Today marked my graduation from college - the end of my career at UC Berkeley, and the official start of my professional life. I've been waiting for this day for as long as I could remember, and I'm honestly astonished that I managed to graduate. I've tried to drop out of college three times. But every time, someone managed to convince me back. And I'm happy that they did.

My first attempt to drop out began after freshman year. Three summers ago, I met a few other young entrepreneurs in a hot tub at a programmer's party called "Super Happy Dev House", and we all discussed the idea of dropping out of college so that we could start our startups. How to break this news to our parents and why dropping out makes sense to do. Being the ignorant kids that we were, no alternative argument existed. By the end of the evening, we had convinced ourselves that it was the optimal path to success. And in this hot tub three summers ago, I befriended another young founder and computer science major named Brian. We kept in touch by email, and I ultimately found out that only Brian and I remained in college. The other young upstarts kept to their word and dropped out.

In the three years since that night in the hot tub, I've received the education I dreamed for, and unique lifetime experiences that I wouldn't otherwise have in the real world. Among them being a great education in computer science, and most importantly, meeting my cofounder and best friend Andy Su. While I realize that I may just be justifying the decisions I made, I would do college all over again just to meet Andy.

Andy and I have been incubating side projects for almost two years now. We launched internshipIN together in November '08, did most of our computer science class projects with each other, recently launched a Java IDE called Breve, and started inDinero before summer break last year. It was through UC Berkeley that we got the Lightspeed Ventures Summer Grant. It was through UC Berkeley that we won the Venture Lab competition and got free money + office space on campus. It was also through UC Berkeley and the CSUA on campus that we got hooked into the YCombinator community, and recruited two more great hackers to join inDinero. It's just weird to think that none of this would have happened had I dropped out three years ago.

I owe thanks to my friends for supporting me, my advisors for keeping me in college, UC Berkeley for hooking me up with an incredible team of co-founders, and my parents for supporting me through the past four years. This is just the start of an incredible journey.