College Dropout Shares How He Got Mark Cuban to Invest in His Business

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with 27-year-old Eric Chen, the cofounder of Injective, from New York. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Before going to college, I lived in the Bay Area.

I was surrounded by entrepreneurs and founders, so building a company didn’t seem incredibly novel to me.

But in 2018, I started a company of my own called Injective. We’re a blockchain network that provides infrastructure for finance applications.

We’ve raised over $50 million in funding and got Mark Cuban to invest in our vision. In 2020, I dropped out of college at 22 to focus fully on the business. It was the best choice I could have made to get where I am now.

The college pipeline wasn’t for me

I joined NYU in 2016. I decided to major in business and minor in computer science. I imagined I’d go into finance or tech after graduating.

I went into college with a career-oriented mindset, but I quickly realized I didn’t want to pursue the same career pipeline as everyone else. Instead, I wanted to find out what I was really passionate about and good at.

I was very interested in blockchain technology and decided to explore this area from an academic perspective through my work at college. I could spend hours studying it and not get bored.

I was very interested in an academic discipline called cryptography, but I wasn’t going to be exposed to it until the late stages of my course. I started teaching myself in this area by joining a Ph.D. student reading group and some research labs.

In late 2017, I also started working part-time for a venture investing fund in New York. This helped me gain some industry exposure.

By the summer of 2018, I had ramped up my work with the fund to full-time and was seriously considering taking a leave of absence from college.

I wanted to be fully immersed in the blockchain finance space, and felt that staying at college would be too time-consuming for me to do what I wanted.

I started a company and dropped out of college

Gaining more industry and subject understanding helped me develop the idea behind Injective.

I noticed a problem in the industry: decentralized crypto exchanges had performance issues, like not being able to process orders quickly. I wanted to create something with the same efficiency you’d expect from traditional finance, but in a more decentralized way.

The space was so nascent, and it felt like a once-in-a-generation opportunity where someone like me, who didn’t have industry experience or a lot of academic knowledge, could jump in and contribute value right away.

In the fall of 2018, I took a leave of absence from college and officially started Injective. I got a cofounder to help split up the engineering and research tasks. We recruited engineering talent so we could build out our own exchange product more quickly.

When it came to figuring out how to operate a company and get investor buy-in, I engaged with other people in the industry, including my contacts from the fund I worked at, but I also had to figure out a lot of stuff by myself. The industry was so new that people who’d worked in it for a while didn’t have standardized answers.

I took some college courses on the side because my parents encouraged me not to drop out, but eventually, in 2020, I decided not to devote any more time to finishing college.

There were challenges

We vastly underestimated the engineering challenges of building a decent-sized exchange infrastructure with such a green team. Our product iteration process took roughly two years.

If we had millions of dollars in the bank, iterating would have been quicker, but acquiring funding and interest from investors was challenging. At the time, investors didn’t believe that decentralized exchanges had much promise, and having no degree or much industry experience probably didn’t help.

We were bootstrapping and living on low costs to make things work.

When the space started blowing up in 2020, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. We raised a decent seed round, which allowed us to accelerate.

We convinced Mark Cuban to invest in our company

Our head of business once saw Mark Cuban speak at Harvard, where he shared his email for people to pitch him ideas.

Our team decided to pitch him. At the time, the GameStop saga was causing upheaval because Robinhood had prevented people from buying GameStop stock. Mark Cuban commented publicly on it. In our pitch, we spoke to that moment and shared that we were building an open platform with no entity that could control what people can or can’t do.

It kicked off a whole email chain in which Mark asked us questions about our solution, and we had to answer as accurately and quickly as possible. After a bit of back-and-forth, he decided to invest.

Our strategy was to be down-to-earth, so we were honest about our product and not upselling it or exaggerating what we could achieve.

In total, we’ve raised over $50 million.

I’m glad I took advantage of an opportunity

The first few years after leaving college were the most challenging of my life. I was constantly drowning in work and felt pressure to make things work.

I didn’t have a strong dissatisfaction with college; I just felt there were better opportunities for me than being locked into that route.

The space I was building in would’ve been so different if I’d waited just a few years, so I was forced into action.

My most important takeaway is that if you have an opportunity you’re passionate about, you should take it.

Do you have a story to share about dropping out of college to become a young founder? Contact this reporter at ccheong@businessinsider.com.