A version of this type of situation seems to cover a lot of career decisions made by sufficiently talented people. If you’re a young Mark Zuckerberg, should you drop out of Harvard? Dropping out of college is a bad idea, on average. It’s not quite as clear cut as OP suggested because you can’t reliably replicate what Bill Gates did, but there may be strong indicators that startup founders, or some more specific subclass like startup founders experiencing x% monthly growth in recurring users, and not the average college dropout, is the reference class you should look out. And maybe an experienced startup or VC person could point one to an even better reference class that wouldn’t occur to me.
Choosing the wrong reference class?
A version of this type of situation seems to cover a lot of career decisions made by sufficiently talented people. If you’re a young Mark Zuckerberg, should you drop out of Harvard? Dropping out of college is a bad idea, on average. It’s not quite as clear cut as OP suggested because you can’t reliably replicate what Bill Gates did, but there may be strong indicators that startup founders, or some more specific subclass like startup founders experiencing x% monthly growth in recurring users, and not the average college dropout, is the reference class you should look out. And maybe an experienced startup or VC person could point one to an even better reference class that wouldn’t occur to me.