© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Some of the most famous stories in Big Tech come from college dropouts. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004 from his Harvard dorm room before leaving school, and Bill Gates left Harvard in 1975 to cofound Microsoft with Paul Allen.
However, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, considers Zuckerberg and Gates more of exceptions than the rule. According to Bezos, a college degree still holds value, and success doesn’t require launching a business in your early twenties. He encourages young people to first gain experience at established companies before venturing out on their own.
Rather than slowing down one’s path to success, that experience “increases your odds” of building a successful company later, Bezos said during Italian Tech Week in Turin. “I always advise young people: Go work at a best-practices company somewhere where you can learn a lot of basic fundamental things [like] how to hire really well, how to interview, etc. There’s a lot of stuff you would learn in a great company that will help you, and then there’s still lots of time to start a company after you have absorbed it.”
Bezos himself was 30 when he founded Amazon. After graduating from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, he first worked debugging code at Fitel, a telecom startup, then moved on to a product manager role at Banker’s Trust. Eventually, he became a vice president at D.E. Shaw, a hedge fund using advanced mathematical modeling to predict market trends.
“It was at Shaw that I learned a tremendous amount,” Bezos recalled. His time there exposed him to untapped opportunities in the early internet, including a statistic showing web usage growing 2,300% annually, an insight that inspired him to create an online retail platform. The lessons he gained across these roles, he said, gave him a far better chance of success than if he had tried to launch a business straight out of college. “I think that extra 10 years of experience actually improved the odds that Amazon would succeed,” he added.
Bezos has no regrets about completing his degree. “I enjoyed college and I think it’s been helpful to me,” he emphasised, encouraging others to do the same.
His perspective comes at a time when the traditional weight of college degrees is being questioned. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky recently highlighted that employers are placing less emphasis on formal credentials, especially as AI changes how talent is evaluated. “I think the mindset shift is probably the most exciting thing,” Roslansky said. “My guess is that the future of work belongs not anymore to the people that have the fanciest degrees or went to the best colleges, but to the people who are adaptable, forward-thinking, ready to learn, and ready to embrace these tools. It really opens up the playing field in a way we’ve never seen before.”
