Amid AI boom, Princeton students pause degrees to build Silicon Valley startups
Three credits shy of graduating, Princeton computer science major Athan Zhang left campus last fall and headed to San Francisco. His startup, Copperlane — co-founded with University of Pennsylvania graduate Brianna Lin — was accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 batch.
“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,” he said. Copperlane says it helps mortgage lenders originate loans faster and eliminate intake errors with an artificial intelligence agent named Penny.
Zhang is part of a visible, if small, group of Princeton students stepping away from the classroom to build companies as the AI boom reshapes how startups are formed 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.
Even at a university where roughly 90 percent of students finish in four years, students and faculty describe growing interest in startups and venture capital, reflected in anecdotal accounts and rising enrollment in entrepreneurship courses. Many founders frame their decision in terms of opportunity costs.
“Think of college as a four-year subscription product,” said Kelvin Yu, founder and CEO of NewCo and a former member of the Class of 2021.
“And like any product, evaluate whether it’s worth keeping the subscription.” Yu, who left Princeton during the pandemic in his junior year, said he saw diminishing returns from the five value propositions he attributes to a Princeton education — academic enrichment, community, strong networks, prestige, and exploration.
“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.” NewCo, founded in 2025 after Yu served as a policy advisor in the U.S. House of Representatives, is “building the substrate for growing U.S.
industrial GDP,” according to his LinkedIn profile. His calculus mirrors that of other students who see a narrow window to capitalize on rapid advances in AI and the capital flowing to early-stage ventures. Princeton, though, has not traditionally been synonymous with startup culture in the way that Harvard, MIT, and Stanford are.
Private market data from PitchBook shows Princeton produced the 15th-highest number of venture capital-backed founders and companies in the decade up to 2025, trailing every other Ivy League university except Dartmouth and Brown.
“We’re definitely not an entrepreneurial school,” Zhang said, arguing that the school’s strong post-graduation return on investment dissuades students from dropping out and reinforces a culture that “breeds really risk-averse people.” That sentiment is shared by some peers.
“In Princeton, I don’t think people are as intrinsically motivated to just do cool things,” said student founder Windsor Nguyen.
“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.” Still, several students say the landscape is starting to shift as AI’s momentum draws more classmates toward startups and investors toward campus.
Whether this moment translates into a lasting change in Princeton’s entrepreneurial profile remains to be seen. For now, a small cohort is betting that a leave of absence — and a plane ticket to San Francisco — offers a better return than an immediate diploma.