The college application season is well underway, and high school seniors are facing some big decisions. Chief among them: What about a gap year?
Now, a new program wants to formalize that path. Common Gap, launching Thursday, aims to match ambitious teens taking a year off before or during college with startup jobs.
Delaying, dropping out of, or skipping college altogether have long been popular in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison have all done some version of it. As artificial intelligence hype draws young founders to San Francisco, programs at companies like Palantir Technologies are rolling out anti-college initiatives for high school graduates. Meanwhile, startup entrepreneurship programs like Y Combinator skew increasingly younger, as taking a gap year has become less contrarian and more mainstream for aspiring technocrats.
As part of Common Gap’s program, participating startups must agree to pay the high school graduates at least $75,000 a year. Oliver Zhou, the founder of the initiative, expects most offers will exceed $100,000. Common Gap doesn’t have its own funding, since the participating companies will pay the students’ salaries, and it won’t turn a profit.
Zhou sees early-career prospects as a major unlock in the AI talent race, which last summer sent offers for the most technical machine learning roles into the millions: “Why wait for them to graduate?” He told Business Insider in an interview.
Zhou, 24, wishes he had taken a gap year. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania a year early and founded Deep24, a Y Combinator-backed startup that analyzes productivity data to help users manage their time effectively, in 2024. He also previously worked as a product manager at Uber.
“If you choose to go to college, you’re going very intentionally,” he said of those who will complete the Common Gap.
Common Gap takes its name from the Common App, a platform used by college-bound students to apply to over 1,000 schools with one application.
Programs for early-career techies aren’t necessarily new. The Thiel Fellowship, founded in 2011, awards early-stage founders $200,000 and requires participants to drop out of college. Some venture capital firms, like Kleiner Perkins, have programs like the Common Gap, which matches college students with internships at startups in their portfolios.
Several startups have already signed on with Common Gap, including Austin-based SuperBuilders, which makes technology for Alpha School, an AI-powered private school. Many other partners are AI-focused — a health tech company, an insurance startup, and Zhou’s Deep24. His company and others in Common Gap went through the Silicon Valley entrepreneurship program Y Combinator. Zhou is working on programming for participants who will work at San Francisco-based startups.
The application process will skip the traditional résumé drop and instead asks applicants to share “the most impressive thing you’ve done or built,” Zhou said, with an optional video interview component. Zhou is also considering using AI as an initial filter in early interview rounds.
“I certainly think that college is not right for everyone, and it has kind of become a default,” he said. “Being able to do real work, rather than just turning in assignments for someone to grade, is quite rewarding — and good learning.”