A Harvard diploma is the golden ticket to career success—at least that’s what many people on campus believe. But dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg have paved a new path, as more and more students are pausing their college careers to pursue innovative ideas and create companies that just can’t wait till after graduation. One example is Karl Oskar Shulz ’23, who unenrolled from classes and moved to Brooklyn, New York this year to found the decentralized blockchain oracle Empiric Network with his classmate, Jonas Nelle ’23. As “the leading oracle on Starknet, built to empower native protocols to realize their ambitious potential,” Empiric raised $7 million in its first round of funding led by web3 investing fund Variant. Yet behind every startup is a founder with even more “ambitious potential.”
Koch: Why did you take time off from Harvard? What was that decision process like?
Schulz: My co-founder Jonas and I both worked at startups during our Covid-19 gap years. He was at a machine learning startup, and I was at a blockchain startup, and we thought, this is actually much better than working at a big company. You have so much freedom. You can choose who to work with, what to work on, and where to work on it.
We came back to Harvard wanting to start a company ourselves. We ended up with one idea that we’re doing now, which is financial data analysis for smart contracts, applications that run on blockchains. We learned more about it, then built a prototype, a first product, and got a bunch of customers. It turned out that we, Empiric, were first with a couple of things no one had done before. It coincided with the rise of ZK rollups, a particular technology that uses zero-knowledge proofs to make blockchains very fast, so we had this positive traction, and the timing was right. This was not something we could have waited for another year.
Koch: Given that about 90% of startups fail, it’s often perceived as a risk to leave school to build one. Was it a difficult decision for you?
Schulz: I was thinking, if the startup does work out, I will have done something very interesting and then I can build another company. If it doesn’t work out, I can always come back to Harvard and I will have learned a lot in the process. The cool thing about Harvard is they tell you you can come back whenever. There’s maybe some small risk, but the upside is huge. Entrepreneurship and company-building are what I want to be doing long-term.
Even if I never get a degree, I’ll be totally fine. I think this is due to a development that we’ve seen in the last four or five decades: a single person can nowadays build a huge company within a decade. That was not the case for most of human history. Now individuals can achieve so much and ideas can spread around the world.
Koch: Also, I imagine the skills you’re acquiring in building a company—how to manage people, incentivize their productivity, work efficiently, make connections, and earn profits—are easily transferable to other jobs.
Shulz: I’m operating in the real world, where no one tells you anything and you just have to figure it out. I’ve now talked to so many entrepreneurs who said it’s almost easier to get finance jobs when you don’t go through the analyst route. The head fund manager Bill Ackman told me he’s more inclined to hire people who, say, study philosophy in college, or have a more diverse background because he wants employees who have different experiences.
Koch: The traditional Harvard career pipeline into finance or consulting offers so much stability and comfort. Straying from that path and jumping into the startup world is scary for many. Would you say you are less risk-averse than most students?
Schulz: How you grow up really shapes your risk-taking profile. When I was in high school, I decided I should go to the US for college because behavioral economics seemed like a great thing to study and I couldn’t do it in Germany. No one I knew went to the US. At Harvard, there are three or four Germans every year.
So when it worked out, that was a great learning experience because it taught me that if I really want to do stuff, if I work for it, I can actually do it, even if it seems super unlikely. That gave me the confidence and motivation to try lots of new things. It might be delusional, but I think on average people should be a bit more confident that things can work out.
When it comes to entrepreneurship, Harvard students confuse opportunity cost with risk. You might say, if I spent 10 years at Goldman, I might become a partner. But that is an opportunity cost. You will certainly get more information about how to work Excel, but if your passion is climate tech, you will not learn anything about that. You won’t be able to test your hypotheses around that. Arguably you’ll be in a worse position because Goldman will be a 14-hour job every day, and you will have no time to do anything else.
Koch: And once you’ve begun to pave your career path, it would be much more intimidating to challenge it when you’ve already been working and making connections in that industry.
Schulz: The problem is that we always think in the future, somehow things will be wildly different and we’ll have way more information. There’s this idea that by going to McKinsey or Goldman, you are preserving optionality. But if you never decide what you want to do two years from now, and you just wait for it to happen, your option set collapses. It doesn’t become easier—in fact, it becomes much harder to figure out what you want to do. You may end up doing what your parents did or the next safest thing. If you’re just passive, then really you have no options at all. When you’re thinking proactively about your long-term future, however, that is when you have all the options.
If you can’t figure out what you want to do with your four years of college, surrounded by thousands of other young people and the smartest professors on the planet, then when can you?
This conversation was lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Mary Julia Koch ’23 (editorinchief@harvardindependent.com) dreams of building her own startup one day.