Forget the college debate: The most driven people may not need their high school diplomas either.
Tumblr founder David Karp dropped out of high school at the age of 15 and now his New York startup is about to sell for $1.1 billion in cash to Yahoo.
Although his success proves that he didn't need the diploma to make it, Karp tells Forbes' Jeff Bercovici in an interview that he doesn't recommend kids today to drop out of high school, saying "There's a lot that I feel like I missed out on ... just a whole lot of normal, social, childhood kind of stuff that I definitely missed out on."
Karp — worth more than $200 million — isn't the only person to make it big without finishing high school. He belongs to a special breed, which includes Virgin's Richard Branson and Mike Hudack, founder of Blip.tv.
David Karp founded Tumblr and sold the blog-hosting company to Yahoo for $1.1 billion.
At the age of 15, Karp dropped out of an elite Bronx High School of Science and developed Tumblr, the blog-hosting and social network company, in 2007 in the "back bedroom of his mother's modest Manhattan apartment."
Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin, is an international powerhouse worth $4.6 billion.
Branson left school at the age of 16 and has spoken out against the university system on his blog. The billionaire is even richer this year after the recent sale of Virgin Media to Liberty Global and is ranked #272 on Forbes' World's Billionaires List.
Mike Hudack founded Blip.tv in 2005 and is currently a product manager at Facebook.
Hudack dropped out of high school and started working at a small internet security and privacy company in Connecticut at 16. He then moved to New York and worked as a consultant for Time Warner.
In 2005, he founded Blip.tv, a hosting platform for creators of digital video content. In 2012, he left his position as CEO to become Facebook's product manager.
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