The Engineer Who Got Kicked Out of College

James Everingham's mother cried when he told her he'd been kicked out of Penn State with a 0.0 GPA. Two weeks later, the same university that expelled him offered him a full-time position as a computer scientist—the first person hired without a degree in over 50 years.

This wasn't luck. While Everingham was failing every class, he was building shareware that the university's library had started using. They just didn't know the developer was local until they needed help migrating their mainframe systems to PCs. The left hand genuinely didn't know what the right hand was doing.

"I literally didn't go to any of my classes," Everingham tells host Ryan Peterman in a recent interview about his path from that chaotic start to becoming Instagram's head of engineering. "I was just programming at home, totally obsessed with this software."

What's striking isn't the redemption arc—those are common enough in tech. It's what Everingham did with the opportunity. He took every computer science class the university offered, racking up 150 credits of advanced coursework without ever getting a degree. He just never bothered with the electives. When people kept sending him money for his shareware, he quit at 20 to start his first company.

When the FBI Comes Knocking

Before any of that, though, there was the teenage hacking phase. Everingham wrote software that could take over telephone operator lines using frequency manipulation—a technique called "phreaking." His Commodore's multi-sound chip could generate the precise tones needed to blow off operator lines and emulate keypads, letting users listen to conversations or make free calls.

The FBI traced his phone number. They also had another lead: Everingham had proudly signed his name to the hacking software. He was 16.

"My mom didn't understand what a computer was," he recalls. "She thought I was wasting my life on that video game."

The security vulnerabilities of 1980s bulletin board systems—single-user servers running on home computers with dial-up modems, syncing messages in the middle of the night—seem quaint now. But they taught Everingham something that would matter more at Netscape and Instagram: distribution beats technology almost every time.

The Pattern That Actually Works

Everingham's career advice sounds generic until you see how he's actually lived it. "Friends come and go but enemies collect," he quotes—possibly Bill Gates, possibly someone else. The person sitting next to you at a struggling startup might report to Tim Cook in 20 years. Your first college hire might sell their company for $400 million.

This isn't aspirational networking talk. Everingham joined Netscape after colleagues from Borland—where Microsoft was slowly crushing them—recruited him over. He thought he was escaping Microsoft's competitive radius by joining "this little internet startup." Instead, he landed in the bullseye of what would become the most famous browser war in tech history.

"We couldn't have got more square in the bullseye of Microsoft," Everingham says. "They turned the entire company against us."

Netscape scaled from 150 people to over 3,000 in a year. Everingham worked seven days a week. He took two days off once and returned to find strangers sitting around him. The company went from founding to IPO in 16 months—partly because pre-Sarbanes-Oxley regulation was lighter, partly because the dot-com bubble would fund anything with "web" in the business plan. (Yes, someone tried to FedEx potatoes for $100. People invested.)

The technology war seemed winnable at first. Netscape's browser was superior. Engineers felt they were on a mission to interconnect the world. "I kept thinking, we're going to build a better browser, the technology is superior, and people are going to use a superior solution," Everingham explains. "Nope. Microsoft's like, watch this. It's not a technology war. It's a distribution war."

Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows and gave it away free. Netscape's $35 browser revenue evaporated instantly. The company pivoted to monetizing netscape.com's massive traffic, essentially inventing web services on the fly. When Microsoft planted a giant IE logo on Netscape's front lawn in 1997 with a card reading "best wishes, the IE team," it was both friendly Valley rivalry and ruthless competition.

Years later, Everingham would work directly with Hadi Partovi—the Microsoft engineer who organized that stunt—and they'd swap stories about the browser wars like veterans comparing battlefield notes.

The Networking Advice That Isn't

When asked how to network in tech, Everingham doesn't suggest coffee chats or LinkedIn optimization. His friend Lloyd Tabb (who founded Looker) gave him the filter that actually works: "If you want to find a mentor, don't go and ask someone 'hey I need a mentor.' Go offer them help."

Three people from Everingham's Netscape days have followed him through five or six companies since, including his current venture, Guild. The desk neighbor building plug-in interfaces at Netscape now runs all AI at Apple, reporting to Tim Cook. Another early hire sold a company for $400 million.

The question isn't whether to network—you're already in a network whether you're intentional about it or not. The question is whether you're making that network denser through curiosity and usefulness, or burning bridges through carelessness. Everingham's career suggests the former compounds in ways that look like luck 20 years later.

What Instagram Actually Needed

By the time Mike Krieger brought Everingham to Instagram as head of engineering, the team was hitting 100 people—"a common place where teams start to break," as Everingham puts it. The challenge wasn't scaling up. Often, it was the opposite.

The full interview covers his time leading Meta's cryptocurrency project, his current work, and the career regrets he's accumulated over three decades. But the through-line is consistent: the person who got kicked out of college for a 0.0 GPA learned more from obsessive curiosity than structured education. The teenage phreaker who signed his hacking software learned distribution matters more than superior technology. The engineer who thought he was escaping Microsoft learned that the people you work with—and how you treat them—matter more than the company's fate.

There's no tidy lesson here about unconventional paths or betting on yourself. Everingham's career worked because he was useful to the right people at inflection points, because he stayed curious when formal education failed him, and because he didn't burn bridges even when companies burned around him. He happened to be correct that Microsoft would eventually adapt to the web threat and become even larger. He happened to be wrong that superior technology would win the browser war.

The difference between those two outcomes? One he could control. The other he couldn't.

Rachel "Rach" Kovacs is Buzzrag's cybersecurity and privacy correspondent.