To Get Rich, Just Follow the Instructions
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
If you'd like a safe way to get rich off a start-up, creating a consulting gig doing something "enterprisey" and then morph it into a start-up. In 5-7 years that could mean wealth. But this also means you'll be coding Java/.NET all of that time and are never going to build the next google.
What you would build is something like the next Siebel: worse than what the open source community provides, but some suit somewhere will justify spending $1 mill on it as a "business decision".
Nor do you begin with million dollar deals, first customers can be cheaper, just to establish a clientèle base/relationships. The fact you said it's a matter of contacts vs. software quality is a point I forgot to mention: as Ben Stein said, you don't need to be great to do this. You just need to follow directions.
pg makes the same recommendation (go into enterprise) for those who do not think they are smart or driven enough to build consumer web applications.
They've followed the path of many, many other successful disruptive innovations. They come out with something that's innovative & technically hard, release it as a low-margin consumer product, and then gradually move up-margin into enterprise systems as their product gets better & more widely known.
for a consumer application, you have to offer something of immediate value (whether through a technological advance or not) or you have to heavily market it. no matter how long your commitment is to an idea, if it can't be marketed or isn't viral it won't catch on (versus with enterprise, where you are working with few high-value clients until you develop a product to match their needs / you build up a client base).
It's a shame Ben Stein turns his brain off when his faith is questioned, but if blind belief in the sky elf is enough to turn you off someone's writing you'll miss out on a lot of good stuff.
But Yanik is selling his time, he's getting $300k for the time it takes him to manage a building's construction. Stein says he's "well on his way to being in the top 1 percent and, after that, the top one-tenth of 1 percent." Absolutely false.
Let's say Yanik can put up not one but three $300k buildings a year, because he's so talented. Great, he'll be a billionaire in just 1,111 years.
The wealthiest 1% of America isn't just a little ahead of the rest of us; as Stein correctly notes they're hugely ahead. It doesn't happen by trying harder at your job but by redefining the work, putting capital to work for you instead of going to work yourself.
ID as a scientific methodology merely says we shouldn't arbitrarily limit where we can look for intelligence. The only reason we currently have this limit is because of purposeful cultural transformations (see "Closing of the American Mind") and not because of any rigorous arguments or evidence.
Also, it needs to be said that ID vs evolution is a false dichotomy.
What I take issue with is that he appears to be intellectually dishonest (n.b. the whole debacle with his pro-creationist movie).
I take issue with your comparison of Einstein to Ben Stein though; Einstein took issue with Quantum Mechanics because of lack of proof. Ben Stein's position appears to occur incongruous to the face of proof.
Creationism is almost by definition dishonest, as it a thinly veiled attempt to replace science with dogma, and so any pursuit in support of creationism-as-science is guaranteed to be intellectually bankrupt. That said, in the modern world, being deeply religious often comes with a great deal of cognitive dissonance, and it is not uncommon for people, like Ben Stein, to genuinely believe that what they are doing is not only correct, but honest and good, no matter how much their efforts fly in the face of logic, common sense, or good taste.
Doesn't mean that said people are fundamentally dishonest; just that their view of the world doesn't entirely coincide with reality.