I just got kicked out of Columbia for taking a stand against Leetcode interviews.

Here's the whole story (long thread): 

1\ Fall ‘24, I transferred to Columbia as a CS major.
I came in knowing I wanted to start a company and found an amazing co-founder in @shanmugam_neel. 

We hacked on a few things, but nothing stuck (note-taking app, AI sales agents for liquor distributors, etc) 

2\ We took a step back and realized we needed better distribution. So we started from scratch and thought about what would go viral. 

distribution -&gt; product instead of product -&gt; distribution.

This is also, in my opinion, what the future of companies  looks like.

3\ That’s when we came up with @InterviewCoder — a cheating tool for Leetcode-style technical interviews. We'd use the tool to get offers from top tech companies, film it, and ride the shock factor. 

Side note: We read the Columbia student handbook first.

The tool didn’t violate any policies then — and it still doesn’t.

6\ We used the entire recruiting cycle to polish up the UX on real interviews, getting offers from Meta, Tiktok, Capital One, and Amazon.

I actually ended up posting all these offers as work experience on my Linkedin, and got my account banned bc I didn’t have work emails to prove that I worked there.

7\ I recorded the entire Amazon process using the tool, from OA to offer. I posted the video and it was doing moderately well. 

Amazon has since taken down every single reupload of this video, but some clips are available here:

https://www.interviewcoder.co/#proof

8\ Soon, Columbia hits me with a disciplinary notice. Some Amazon exec had sent the school a letter essentially saying “expel this kid or we won’t hire from your school anymore.” I tweeted the letter (below), which went hyper viral.

Honest thought:
The time from receiving the letter to tweeting it and it blowing up was the only point in this whole process that required any balls.

For a while, I thought I blew up my entire career and education for a few thousand Youtube views.

Had some extremely stressful conversations with my co-founder at this point, which I'm glad happened in hindsight. They brought us much closer together and proved that we could survive through tough times.

It was against the better judgement of literally everyone in my life that I decided to move forward with this, and am really really glad I did.

Learned to truly trust my gut after this moment.

9\ Columbia later scheduled another hearing, this time for “distributing confidential documents” and later banned me from attending.

Of course, I am still tweeting updates throughout this entire process. 

11\ A week later they made it official. Kicked out officially :) 

12\ Final thoughts:

> I didn’t realize this would go as viral as it did, but certainly hoped it would go viral.
> Most ppl don’t realize that 99% of the risk I took was when I decided to post the letter. Everything after then was past the point of no-return.
> I honestly don't have any ill-will towards Columbia. Really weird positions they decided to take, but I had a lot of fun in school and met my co-founder here, so no complaints.
> Learn to trust yourself and your gut more and other people less. 
> Truly truly truly, risky things are not as risky as they seem. Take more risks.

Excited for what's next!

Roy

Roy