Ali Debow
On May 10, hundreds of founders will gather at San Francisco’s Marina Theatre for a commencement ceremony of sorts.
Their shared alma mater? Some might say Y Combinator or the Thiel Fellowship, but don’t expect any Stanford degrees: “Dropout Class of 2025,” Ali Debow, an organizer of the event, told BI.
“Dropout Graduation” has everything a traditional commencement would — diplomas, caps and gowns, hundreds of registered attendees, and a class photo in front of the Palace of Fine Art — except for one key component: anyone who actually graduated from a university.
For Debow and her co-organizer Cory Levy, “Dropout Graduation” is personal.
Debow left NYU in 2024 after being accepted to the prestigious Thiel Fellowship — which awards participants $100,000 and famously requires them to drop out of college — to build Swsh, a photo-sharing startup. (She shared a fellowship class with rising stars like AI recruiting startup Mercor, which claims to be the fastest-growing company in the world.)
Levy — who interned at Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures, and TechStars in high school — dropped out of the University of Illinois after one year to build social app startups. Today, Levy runs Z Fellows, a one-week accelerator that gives technical founders of all ages — even high schoolers, he added — $10,000.
When Levy left college over a decade ago, the Thiel Fellowship had first launched. Contrast that to today: “The community of dropouts is at an all-time high right now,” Levy said. “At a big group dinner of 15 or 20 people, we’ll look around the table, and no one has a college degree.”
The idea for “Dropout Graduation” started on a whim. One weekend in late March, Debow and Levy threw together a Google Doc, linked an invite, and posted it on X.
It didn’t stay a joke for long: hundreds of sign-ups flooded in, according to Debow and Levy.
“We just want it to be super high quality, really determined, awesome founders who didn’t find the highest value of their time in school for what they wanted to build,” Debow said. “And so they wanted to go into the real world and build something.”
The stunt struck a nerve. In Silicon Valley, dropping out of college like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates has long been a badge of honor, but large tech companies have only recently begun to catch on. Take defense tech heavyweight Palantir, for instance, which launched its Meritocracy Fellowship, an internship aimed at luring recent high school grads into full-time tech jobs and away from college, in April.
In addition to all the graduation accouterments, “Dropout Graduation” will feature a “very insane” commencement speaker, Debow said. While she didn’t disclose their name, she promised they, naturally, never graduated either.
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