Amid the AI boom, Princetonians swap school for Silicon Valley

Athan Zhang was three course credits shy of graduating with Princeton’s Class of 2026 when he took a leave of absence last fall to pursue a startup. “I was waiting around, waiting to get a degree, but I had already gotten the education, gotten the network, and made the relationships I wanted to make, so it made sense for me,” Zhang told The Daily Princetonian. Zhang, a computer science major who had already worked on two startups in high school and college, left campus in fall of 2025 and headed to San Francisco. 

His company, Copperlane — co-founded with Brianna Lin, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania — was accepted into the Winter 2026 batch of Y Combinator, the influential startup accelerator known for backing early-stage companies. Copperlane “helps mortgage lenders originate loans faster and eliminate intake errors” with assistance from an artificial intelligence agent named Penny.

Zhang is part of a small cohort of Princeton students stepping away from the classroom to build companies, a cohort which has become increasingly visible as the AI boom has reshaped how businesses are started and scaled. 

Venture funding for AI startups has surged in recent years, with Silicon Valley firms raising a record $150 billion in 2025, up from the previous peak of $92 billion in 2021. At Princeton, where roughly 90 percent of students graduate in four years, students describe a growing interest in startups and venture capital, reflected both in anecdotal experiences and in rising enrollment in entrepreneurship courses. 

Many of the startup founders interviewed by the ‘Prince’ said the benefits of leaving school outweighed those of staying, and often framed the decision in terms of opportunity costs and time.

“Think of college as a four-year subscription product,” Kelvin Yu, the founder and CEO of NewCo and a former member of the class of 2021, told the ‘Prince’ as he scarfed down a sandwich over Zoom. “And like any product, evaluate whether it’s worth keeping the subscription.” 

NewCo, which is “building the substrate for growing U.S. industrial GDP” according to Yu’s LinkedIn, was founded in 2025 following a stint in Washington, where Yu served as a policy advisor in the U.S. House of Representatives. 

Yu believes that there are five value propositions to a Princeton education: academic enrichment, community, strong networks, prestige, and exploration. “The reason I dropped out [at] the particular time I did was because I thought I reached diminishing returns on these fronts,” Yu, who dropped out during COVID in his junior year, said. “I decided that the opportunity cost of not being in San Francisco working for a high-growth company wasn’t worth it relative to staying in school.” 

Unlike peer institutions such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, which have long been associated with startup culture and high-profile dropouts, founders of startups said Princeton lacks a similarly prevalent entrepreneurial ethos. According to private market data platform PitchBook, Princeton produced the 15th-highest number of venture capital-backed founders and companies in the decade up to 2025, trailing behind every other Ivy League university except Dartmouth and Brown.

“We’re definitely not an entrepreneurial school,” Zhang said. He argued that Princeton’s high return on investment post-graduation discourages students from dropping out, reinforcing a campus culture that “breeds really risk-averse people.” 

“In Princeton, I don’t think people are as intrinsically motivated to just do cool things, and the like,” Windsor Nguyen ’25 added. “People do things, but it’s because they want to get an internship, or they want to settle; it’s not like you’re just staying up coding on Sunday for the love of the game.” 

But some say that this landscape is beginning to shift, fuelled by the impulse to capitalize on the rapid pace of AI developments. Nguyen, who dropped out of Princeton’s Ph.D. program in Computer Science, was passionate about research but thought his degree timeline was too long. “The only thing I didn't like about a Ph.D. was it takes at least five years, and that is an eternity in AI time,” Nguyen told the ‘Prince.’ 

Nguyen is a former Opinion and Humor contributor for the ‘Prince.’ 

In 2025, Nguyen co-founded Dedalus Labs with Cathy Di ’26. Dedalus Labs is a platform where users build and deploy agentic AI applications, systems that can autonomously complete complex tasks without requiring much supervision. The company, which was accepted into Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 round, raised $11 million in seed funding from investors last fall. 

“Now is probably the best time to start a company, ever,” Nguyen continued. “It’s probably analogous to the internet boom, when you just have so much opportunity … AI moves so fast — I don’t know where we’re going to be in two to three years.” 

The rapid growth of AI has also removed barriers around starting companies with little technical experience. 

“It is the easiest time to start and create a company, because we have AI tools like OpenAI or Lovable, where you can actually create a platform without having a super technical background,” Sarah Phillips ’27, the CEO of Girls Into VC, told the ‘Prince.’ 

Beyond the opportunities provided by AI, some students also expressed that they provide unique value to Silicon Valley: The archetype of the Ivy League dropout carries weight in Silicon Valley, where leaving school can signal ambition and intelligence to investors.

Joseph Tso, the co-founder of Haladir who took a leave of absence in fall 2025, described his status as a former student as “a pride point” in Silicon Valley. “Our YC group partners — our mentors — often tell us to wear it with pride: You should present yourselves as dropouts of prestigious universities,” Tso told the ‘Prince.’ 

“No one views you as lower status because you dropped out; if anything, you’re viewed as higher status,” Yu said. “That’s almost like a default reaction … if [investors] know that you dropped out of Princeton, they will assume you are smarter than if they just knew you were at Princeton,” he continued. 

These reasons are coupled with Princeton’s streamlined leave process and a “lenient” return policy, adding to the appeal of taking a leave for these young founders.

At Princeton, a standard leave of absence typically lasts two semesters, though students who take a leave are eligible for reinstatement if they return within three years. Students remain eligible for financial aid upon reinstatement, and residential college deans oversee the leave and return process. Undergraduate students may also choose to withdraw permanently at any time. 

Tso spent his only weeks at Princeton splitting time between freshman orientation and settling into classes. Two months into the semester, he decided to take a leave of absence, a process he described as “relatively easy.” 

“When I had made the decision to leave, within a week, I was fully moved out.” Tso left to co-found Haladir, an applied AI product lab working on what he described as “operational superintelligence”: enhancing the ability of AI to synthesize complex information and determine the best course of action.  

“You can always go back to Princeton,” Yu said. “There’s a very lenient policy on returning.” 

The heightened visibility of startup founders on social media has also helped encourage entrepreneurship culture at Princeton.

“It’s very clear that more and more people are trying to build something at Princeton,” Zhang added. “I think part of it is because there [are] more and more founders like us who are making that choice, and there’s a lot of publicity around it, so people are realizing it’s something that’s possible.” 

Princetonians also spoke highly about the growth of institutional infrastructure supportive of entrepreneurial ventures in the past decade. The Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education, which “creates societal impact through entrepreneurship, design, and innovative education,” was established in 2005.  

“The first thing that’s completely changed the Princeton ecosystem is the Keller Center, and it’s a pretty new part of Princeton,” Phillips said. She praised the Center’s vast educational resources and support of student entrepreneurial ventures, noting that many Entrepreneurship (ENT) classes she had taken were “entirely full.” 

“There’s clearly that momentum on campus right now that we haven’t seen historically, but that is changing,” she added. 

“We’ve seen a steady growth in student interest in entrepreneurship, going back to 1997 when the engineering school introduced the popular course EGR 491/ECE 491/ENT 491: High-Tech Entrepreneurship,” Director of the Keller Center Sigrid Adriaenssens wrote in a statement to the ‘Prince.’ “The Keller Center has built on that momentum.” 

According to Adriaenssens, the Keller Center now offers about 10 entrepreneurship and design courses each semester. The minor in entrepreneurship, which was transitioned from a certificate program to a minor program in 2025, had 35 graduates last year.

In March, the ‘Prince’ reported that the entire nine-person Keller Center staff will be laid off as part of a restructuring of the academic unit amid University-wide “budget constraints.” Adriaenssens wrote that the restructuring “creates greater capacity to focus on the successful courses and programming that have brought life-changing benefits to generations of Princeton entrepreneurs.”

Nguyen, who took “High-Tech Entrepreneurship” when at Princeton, said that campus not only served as a place for academic enrichment, but also as a place to network. “You should keep … close tabs of your most cracked friends, your most talented friends — even people who are really good at writing, are really good at sales,” he said. Most of Nguyen’s staff at Dedalus are fellow Princeton students. 

For many, the decision to return to Princeton is dependent on how their company fares, and some expressed an interest in completing their education.

“Maybe this is just a characteristic of being in San Francisco and the tech world, but it’s always hard to see beyond like a year or two,” Tso said. “But I do know deep in my heart that I really want to go back [to Princeton] and round out my educational journey there. It feels like I just left something sort of unfinished.” 

“But for now, I see the value in being in SF and the tech world, the value in doing this company and being part of this company, as much greater to me, at least in the current moment.” 

“On whether or not I see my leave of absence as a more permanent thing — I don’t know,” Zhang said. “The best answer is that I want the company to do well, and if the company does well, I’m probably not coming back.” 

Sena Chang is a staff Features writer and the associate News editor for the ‘Prince’ leading investigations. She is from Japan and South Korea, and she often covers local politics and student life. She can be reached at sena[at]dailyprincetonian.com.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.