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Fast Company is delighted to make this article available to any student for free. Please request a copy by email. I was sitting on the steps of Duke Chapel at 2 a.m. in December 2023, the Gothic towers looming above me, a 210-foot reminder of everything I was about to walk away from. My phone was exploding with notifications: Y Combinator had just accepted us. ChatGPT had hit 100 million users in two monthsfaster than TikTok, faster than Instagram, faster than anything in human history. And I was about to break my single mother’s heart. The chapel bells rang twice, echoing across the empty quad. In six hours, I’d be dropping out of one of America’s best universities. The same university my mother had sacrificed everything to get me into. The same university whose acceptance letter made her cry tears of joy in our cramped apartment kitchen in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a place most Duke students couldn’t find on a map, where American university acceptance letters arrive like answered prayers, meant to lift entire families. The only thing harder than getting into Duke from there was explaining why I was leaving. Now I’d make her cry again. I threw up twice before leaving Duke that morning, once in the dorm bathroom, once behind the student center. Not from the previous night’s parties; I’d stopped going to those months earlier while my hallmates were doing keg stands. I was too busy watching the world change at warp speed. While my classmates wrote papers about AI’s potential, we were teaching it to think in practice. While they debugged thesis statements, we debugged systems that would touch millions. They worried about grades. We worried about scale.The decision wasn’t romantic. It was terrifying. But sitting on those chapel steps, watching my classmates live their normal college lives while history was being written in real time 3,000 miles away, I knew. My cofounder, Md Abdul Halim Rafi, and I were accepted into Y Combinator’s W24 batch with Octolane AI to build the next AI Salesforce. We were one of 260 companies selected from more than 27,000 applications, less than 1% acceptance rate. Duke’s is 8%. Harvard’s is 5%. I’m not great at math, but even I could figure out which achievement was statistically more improbable. Some trains only come once. And this one was leaving the station with or without me. Why This Moment Is Different History rarely offers moments when the ground shifts beneath our feet. I’ve studied them obsessively: The internet in the ’90s, when two Stanford PhD dropouts named Larry Page and Sergey Brin saw search differently. Social media in the 2000s, when a college dropout named Mark Zuckerberg connected the world from his dorm room. Today, it’s AI, and it’s moving faster than any wave before. Consider this: ChatGPT hit 100 million users in two months. TikTok took nine months. Instagram took 2.5 years. The telephone took 75 years. We’re watching revolution at warp speed. The AI market is projected to reach $1.81 trillion by 2030, growing at 35.9% annually, faster than the cloud computing boom, faster than mobile, faster than the internet itself. Here’s what kept me up at Duke: By 2028, AI will autonomously make 15% of all work decisions. Not assistdecide. We’re not talking about a tool anymore. The question for me was: “Do I want to build the next GPT or learn about it in a textbook?” Actually, scratch that. When BackRub started as a Stanford research project in 1996, Page and Brin had years to develop it before formally launching Google in 1998and even then, it took until their 2004 IPO (six years post-launch) before the world fully understood just how profitable and dominant they’d become. Zuckerberg had seven years after Facebook’s 2004 launch before Google even tried to compete with Google+ in 2011. AI founders? Look at what happened to Character AI: They built something revolutionary, then Google just hired the team. Look at Inflection, which got $1.5 billion in funding, then Microsoft basically bought them for parts. We don’t have years. We have months. Maybe 24 if we’re lucky. Every week I stayed in that Duke classroom, another AI startup was getting a $100 million Series B. Every test I took, OpenAI was releasing another model that made last month’s breakthrough obsolete. Every night I spent in the library, someone my age in San Francisco was defining how humanity would interact with AI forever. The companies that win the AI race in 2026 and 2027 will dominate for decades. The rest will be Wikipedia entries nobody reads. The Framework That Made Me Jump Dropping out sounds romantic. In reality, it’s a calculated risk that requires brutal honesty. Here’s the framework that helped me decide: 1. Conviction: Were we solving a problem that mattered? Sales teams waste 30% to 40% of their time manually updating CRMs. The question was simple: Could we eliminate a trillion-dollar inefficiency? 2. Timing: Was this the right moment? AI adoption was exploding, but it was still early enough for startups to move faster than incumbents stuck in quarterly earnings calls. 3. Traction: Did we have proof? Early customers kept asking the same question: How fast can you onboard us? One customer pulled out credit cards mid-demo. 4. Partnership: When you’re about to jump off a cliff, you better trust who’s jumping with you.Building a startup isn’t a solo sport. When you hit the inevitable walls (and you will), you need someone who believes in the vision as deeply as you do. Someone who can carry the weight when you can’t. Someone whose skills complement yours, who challenges your assumptions, and who won’t let you quit when things get dark.My cofounder, Rafi, my best friend since high school, left his comfortable job, said goodbye to his family, and boarded a plane to San Francisco with his wife after one phone call. He did this based on nothing but my conviction and our shared dream.br>Some nights we’d code in complete silence for hours, the only sound being keyboard clicks, because we knew we didnt have the luxury of giving up.When someone trusts you with every fiber of their being, failure stops being an option. 5. Runway: Could we survive? YC and early investors gave us just enough capital to go full time. Not comfortable, but enough. But when you’re building with your best friend who crossed oceans for this dream, you make it work on breadcrumbs. Without all five elements of this framework, I would have stayed in school. That’s why most people shouldn’t drop out, because unless those factors align perfectly, you’re not making a calculated leap. You’re gambling with your future. Why Most People Shouldn’t Do This Let me be brutally honest: Dropping out isn’t a badge of honor. It’s a tactical decision that’s wrong for 99% of people. Stay in school if: You’re running from something (hard classes, social pressure, your roommate’s terrible music taste) rather than toward something specific You don’t have a problem that keeps you up at night and wakes you up excited (insomnia doesn’t count unless it’s productive insomnia) You think being a “dropout founder” sounds cool on X/LinkedIn You don’t have at least 12 months of runway secured (No, your parents basement doesn’t count as runway.) You’re alone without a cofounder or strong support system (Chatting with Cursor AI or GitHub copilot is not a cofounder.) You haven’t talked to at least 50 potential customers The opportunity will still be there in two years (Spoiler: If it will, it’s not urgent enough.) The world needs doctors who finish medical school and engineers who master their craft. We can’t all be dropout founders, and thank God for that. Someone needs to actually know what they’re doing! What I’d Tell My Past Self If I could go back to that terrified kid holding his Duke ID at 2:12 a.m., here’s what I’d say (yes, I remember the exact time; anxiety has a way of burning timestamps into your brain): The fear never goes away. You just get better at moving forward despite it. Every founder you admireZuckerberg, Gates, Jobswas once exactly where you are: terrified, uncertain, but unable to ignore the pull of what could be. Your parents will understand. Maybe not today, maybe not this year, but when they see you building something that matters, they’ll understand that you honored their sacrifices in a different way. Failure isn’t falling, it’s not trying. You can always go back to school. You can always get a job. You can always become a consultant and use phrases like “leverage synergies” for the rest of your life. But you can’t always catch a wave that’s already crashed. Find your tribe. The loneliest part isn’t leaving school; it’s the months when you’re building in obscurity while your friends are at parties you’re no longer invited to. Find other builders. Share your struggles. The founders who seem to have it all together are often one bad day away from quitting too. A Final Thought Last week I got coffee with a Duke student who’s considering dropping out. He reminded me of myself: brilliant, ambitious, and absolutely terrified. I told him what I’m telling you: Don’t drop out to follow my path. Drop out only if staying would be a betrayal of the fire inside you. Drop out only if the problem you’re solving matters more than your comfort. Drop out only if you have something to build that the world desperately needs. And drop out only if you have someone like Rafi, someone who’d cross oceans for your shared dream. But if you have that fire, that problem, that desperate need to build, then maybe, just maybe, the biggest risk isn’t leaving. It’s staying.
Category:
E-Commerce
Square, the point-of-sale system owned by Jack Dorsey’s Block, is announcing a number of new upgrades todayincluding one that will make it easier for business owners to accept payments in Bitcoin. On Wednesday, the company made three announcements: An expansion of its platform for restaurants (including AI-voice ordering and a bigger, broader Grubhub integration) A conversational AI assistant embedded in its dashboard to answer questions, called Square AI Square Bitcoin: An integrated Bitcoin payment and wallet system for business owners The upgrades and announcements are designed to help business owners control their costs, dig up more insights within their data, and plan ahead with more confidence, Willem Avé, Squares head of product, tells Fast Company. Were focused on anything we can do to help small businesses compete better, Avé says. That includes a smattering of new and beefed-up features for restaurant operators, specifically, such as AI voiced ordering, which allows customers to call in and place an order with an AI assistant (while also answering questions about the menu and make customizations). Meanwhile, a speedier kiosk will help orders get entered faster, and enhanced accounting and sales reportsplus an Order Guidewill help restaurateurs get a clearer picture of their costs and revenue. Avé says that the voice-ordering feature is particularly interesting, as the technology has only recently become good enough to launch. At the beginning of this past summer, for example, it wouldnt have worked, he says. We believe that the tech is finally here to build a natural, good, AI-based ordering system,” Avé adds. ‘The tech is there, the demand is there’ Perhaps the most interesting announcement of the day is the launch of Square Bitcoin, which allows businesses to accept Bitcoin payments, automatically store those payments in a designated wallet, convert other revenue to Bitcoin, and do it all with no processing fees through the end of next year. Square has always been about accepting any type of payment that comes across the counter, Avé says, and so giving businesses the power to integrate with crypto in a relatively simple way was a natural step for the company. The tech is there, and the demand is there, and from a cost perspective, Bitcoin payments are cheaper for businesses, he says. While some large merchant chains accept cryptocurrency paymentsa list that includes the Home Depot, Chipotle, and Whole Foodsits been, thus far, a difficult implementation for small companies. Squares announcement could change that, all while crypto adoption and prices reach a fever pitch. The timing isnt necessarily a coincidence, as Avé says the company has been trying to move quicker as customer needs evolve. “This release is highlighting that speed is the name of the game, he says, and were moving faster than ever.
Category:
E-Commerce
The worlds best engineers, entrepreneurs, and researchers face no shortage of opportunities. If youre building the future in frontier technologies like AI, you could base yourself anywhere. So the real question is where. The answer today points northto Stockholm. The European Commission recently declared Stockholm as Europes most innovative region. Ahead of Copenhagen, London, and Zurich, the Swedish capital took the top spot. Not just overall, but on a range of individual indicators, from lifelong learning and share of tech specialists employed to cross-border scientific publications, collaboration between SMEs, patent filings, and trademarks. Right after the European Commissions report, the citys own Lovable was declared the fastest-growing software startup in global history. This is another indicator of Stockholm as Europes capital of the futureadmittedly anecdotal, yet hard to ignore. STOCKHOLMS LIFESTYLE EDGE Of course, for youa global top talentthere are regions beyond Europe to consider. The U.S. and China still have metro areas that are more innovative, for now. But what Europes innovative center can also offer is another way of life. Sweden consistently ranks among the worlds most gender-equal societies. The childcare system is outstandingenabling both parents to combine engaged parenthood with career advancement. Society is cultural, creative, democratic, egalitarian, and open. Clean air and water, smooth public transportation, and buildings designed for light and ventilation make daily life in Stockholm unusually comfortable. Government bureaucracy is light for individuals and companies. Starting a business is easy, energy prices are among Europes lowest, and taxes not as high as Swedens reputation suggests. With no wealth or inheritance tax, low corporate tax rate, and minimal everyday costs for healthcare, childcare, and education, the benefits often exceed the income tax rate headlines. Add in generous parental leave (exported by Spotify to the U.S.) and EU freedom of movement, and this capital offers a package of benefits rarely matched in other hubs. For many specialists, flatter structures and shorter weeks tip the balance in Stockholms favor. Fast Company recognized our Stockholm-based real estate firm as one of the Worlds Most Innovative Companies. My job at Atrium Ljungberg can perhaps best be described as playing SimCity but in real life, with the city I love most as the game board. To be fully transparent, the job comes with a dose of stakeholder management and administration that SimCity leaves outbut still, the analogy is strikingly true. Stockholm is evolving, and its a thrill to be part of the ride: Atrium Ljungberg is redeveloping Slakthusomrdet, the worlds largest transformation of a meatpacking district, while also building Stockholm Wood City. The renewal of Slussen, a central hub, is nearing completion, as is the expansion of Hagastaden, linking the city with Europes top medical university and hospital. They knit old districts and new innovation hubs into a more connected city. FROM NOBEL PRIZES TO SPOTIFY: THE CITYS LONG GAME How did Stockholm become Europes most innovative region? It helps to start at the beginning. Stockholms tradition has long shown progress. By the 1880s, Stockholm had the most telephones of any city in the world. The Nobel Prize was established in 1901 and soon became the worlds most prestigious award across five scientific disciplines, later joined by a sixth in economics. A series of world-class companies were created here in the pre-WW2 industrial era, including Ericsson, Atlas Copco, and Electrolux. That period laid the groundwork for Stockholms rise. The city gained a reputation as a hub of practical innovation and engineering. In 1954, the Royal Institute of Technology hosted Swedens first nuclear reactor, built underground in the middle of the city. By the 1980s, Stockholms universities were among Europes first online. The 1997 Home PC reform gave Swedes tax-free access to computers via employers, driving mass adoption and digital skills. Since the 90s, Stockholm has produced another wave of champions: Spotify, the leading music streaming service globally; EQT, one of the world’s largest private equity firms; and Klarna, a fintech giant. Stockholm now counts more listed firms than any European city, including London and Frankfurt. Along the way, Stockholm also became a creative capital. The city that once exported timber and steel now exports pop music, design and gamingfrom Avicii to Acne and Minecraft, with billions playing our video games. In 1968, only a quarter of Swedes had eaten out in the last quarter, and kitchens still shut at 8 p.m. Today, Stockholm is a city full of Michelin stars, neighborhood bistros, late-night bars, and clubs. THE ECOSYSTEM BUILDING EUROPES NEXT GIANTS Sweden ranks first in Europe by VC investment per capita and unicorn creation per capita. But capital alone doesnt build companiestalent does. In Stockholm today, workplaces are increasingly designed to attract it: more like clubs or labs than offices, they give talent autonomy, wellbeing, and connection. A diverse set of Stockholm ventures is now breaking ground. Einride, putting autonomous electric trucks on roads across continents, and Candela, whose electric boats ferry Stockholms commuters, drive the future of transportation. Fashion and beauty names Toteme and Estrid stand beside music investor Pophouse, steward of catalogues from Avicii to KISS and Cyndi Lauper. Investors Creandum, EQT Ventures, Northzone, and Norrsken have underpinned the citys ascent as one of Europes leading venture hubs. Scaling companies consume vast amounts of energy. To support the soaring demand, national energy company Vattenfall and the government just announced that Sweden will build a series of small modular reactors (SMRs). The initiative is notable globally: While most countries are still piloting single SMR projects, Sweden is planning a program at scale, aimed directly at powering fast-growing industries. Propelled by clean energy, culture, and investment, few places combine beauty and dynamism like Stockholm: the Nordic Venice with its islands, a cultural city from Gustav IIIs opera house, to Max Martins pop, built on democracy and openness. Yet its real strength lies in its trajectory. For builders, creatives, and intellectuals, Stockholm has become Europes most attractive base to change the world from. Linus Kjellberg is head of business development at Atrium Ljungberg.
Category:
E-Commerce
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