News alert: Alex Godin was skipping school today. Betabeat ran into the 17-year old at TechCrunch Disrupt this morning, typing away at a table in the hackathon hall with Jesse Lamb, a New Work City freelancer who partnered with Mr. Godin and Nick Stamas to build Dispatch.io, one of the four projects selected out of 100+ hacks produced this weekend during the hackathon. They were getting ready for their demo on stage in front of the whole conference this afternoon.
“It’s 90 seconds instead of 60 seconds,” Mr. Lamb said, referring to the time slot for the demo. “And ours took about 40 seconds. So we’re trying to figure out what to do.”
Dispatch.io is a Chrome browser extension that lets users transfer files easily between cloud services like Google Docs and Dropbox. Mr. Lamb and Mr. Stamas are building AirDropper, a replacement FTP service for small businesses, so Dispatch.io was a natural extension. They’ll be releasing the extension soon and eventually integrating it into AirDropper.
So Mr. Godin, Betabeat asked, did you apply for Peter Thiel’s 20 Under 20 fellowship, which announced 24 fellows this morning who are skipping college or dropping out of school to head to California for two years?
Nope, he said. “He’s interested in making a point, not investing in those start-ups.”
What are you guys talking about? Mr. Lamb wanted to know.
“It’s an incubator for people who are under 20 and he’s making a point about college and how he doesn’t think it’s necessary, even though he has a law degree,” Mr. Godin said. He’ll be applying to colleges soon, he said, although he’s not sure where. “I don’t think finishing college is as important as starting college,” he said. “Degrees are not worth as much as they used to be.”