At the first startup I worked for we polled our office of 12 people to see who had graduated from college. I'm pretty sure the answer was just two people, myself and the other middle manager. Everybody doing interesting work, developers, designers, and founders had either skipped or dropped out of college.

Three of those college dropouts went on to found a company that Fred is funding. So his story could easily be about those three people.

There are two things I realized after that poll. First, the conventional path is boring and I needed to jump off.

Second, the amount of work required to be great at something completely trumps the tiny amount of work that you're going to put in during college. Sure, the background knowledge is helpful, but only a little bit compared to everything you're going to have to learn after college.