5 reasons why university is the best place to startup a company

There have been series of publications, reports and arguments from different quarters in the media about the wastage, useless and irrelevance of going to school. Yes! Some of the arguments may be correct. There are stories of many dropouts from Harvard, Stanford Universities that are making waves in the tech and business  today.

But in this article, I will tell you why school is a great opportunity to have as an entrepreneur to startup your dream ideas and make it scale as you push out.


One of the mistakes I made when I was in school was not to make many friends. I lived like a recluse trying to succeed in my academics whereas I had in me the entrepreneurship spirit to startup something great in the future.

It is in school you meet friends that are passionate about your dream. Learning together bring great discoveries and make learning fun. Learning with like minds give an idea of who to work with, who shares same vision.


The major story we do hear about great founders are they are dropped out. The likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and many more of them. Bill Gate meets Paul Allen in the university before dropped out. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were both Ph.D students at Stanford university before they started Google.

Having said school is the best place to meet like minds, then like minds attract and become co-founders. You will have time to work together on your project, to share more ideas.

The founder of Paystack, Shola Akinlade in his application to YCombinator wrote this

In a follow-up, YC forced the question of a co-founder, asking which of my advisors I would ask to join the team full time. After much thought I told them that Ezra Olubi would be my co-founder.

Please note: I hadn’t asked Ezra yet 😂 Luckily, he said yes

Why did he only think about Ezra in that critical situation to be a co-founder? Because they have worked together and working together to make Paystack a success remains calling him back.


One of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs are facing in the startup scene is getting the right team. Team is very difficult to setup after school, thanks to several meetups though.

Most of the engineers that work at Google are from Stanford university where the founders finished. It is easy to pinpoint who is who in the school environment and that can be easily called to take a place in the startup.


Yes! Assuming I had my ideas intact when I was in school with the likes of Ajayi O.O, Ogunniye Gideon of both at the department of computer science, AAUA. They would have shaped my ideas, push it and possibly bigger than this today.

Lecturers are good tools to shape students in school especially those with bright ideas. They will give you everything from using their office to using their laptops and internet facility. Isn’t that sweet.


When you are passionate about your dream and want to make it a reality, you need time to think, think and think. And school is the best place. No one is there to ask you have you eat or why are you not sleeping 1:00am. You have all the time. If you like you go to class or not. Critical thinking requires knowing questions to ask which is 100% applicable to the success of your ideas.

So, don’t make the mistakes I made when in high school, read and digest and do something about it now. Thank you for reading.

Oluwaseun Hephzibah, Babatunde


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