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Comment by joshmlewis | Hacker News Reader

I'm 19, and I can give credit to a couple forums (The Web Squeeze and Forrst) and Hacker News for making me successful. If it weren't for a handful of people out of the buckets of everyone, I wouldn't have had the encouragement or motivation to be where I am today. I skipped college, and am cofounding my second company now and leading a team of talented people. I would have never guessed I'd be doing that..even two years ago. If it weren't for you guys and other forums giving me critique, criticism, and encouragement, who knows where I'd be. I've learned soo much from HN, it's ridiculous, but it has helped me in more ways than I can acknowledge.

Anyone can be an encouragement to someone like a younger me, but a lot of people don't. The ones who do however can really make a difference in peoples lives.

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Congrats on your success. One piece of advice: you can further reduce the chance that you have blind spots due to your skipping of college (which you almost certainly do) by slicing off some time to go through Coursera classes, particularly ones that are a bit far afield and seem like a waste of time. People your age are so damn lucky :)

The thing about college is it forces exposure to stuff you'd never see otherwise. A lot of it is irreplaceable but more and more of it is thanks to sites like these.

Great advice. The most important thing to understand about life is that you don't know what you don't know!

Put negatively, if you're not interested in further educating yourself outside of your direct interest areas, understand that you will have certain limitations in life that you will not yourself perceive.

Wow, mazal tov! This my favorite story I've read here. Congratulations on skipping college and getting right into the meat of your career.

Thank you! I've written one blog post about my experience a few months out of high school, and I need to do a follow up with almost two years out now. My new company is launching in March and I'm super excited about it. Hopefully I'll have an even more interesting story to tell after that.

what happened with your first company?

I was a cofounder and we went through an accelerator this past summer. I met a lot of people, learned a ton, but in the end I wasn't the right fit with the other cofounders and we were in a very niche space I didn't have a lot of domain knowledge in, so for lack of a better term, we parted ways. There are of course more details but that's the gist. It definitely taught me a few lessons and established relationships that are now funding the new company.

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