Sam Altman, one of the most powerful leaders in Silicon Valley, is jealous of Gen Z college dropouts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m envious of the current generation of 20-year-old dropouts,\u201d the OpenAI CEO told Rowan Cheung during an interview<\/a> at the DevDay conference on Monday. \u201cBecause the amount of stuff you can build\u2026 the opportunity space is so incredibly wide.\u201d<\/p>\n Altman said in the past couple of years he has not had a \u201creal chunk of free mental space\u201d to think about what he\u2019d build now. \u201cBut I know that there would be a lot of cool stuff to build,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Altman dropped out of Stanford University in 2005 after two years of studying computer science. An \u201cunexpected opportunity arose<\/a>\u201d for 19-year-old Altman, who left Stanford to cofound the location-sharing app Loopt.<\/p>\n As CEO of the company, Altman helped bring in more than $30 million in funding including from notable VC firms like Sequoia Capital. Loopt went through startup accelerator Y Combinator, and after the app was acquired, he became the president of YC. He later cofounded OpenAI in December 2015 with a slew of people, including the world\u2019s richest man, Elon Musk.<\/p>\n Despite his rise to success with tech startups, Altman said in the Monday interview he longs to brainstorm other businesses.<\/p>\n \u201cThe degree to which OpenAI is, like, taking over all of my mental space, and I don\u2019t get to go think about how to build a new startup, is a little bit sad,\u201d Altman said.<\/p>\n Altman joins a list of college dropouts that have become tech leaders in Silicon Valley, including Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n The tech billionaire also said<\/a> in August he\u2019s envious of young people because current early-career jobs will look \u201cboring\u201d by comparison to jobs in 10 years\u2019 time.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Gen Z is in the midst of a job crisis,<\/a> higher education is being scrutinized even more as the right path for tech entrepreneurs and startup hopefuls.<\/p>\n In September, GV CEO David Krane\u2014and employee No. 84 at Google<\/a>\u2014said<\/a> his son spent the entire summer break between college semesters working in AI, and was questioning if higher education was a \u201cscam.\u201d<\/p>\n Only 41% of junior U.S. professionals say a college degree is necessary for career success, according to a new LinkedIn<\/a> Workforce Confidence survey<\/a>. And CEOs of big tech companies are echoing similar sentiments.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s going to have to be a reckoning,\u201d Meta<\/a> CEO Mark Zuckerberg told<\/a> Theo Von in a \u201cThis Past Weekend\u201d episode in April. \u201cMaybe not everyone needs to go to college,\u201d because there are a lot of jobs that don\u2019t require it, he added.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are probably coming around to that opinion a little more now than maybe, like, 10 years ago,\u201d Zuckerberg said.\n<\/p>\n