The sweet success of Nick Smith

By David Boyle

Gargoyle co-editor-in-chief
Published Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2006, Gargoyle, features

Uni alum Nick Smith was sitting around his apartment one night during his Thanksgiving break when he got a call from former classmate Anthony Phillip. Smith, 21, and Phillip both graduated from Uni in 2003, and they both attended the University of Illinois until Smith got that call in late November.

Max Levchin, the co-founder of PayPal and an Illinois alum, had returned to the U of I to speak to a group of students. He was taken out to dinner by the executive board of the U of I's Association of Computing Machinery, which included Phillip.

“He [Levchin] said he was looking for people to join his new company, Slide, and Anthony suggested he talk to me,” Smith recalled.

Smith met Levchin at the Siebel Center for Computer Science, where the two talked for several hours. Two days later, Smith flew out to San Francisco to interview at Slide.

“They made me an offer that night,” he said.

So Smith dropped out of college and took the job as a software engineer for the company. He will start out making $60,000 this year, plus 1,000 shares of Slide stock every six months. Slide is developing a file-sharing program that displays a slideshow photo ticker on your desktop. A beta version is available at slide.com.

“At this point I don't really know what I'm doing,” said Smith. “There's still plenty to be done, and people are having new ideas all the time.”

Smith was quick to make the decision to take a real-world job over another year and a half at the U of I.

“You basically spend some amount of time learning the basic ideas of CS, and then you spend the rest of your time in college learning specific applications of the ideas,” he said. “So I had pretty much learned all the ideas, and now I have the opportunity to learn the applications in the real world instead of in college.”

Smith has few second thoughts about dropping out of college. “I wasn't very impressed by the education I was getting: huge lecture halls, professors who don't really care about teaching undergrads the basic ideas of computer science, idiot suburbanites, and most of the people in CS are nerdy dudes whom I didn't really enjoy spending time with.”

Smith began his new job on Jan. 3 and is temporarily living out of a hotel in San Francisco. He is making an easy transition between college life and the working world.

“The adjustment to the real world hasn't been too difficult — the office atmosphere of a small Internet startup isn't too different from that of college,” Smith said. “I can come into work whenever I'm ready and wear whatever I want.”

You can still find Smith logged on AIM, he is still in the Dirty Crew, and he still posts on Facebook walls. Less than three years out of Uni, Smith has moved on to the next stage in his life and is still the same person who lives on in the fond memories of Uni upperclassmen and faculty.