The College Combinator: An Interview with a Tech Founder Drop-Out

"Part of the culture is [that] you never really know who’s going to end up a billionaire...it’s in our best interest to treat everyone nicely to see how it plays out."

Untitled, Kit Knuppel

Elan Kluger is a 21-year-old writer from Michigan studying intellectual history at Dartmouth College.

Danylo Borodchuk is a 20-year-old start-up founder from Ukraine.

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Danylo Borodchuk and friend Aamish Beg, both students at Dartmouth College, recently founded Lopus AI: “an AI‑powered data unification layer for sales leadership that transforms fragmented sales signals into actionable insights for better Pipeline Visibility, GTM Attribution and High-Fidelity Forecasting.” They were accepted into the highly competitive (read: 1% acceptance rate) start-up accelerator program Y Combinator, affectionately known as YC, in the winter of 2025. Borodchuk and Beg’s side of the world is filled with spritely, energetic young people far more interested in forward motion than all else. Silicon Valley is the present and the future, though their land of high-risk, youth-forward values remains foreign to an older establishment. I spoke with Borodchuk about start-ups, dropping out, college culture, and the mystical world of innovation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ELAN KLUGER Was Dartmouth helpful in getting you into entrepreneurship?

DANYLO BORODCHUK That’s a great question. I actually recently attended a gathering with several Dartmouth alumni who are also YC founders, along with Jeff Crowe, a prominent investor. We reflected on our shared experiences, particularly exploring the factors that contributed to our entrepreneurial journeys. Interestingly, there was a near-unanimous consensus: Dartmouth, as valuable as it is academically, provided very limited preparation specifically for the realities of entrepreneurship and the unique demands of Silicon Valley. Almost every YC founder I spoke with agreed — “Dartmouth did not equip us for Silicon Valley.”

The general agreement was [that it’s] because of the fact that Dartmouth has a huge consulting and investment banking pipeline, whereas Silicon Valley’s culture is much more [one] of going against the grain. That’s kind of the normal thing there. Dartmouth culture doesn’t necessarily support you creating your own thing. There’s not a builder culture in Dartmouth. They select their students pretty well, but as for the actual environment, it does not help them as much as other technical and start-up schools might.

KLUGER You said that there are other schools where it’s sort of the culture to go against the grain. That seems to me at least kind of a contradiction in terms because if everyone’s going against the grain, then it’s not exactly going against the grain.

BORODCHUK I’ve talked to a lot of people from MIT and Stanford and our YC batch — and some previous and later batches after ours — and they all say entrepreneurship is pretty normal there. It’s a common path. It is an oxymoron for it to be a norm to go against the grain, because then that becomes a norm of itself, so Stanford culture is very interesting. I heard it’s very normal to start a start-up and do your own thing and go against the grain. But then that creates a different problem. Whereas if you don’t do that, and if you’re not always talking about business [and] tech 24/7, and if you don’t build your own thing, then that creates the opposite environment where it puts you down for not doing that, which is a critique of Stanford that I’ve heard. So it is sort of an oxymoron in that sense. But I would say it does, in terms of start-ups and Silicon Valley generally, prepare you more and much better than Dartmouth.

KLUGER Do you think that there was a chance because of the environment at Dartmouth that you wouldn’t have done entrepreneurship? Or was the decision easy?

BORODCHUK It was an easy decision. I came to Dartmouth pretty confident in my own approach. I just got lucky that it happened to be a good approach. If you’re going against the grain, you never know if you’re going up or down. For a long time, once you’re in that environment, it feels like you’re going down. But thankfully, you know, it turned the other way around.

For Aamish [Beg, Danylo’s co-founder] — [though] I can’t speak on his behalf — there was a moment where he heavily considered consulting. For him, that took away a lot of time that he could have been spending on a lot of these other projects. When we applied to YC, it was actually very funny because [Beg] came in there and they [asked him,] “What have you built before?” He [replied], “Before college, I was doing this, this, and that.” And they [asked], “Okay, what about during college? What have you done?” And he [said], “That’s a good point, actually.” Because he had a great resume — he had a great track record of building and creating a lot of things — but then once he came to a place like Dartmouth, that just seemed to not be the norm anymore, and he found it extremely difficult to keep on building like he used to.

I think it’s very ironic, in terms of Dartmouth’s culture, in a way, because if you’re a nonconformist at Dartmouth [and] you don’t do [investment banking (IB)] or consulting, it’s very easy — or it’s pretty easy — to find other nonconformists. Ironically enough, finding a good co-founder is a little easier, if they exist, right? But it’s a nature versus nurture thing. [Beg] just happened to be very good and very technical before he came to the college, but some people become like that when they’re in college.

So if there was someone [who] was leaning in that direction, and they really wanted to keep growing in that sense, and they wanted to explore that side of them more, that just wouldn’t happen at Dartmouth, period. Maybe they would never even go down that path, unless they do it sometime later in life. In terms of Dartmouth, it does pull you away from that direction and tries to push you down the traditional consulting and IB direction instead.

KLUGER Have you thought about the question of dropping out?

BORODCHUK Yeah, it’s a no-brainer for me and for Aamish. Actually, when we first applied [to YC] — it’s a funny story that we always tell everyone — we were always tracking the application to make sure we didn’t miss any messages. At one point, we got a message in the application portal, and it said, “Would you guys be willing to drop out for this?”

Aamish, within like thirty seconds, and on my behalf, said yes. You can do a leave of absence for like a couple years, and then you can come back later, and I mean, we might do the same thing. But we said yes.

It was really funny because I had no input in his statement. But for me, that was exactly what I would say, too. We both happened to be on the same page and it’s definitely a testament to our friendship and deep understanding of each other as co-founders.

KLUGER Why is that?

BORODCHUK Dartmouth is so disconnected from everything, which is great if you want to find yourself, in isolation. But once you actually do find yourself, and you know which direction you want to go in, I would say Dartmouth is not the place for that. Being in college would severely limit our network, our environment, our friends — a lot of our friends are now from Silicon Valley, from around here, from San Francisco and so on. That environment just simply does not exist at Dartmouth. It would be extremely difficult to facilitate that [there].

It’s a morale and a business perspective — it just doesn’t make sense to still stay, especially if you have adequate funding. Of course, if you have none, then yeah, you can stay in college.

KLUGER Do you think there are things Dartmouth could change to make it a more entrepreneur-friendly culture? Perhaps changes to the Magnuson Center [the business incubator at Dartmouth]?

BORODCHUK I think the Magnuson Center is an amazing idea, an amazing concept, [but] the execution could definitely be better. I actually was part of the Dali Lab [a software project incubator at Dartmouth], which is technically part of the Magnuson Center. I think the Dali Lab is great. The fact that they’re able to put you in charge of real work and real projects as a college student, get your work out there, and trust you with making a good product for these people, that’s great. I think that’s very, very good, and I learned a lot from that experience. But I would say that the Magnuson Center just doesn’t feel like a community — it doesn’t feel like it has any other program [besides the Dali Lab]. A lot of entrepreneurship cultures are almost intertwined with builder culture, and I think that just doesn’t exist [at] Dartmouth. That’s not a very common thing. A lot of people do it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a community. It’s more like they select for great people, and a lot of great people who want to do their own thing happen to come to Dartmouth, and then they do them there. But [that builder culture is] not really facilitated by the environment or the institution.

KLUGER What are the big differences you found with the culture at YC versus at Dartmouth?

BORODCHUK [They’re] dramatically different. I would say the biggest thing about YC — the best thing about it, in my opinion — would probably be the community because it’s generally much preferred [for people there to be] extremely competent, friendly, and open.

You know, I could reach out to some famous CEO, [from] a start-up that was in a batch, let’s say, seven years ago that is doing very well now, and that is not anything unusual. They would reply, maybe they would help [me] out. I mean, granted, they might not have the time. But if they do, they will. It’s that sort of environment, whereas at Dartmouth, people will [say], “Oh, I don’t want to be too rude. Oh, how about we circle back next week?” You know, that sort of bureaucratic language. It’s not exactly direct and not very efficient. [It] also breeds too much self-consciousness around your own social standing because you start thinking, “Okay, this person said that, but did they really mean that?”

As soon as I moved [to San Francisco], I stopped thinking about it at all. [Instead, I thought,] “Okay, I know what people think of me. I know what they say to me. I know that it is how they say it is.” That’s the sort of culture that is enabled in this environment. They’re all very friendly, too. A lot of the people we talk to have, like, ten years of building start-ups behind their backs. It’s crazy. [Beg and I] noticed that we can just talk to them like friends, and they’ll be like, “Hey, yeah, oh, that’s awesome. What are you guys doing? Oh, you guys are doing this and that. Yeah, you know, I did that a couple years ago. You guys should do this, and you guys should do that.” They just help you out, if they want to. [At] Dartmouth, they still will [help you], but you have to find the right people, whereas in YC, it’s the expected norm.

KLUGER There’s competition at Dartmouth for a finite supply of jobs, goods, status — whatever — whereas the idea of entrepreneurship is an ever-increasing pot. Is there any zero-sum competition or status hierarchy at YC?

BORODCHUK There is definitely a status hierarchy. Obviously, if you’re a more successful founder, people will respect you more, but it doesn't come from a perspective of, “Oh, if you don’t know anything, I’m not going to talk to you.” It’s much more respectful in that sense. I once talked to some Stanford grads, and they told me that part of the culture is [that] you never really know who’s going to end up a billionaire, you know what I mean? It’s in our best interest to treat everyone nicely to see how it plays out.

At Dartmouth, there are so many stories of — well, this barely happened to me, but my friends talk about this a lot — someone [asking] you for help, you [helping] them out, [and] then you ask them for help, and they ignore you. It’s almost like a norm. It’s a cliche at this point! It’s crazy. That’s such a ridiculous thing to do. Now you’ve just ruined this relationship with this person basically forever, all because you were too lazy to, I don’t know, give them a head’s up because you’re trying to compete over an internship that’s only going to last you, realistically, like, a year.

You’re going to have thirty years’ worth of networking to do over the next couple of decades. If you’re over here cutting people off, just like that, because you feel like you want the better internship, it’s just ridiculous. It’s a great short-term strategy, sure, — you’ll get a great IB internship — but later down the line, it can be very difficult for you if you just end up with a bunch of people who hate you and a bad reputation for being flakey.

KLUGER Bad for your soul as well, but that’s different.

BORODCHUK Well, yeah, that one…that one, too.

KLUGER If you re-entered the standard competition at Dartmouth of consulting and banking, how would you think about it differently with the experience of Y Combinator? Not that you will, and God forbid that you did, but…

BORODCHUK If I were to go back into [that pipeline], I would say that I think it, especially consulting, is great for money, and visa sponsorship if you’re an international [student], and experience. IB — that one, maybe not so much. In my perspective, that one is a purely financial, you know, grind. You always have these crazy quant kids who are cracked at math and physics, and then if they happen to do IB, that sort of skillset doesn’t always translate into [them] doing better higher up on the banking “food chain,” as they say. Banking, specifically, is a very interesting business, in my opinion. I could personally never do it because it doesn’t feel rewarding. It’s a numbers game — you’re just winning money from playing some clever schemes here and there — but consulting is very interesting.

I find consulting very worthy. Unfortunately, with AI, it’s like the worst possible thing to go into nowadays. I definitely would have done it if I couldn’t do start-ups. It’s overhyped a little bit, but it’s not bad.

KLUGER How is the working world different from your student life?

BORODCHUK Granted, I’ve never been in the working world — I’ve only been a student and an entrepreneur — but I consider [the working world] much, much easier. I always hated studying. I’m a much more practical learner. I think that’s what primed me to want to do entrepreneurship. [It’s what] makes me a better entrepreneur [than] student. And yeah, I enjoy it way more. The autonomy you have [as an entrepreneur] is amazing.

I have lived so much of my life being like, “Man, if only I were in charge of this, I feel like I could do a better job.” That’s always haunted me. Maybe it’s partly ego, partly real, [but] now that I’m actually in charge of my own company, I find [that mindset to be] partly true. I feel like I can do things much better than the people [who] have done it before me, for the most part.

Obviously with entrepreneurship, you’re always learning. Realistically speaking, I don’t even know what I don’t know. I’ll find out over the next couple of years, depending on the market that we’re in and so on and so forth, but [entrepreneurship] is most definitely very rewarding because it’s something that you worked on, something that you made, and, obviously, if you exit big, you get financially compensated for it. It’s a win-win, in my opinion, and I love it. It’s much, much better than, say, studying, in my experience.

KLUGER What are your thoughts on people who pursue a bachelor’s in business administration, specializing in entrepreneurship?

BORODCHUK I don’t think [business professors] teach you anything bad. I think a good business degree, a really good business degree, is going to be great, but those are hard to come by. The best business degree is the one that tells you, “Hey, you know what, this is just how we do things now.” But some business degrees, you go in and they’re like, “Okay, you want to, like, sell, and then you want to build, and then you want to have a sales team, and then you want to bring them on, and you want to do that,” and they never explain why, right? They don’t know why.

I have personally found [YC to be almost] a business degree. They teach business from first principles. It’s amazing. They’ll teach you [to] talk to your customers, obsess over the user, and make something people want. That’s their main tagline, and they make it so clear. And that’s [what] I love about it — they really drill into you these good business lessons that come from first principles [instead of the] practices that are now trending in the business world.

They tell you [that] you should be talking to customers because that’s where you get your money from, and the more the customers like you, the more money they’ll give you, and that’s how you make money from business. So how do we talk to customers? How do you make something people want? [Then,] we have to make something. Whether it is computer science or biology [or] engineering — just anything you can apply that business thinking to — if you were to do both [that major and a business major] at the same time, that would be incredibly useful. But learning business on its own is completely irrelevant because you need to be able to hold both systems of thinking — where you have the product, [know] how to build the product, and then [understand] what sort of product you should be building depending on customer demands.

That’s the tricky part of building a business because you need to do those two things at the same time. If you’re a pure business guy, it’s like, “Oh, I know what to do, I need to do sales. Team, let’s do this.” But if you don’t have a product, you can’t do it. That’s why a lot of successful CEOs or founders are technical, because that’s the first step in actually building [a product]. Then once you build it, [once] you put it out there, you meet with reality, and then you sort of iterate from there.

You test this idea out there. People kind of like it, [but] they don’t like this feature. Okay. You come back, rework it, and then do it again, and then see how that cycle keeps going. What ends up happening is, once you start applying this sort of business metric into a business persona, you start to move really fast in the business world. That’s what YC tries to do. Their hypothesis is that business is easier to learn than, say, computer science, which is definitely true [in] my experience. Learning good computer science is going to take you years.

The biggest difference between business and computer science is [that] you can learn business very slowly. If you put a product out there and it’s mediocre, and you make some money, you’re not going to go bankrupt. If you know your tech, and you put out a pretty technically impressive product, but nobody wants to use it — it’s kind of useless, but some people like it — you’ll make some money, and then you’ll learn from it, and you’ll learn to make more and more and more. Whereas while you’re learning computer science, you physically cannot have a product until you get through those initial steps. And then, even if you do, you’re going to start making janky stuff. Purely because of your own technical debt and unknowledge, you won’t be able to make what somebody wants because you just don’t know how.

In that sense, learning business is much more sustainable on the job because you make more and more money and get an education from that, whereas computer science is the base-level requirement. [Without it], a business simply cannot exist — computer science is an example, but it can be anything that you’re working with, whether it’s biology, chemistry, engineering, and so on and so forth.

KLUGER To me, a business degree has always meant asking permission to start a business. And if you’re asking permission, you’ve already lost. But maybe that’s a little too aggressive.

BORODCHUK That’s a good point. Anyone looking to get into start-ups should watch Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell podcast. I used to watch that one during the batch because it was so influential in my way of thinking. But the most important — and the funniest — video I watched was advice for non-technical co-founders. It was [by] Seibel, and he’s known for being very direct. He basically says in the video [that] the best non-technical co-founders are the ones that can get the best technical co-founders to join them. Essentially, [it] doesn’t matter how good of a non-technical co-founder you are — if you don’t have a good technical person with you, you’re nothing. That’s just how it works.

KLUGER Given what you’ve observed about Silicon Valley culture thus far and what you’ll continue to observe, if you were given permission to redesign Dartmouth to be less a place that distributes status and more a place that actually transforms society in some way, how would you redesign it?

BORODCHUK That’s a good question. I think Dartmouth has a great strength of being very isolated. Actually, I’ve had this idea for a while. [That isolation] creates this environment of, almost, a bubble. People always talk about the “Dartmouth bubble.” It’s always people thinking about the same thing. I feel like that can be really powerful if you just dump a bunch of super smart people [in Hanover, New Hampshire] and cut out the outside noise and then just put them in that bubble.

But the problem is that [at] Dartmouth, a lot of that time and energy is wasted on useless social dynamics, [when it] could be put towards pragmatic and practical work. Instead of thinking, “How can I go to this party or be in the right club or fraternity [or] sorority?” that sort of energy [could be] put into you actually working on something, like working on a project [or] on a research paper. If an environment facilitated that, that is how I would create [Dartmouth].

[In terms of] trauma bonding and fraternities, I think it’s completely useless to have people go through tough events for the sake of going through tough events, if you can instead make them more productive and more practical, more rewarding. You can have [people] build a bond together because they have a shared experience of climbing Mount Everest, for example, and that’s always going to be a much better bond, in my opinion, than a shared experience of, you know, swimming through mud for the sake of it. Here are two completely different perspectives, but one is so much more rewarding. It builds a positive working environment where [the two people] support each other. The flip side is just, “Oh, we survived something really hard. We got through it.” I just wish Dartmouth [had built less of a culture around the maxim of], “Do hard things for the sake of doing hard things,” and rather made [its students] do hard things that were also rewarding, that taught [them] the difficulty of doing hard things while giving [them] a reward in the end.

I felt, and a lot of my peers [might] actually agree with this, that a lot of my time at Dartmouth was spent thinking about things that really didn’t matter or didn’t progress my life or career at all outside of the Dartmouth bubble. If that wasn’t the case, [Dartmouth would be] more efficient and much better at producing people who were willing to put something into the world.

Thanks, for having me, Elan. This has been a great interview. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

The question of how to live is the question all of us young people ask and will continue to ask for the rest of time. Borodchuk’s answer — innovation, entrepreneurship, and speed — appeals to many more than just Silicon Valley denizens and is rather inspiring. I hope for his continued flourishing.