“I’m quite nervous, yeah,” Field’s father, Andy, said. “Most startups do fail. I think he has a good shot, but certainly not a sure thing by any means.”
After being accepted into the Fellowship, Field felt confident it was the right move—especially since he had once considered dropping out of high school due to his struggles with structured education. In 2012, the same year Facebook went public (a company also created by a dropout enabled by Thiel), Field left school to build Figma. The rest is a billion-dollar history.
Fortune reached out to Field for comment.
Field is far from the first highly successful individual to have carved their own path in business without having walked across the stage to obtain a college diploma. In fact, many of the richest people on earth can call themselves college dropouts.
Perhaps one of the most well-known college dropouts, Zuckerberg ditched his Harvard dorm in 2004 to move to California and dedicate his time to creating Facebook. Zuckerberg received an honorary doctorate from the school in 2017. His current net worth is about $272 billion.
Sam Altman dropped out of Stanford University in 2005 to work on his first startup: Loopt, a location-sharing app. By 2015, he helped cofound OpenAI, the leading AI organization behind ChatGPT. His net worth is now about $2 billion.
Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, first attended the University of Illinois thinking he might one day become a doctor. After the death of his adoptive mother, he dropped out before later re-admitting to the University of Chicago. While he never obtained a degree from either institution, his move to California opened doors into the tech industry. After jumping around jobs, he met partners Bob Miner and Ed Oates and together they created the company that later transformed into Oracle. He is currently the second-richest person in the world, with a net worth of just over $300 billion.
“I’m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today. I think that there’s a big issue on that, and all the student debt issues are…really big,” he said on This Past Weekend podcast with Theo Von.
“The fact that college is just so expensive for so many people and then you graduate and you’re in debt.”
