Jack Luo — 4 min read

ZFellows graduation

If you ask me what direction and what intuition I have about the future, I think it’s about creating swarm intelligence, or intelligence that’s more closely coupled to the knowledge that exists in the phone you use day to day, like a secretary, making it intuitive and easy to use.

Right now it still takes a long time to build automations and stuff. I want to improve that: to have AI that genuinely understands rather than imitates. I think self-learning and multi-agent forms are very powerful and education is one of the biggest compounding things. Workflows are not really that compounding, which is why I don’t think it’s as good.

Event Overview

I recently attended the Dropout Graduation, which is an invite-only event hosted by Cory. During graduation, we had six commencement speakers that each shared a five-minute story, and I would like to compile the notes and share them with the public.

Overall, the main ideas and principles in these notes are quite easy to digest, but most people don’t follow them, so I would recommend coming back to this blog again and again to fully internalize these ideas. I endorse most of the notes here as well.

Speaker highlights

Adam (OpenAI, advises Sam Altman on strategy)

• this guy spent 1.5 years doing “illegible” work, then everything clicked within a month: he attributes the breakthrough to three principles:
• keep an internal scorecard: in Silicon Valley status dynamics create pressure toward short-term optics like Twitter followers and who raised a series B; resist it as much as possible
• optimize direction, not just magnitude. both Sama and Elon cited: sample fields broadly before committing, don’t index on one path too early
• compound your world model: read, write, reflect constantly; having genuine edge means you don’t need to scramble for narratives when the time is right

Jake (Pilgrim: wound-healing biotech, Thiel Fellow)

• His core thesis is do things before they’re obvious; building without precedent forces you to own the narrative
• Ran out of cash before a clinical study → filmed himself cutting holes in his legs to demo the tech → closed seed round + got direct military demand
• “Pivots” are a misnomer, it’s really growing awareness of how the world works (similar to Adam’s philosophy)

Markie (Poet : AI for complex enterprise processes)

• Dropped out of Stanford PhD on a Monday after his mom asked “who’s using what you built?” realized nothing he’d built was used by anyone and is all just theoretical
• Moved to North Carolina, worked inside old companies (banks, warehouses) for 1 — 2 years to find real bottlenecks → became Poet (a classic build where the customers are)
• This is my favorite quote: “If you have a bad business, no one can help you. If you have a great business, no one can hurt you.”
• Scarce resource isn’t technical talent , but rather courage to follow the threads that feel real rather than in dreamland

George Svolka (Hebia: AI for finance, ~$200M raised, hundreds of employees)

• Dropped out of Stanford PhD weeks in; deferred Harvard Business School, never went
• Spent first 2 years with no product, no growth, living on $6K in a closet in East Palo Alto (guess someone else lived in a wework like environment LMAO)
• Biggest mistake: no co-founder!! finding someone you trust matters more than the dropout decision itself
• Credential-chasing (including “dropout” as a credential) always fails, you should do something because it’s in your bones

Kole (Vigil Labs: AI-powered trading, team of 8)

• Former professional magician; used same “building blocks” intuition in markets and now in AI
• Dropped out of Stanford after OpenAI O3 launched (Dec 2024) : felt the moment was right
• Advice: spend time with people as ambitious as you; it raises your own ambition. The people you choose to be friends could materially alter the direction of your life

Cameron (Whoo — $1.6B company, high school dropout at 15.5)

• Started selling candy from his locker at 13; built sneaker bots doing millions in revenue by 15
• Dropped out with a 0.7 GPA; mom passed + all businesses died at 18 . For about one and half year didn’t know what to do and decided to do his reset in Austin
• Whop: 60,000 people earning money on the platform, ~$5M/year collectively; Cory was first investor; rejected from YC
• Closing line: “relentless drive forward paired with belief” the only real explanation for why it worked

Recurring Themes Across All Speakers

• Follow intuition over external validation (investors, family, credentials)
• Find real problems: don’t work on things that wouldn’t be missed if deleted
• Compounding matters more than any single decision
• The people around you shape your ambition: choose them carefully
• Looking back, the “wasted” detours (NFTs, wrong pivots) often produced the key team members or insights

I also want to acknowledge the fact that most of these speakers had an immense amount of luck and support to build their companies. Know that some of this is also survivorship bias but nonetheless I still believe that this advice holds pretty steadily over the years from my own experience in startups as well.

A speaker at dropout graduation

Originally published on Medium.