On Dropping Out

I remember sitting in a lecture hall at Universite Paris Cite in late 2022 when OpenAI released their playground. I opened it on my laptop while the professor was going through slides I'd already read the night before. Within minutes I knew something had shifted. Not just in tech, but in what it meant to learn, to build, to work.

I was supposed to follow the path. The French system is clear about it: get into the right school, get the right degree, get the right job. Everything was on track. But I couldn't unsee what I'd seen.

Where I started

I come from a poor family in Paris. I was a bad student as a kid, and at some point I turned that into an obsession. I needed to prove I could be good at school. Good grades, good dossier, good master's. That became the entire identity.

At Universite Paris Cite I was doing my exams, validating them. Not brilliantly, but enough. I took the initiative to do a research internship with Professor Perifel on the normality of sqrt(2). The goal was clear: build the strongest possible file for a top master's. Maybe Bocconi. Maybe something else. The path was laid out and I was following it.

But I never felt at my place. I was forcing it. If I had kept going I would've been fine. I would have gotten through, gotten the degree, gotten the job. But it wasn't mine.

In parallel, I launched my first real project: WatchMarketCap. A CoinMarketCap for watches. I posted it on the JVC forums and the community responded well. First 10,000 users. That was the first signal that I could build things people wanted. But I wasn't ready to listen yet.

The breaking point

Then everything collided. I completely failed my first semester exams. Here I was with a research internship, a side project that was working, and a transcript that was falling apart.

I needed a solution. I found one. There was an administrative gap between the two campuses of UParis. The one in Saint-Germain-des-Pres accepted mid-year entries from prepa students. I said I was coming from prepa. I got in.

Then I locked in. BNF every day, 12h to 20h. I buried every desire to build, put my head down, and validated with a 19 average. No shortcuts in the work itself. Only in how I got through the door.

The real question

I validated enough to secure the year without needing the June finals. For the first time I had breathing room. And with that space came the question I'd been avoiding: what do I actually want to do?

Around that time, a friend showed me something. He'd found a way to break ChatGPT, to remove its limits. We started exploring, pushing, seeing what was possible. And then it clicked. The real insight wasn't about jailbreaking a chatbot. It was this: any thought, any word, any concept is now parsable. Representable by attributes. Computable. The moment language became structured data, everything changed. For me that is one of the biggest revolutions in human history.

So we built something. A mobile app for AI roleplay. One of the first OpenAI wrappers. We called it TruePerson. Two months in, we crossed 10k MRR.

That number wasn't just revenue. It was proof. You can actually build something that works.

By October 2023 we hit 20k MRR. That's when I dropped out.

What it cost

Dropping out in France is not like dropping out in the US. There's no romanticized narrative here. Your degree is your identity. When you tell people you're leaving, they don't ask what you're building. They ask what went wrong.

A lot of people in my life thought it was a terrible choice. A lot of them left. People I used to talk to started seeing me differently. That was hard. But I'd made my decision, and I knew why I'd made it.

What came after

TruePerson kept growing. I started traveling across France. Not vacation. I wanted to understand the country, its people, how things worked outside of Paris. I realized the world was much bigger than what I'd known. A trip to Dubai around the same period reinforced that. Seeing a place where people build with a completely different set of assumptions about what's possible. That changes how you think, especially when you come from nothing.

Around that time I met Raouf. There's a before and after him in my life. When you're 20 and things start working financially, nobody teaches you how to handle that. How to live, how to think about money, how to stay grounded. Raouf taught me all of that. He opened my mind to things I didn't even know I was missing. Traveling, knowing what I actually wanted, seeing life differently. I owe him a lot.

Since then I've shipped nonstop. Built and did a lot of projects with him. From AI agents to projects built on x402, an agent payment protocol, that caught the attention of Coinbase's Head of GTM who came on as an advisor. Each one taught me something different. Each one confirmed the same thing: the best way to learn is to ship.

Why I'm writing this

I think anyone who wants to work with me should understand this. Not because dropping out makes me special. It doesn't. But because it explains how I think.

I don't optimize for safety. I optimize for learning rate. When I see a higher-slope path, I take it, even when it means leaving a perfectly good one behind. That's what dropping out was. Not a rejection of education, but a bet on a faster one.

In the future you'll always find someone like me. He could be from Algeria, France, Belgium, Morocco. It doesn't matter where. If you're not good at school, don't force it. Find what you're good at. With AI, that's enough to start.