Despite dropping out of MIT to build $159 billion fintech Stripe, its CEO has a warning for Gen Z who want to copy him: ‘That was a poor intuition’

But Patrick Collison, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of Stripe who dropped out of MIT (not once, but twice), recently told Gen Z they shouldn’t feel pressured to rush that decision. “When I was dropping out, people thought it was super weird,” Collison said last week at Y Combinator’s Startup School. After selling the startup for $5 million, he then returned to MIT to study mathematics and physics. But a year later, he left again to start Stripe, a payments company now valued at $159 billion. Moreover, those startups are performing better, with more reaching revenue milestones of $1 million, $5 million, and $10 million than in previous years.