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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the moral of the story, as far as I can tell, is: 1) make sure to know the kind of person who can write you a $72,000 check as if he was leaving a tip at Starbucks, 2) impress him enough that he’s willing to offer you $200 million when you’re 23.

I see now where I went wrong in my youth.

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> 2) impress him enough that he’s willing to offer you $200 million when you’re 23

I think the answer to that is "Go to Stanford". For literally 99.999% of people that is never possible.

I think you're not giving the meritocracy at MIT enough credit. I went to a state university.

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm? I went to an unranked state university myself - I'd love to experience even a fraction of the respect these folks get.

It is not sarcasm. Stanford does indeed have the most alumni who founded unicorns. But Harvard, UC, and MIT round things out nicely, for American schools at least.

https://www.theatlas.com/charts/HJSgAUdPx

That's...effectively the same idea.

I'd argue that all meritocracy has completely failed people like me so I can't take that seriously at all.

I'd also argue for a replacement, but I guess I'm not credentialed enough to propose one.

Surprisingly, these sorts of people are both not that rare and relatively straightforward to connect with.

A year of low level engineer’s salary is, relatively speaking, not a lot of money in our industry/society, regardless of what that figure ultimately works out to as an integer.

There are 607 billionaires in the US out of 320 million people. You need to meet over half a million people to average one person with Peter Thiel's level of wealth.

My personal controversial opinion is that life doesn't work like that half million people math. In reality, one either can meet a billionaire with very little effort, or won't meet one regardless of effort. Another controversial opinion: that ability to get the desired results with little effort is something that needs to be earned, it's not a casino.

You don’t need to be a billionaire to be able to write a check for $100k like it ain’t no thing.

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