Lakhovsky left Harvard after the fall of his junior year to co-found a Cambridge-headquartered company that helps businesses acquire new customers.

“I was evaluating my options about maybe taking easier classes and trying to split my time, but I want to take classes that I enjoy and that are meaningful. Those tend to not be the easy ones, but I also wanted to focus on the project—but it just takes up a lot of time,” he says.

Greg D. Brockman currently works for Collison at Stripe, but just over a year ago he was a sophomore at Harvard planning to transfer to MIT.

“I really wanted to get more involved—to get as good as I could at the things I was interested in,” Brockman says. “Classes had started to feel like they weren’t fulfilling that role anymore ... I wanted to be surrounded by a group of computer scientists and do computer science all the time.

And the constraints of college life lets an idea go only so far. “You just don’t have enough time to turn something from a prototype into a real product,” Brockman says.

Collison says he thinks Harvard’s decision to let students take time off is a smart move, on that he thinks “diversifies the student body.”

Max D. Novendstern ’12, a Social Studies concentrator who has never taken a computer science class, took last semester off to develop his company, CommonPlace—“a centralized networking platform” which aims to rebuild community engagement across the country by encouraging people to share civic information. He considers tech startups a “promising mode of activism.”

“Technology is about making the world better ... It doesn’t matter if you win start up awards, doesn’t matter how technically sophisticated your coding is,” he says. “All that matters is: do you have users who are actively engaged?”

THE RISK

Harvard’s tech entrepreneurs are very cognizant of the risks they are taking by dropping out of school—and equally aware that their mentality is an unfamiliar one at Harvard.

“Basically a lot of Harvard students think that the key to success is not making any mistakes. The startup mentality is making as many mistakes as quickly as you can until you find the right answer,” Novendstern explains.

For Brockman, dropping out helped him realize the importance of taking a chance on his ideas.

“I guarantee that if you don’t execute—if you don’t try—it won’t go anywhere,” he says. “It’s very easy to not pursue something because you’re not sure about it, but I don’t think that’s the right strategy.”

But not everyone is as comfortable with his risk-taking.

“My mom still, every time I talk to her, will ask, ‘So when are you going back to MIT?’” he says. “A lot of my peers tried very hard to dissuade me.”