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Comment by unabst | Hacker News Reader

This was truer in the past when entrepreneurs had to build physical products or lobby for their business through established family connections of power. Today wealth is less required as long as a proper education can be paid for. Entrepreneurs thrive at Harvard, MIT, Caltec, Berkley, and the like... And software has been the social ladder super express. If Microsoft, google, virgin, facebook, instagram, uber, and apple weren't all started by wealthy entreprenuers then this article is refuted, since those are all the companies we emulate.

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Well, for starters, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Uber and Apple were effectively founded by white, highly educated men. As far as I know, in none of these cases were their families actually poor. Gates came from a straight up wealthy family; Zuckerberg's family is one of doctors and other highly-paid professionals too.

But the key common denominator is still education and software. Not poor does not equal rich, and even in Gates case his family wealth was never a factor in funding his company that was profitable early. You just have to be not-poor and surround yourself with smart people. I find race and gender a more relevant study than wealth.

Microsoft's first customer was IBM because an IBM VP sat on the board of Seattle National Bank with Bill Gates's mother (the bank was founded by Bill's grandfather).

Bill was upper middle class. Sure he had ties, but it wasn't wealth that made Microsoft a non-failure, nor was the IBM deal a simple handshake based on privilege.

Apple's founders came from a middle class background. Paul Allen came from a middle class background. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were also middle class. Larry Ellison was semi-poor. Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen were middle class. Jan Koum was poor. Gordon Moore was middle class. Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner were middle class.

The majority of Americans fall into the same (or better) economic category as those people.

Wait. So Paul Allen was friends with a friend from a wealthy family who sent their son to Harvard. He himself attended a private school.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page were PhD students at Stanford...

Marc Cuban was middle class... in an affluent neighborhood known for the quality of its school district. And the dude was a beast of an intellect and was pushed by his family to be entrepreneurial from age 12. Koum got extremely lucky in being in the right place at the right time in what was essentially the app store lottery, not to mention that he seems like an incredibly bright guy.

Honestly, your arguments are not helping. All these people, aside from being white, working on tech and being extremely talented, were in the right place at the right time. I don't doubt that they would have been succesful in other fields since the common theme is that they're also incredibly smart.

But from all these examples I just can't help thinking that if these guys had decided to, for example, go into medicine, civil engineering, or other traditional paths, or if they had been of a different gender things would have been different.

Also, dude, what part of being a PhD student at Stanford doesn't scream a tremendous amount of privilege? Wealth and class are not just a question of the amount of money in the bank, but also being raised in families from highly educated backgrounds, a culture of hard work, a selection of professions that promote entrepreneurial and technical values, the sheer luck of having chosen a field that's expanded exponentially, and also not having to deal with shit like, say, malnutrition, which is a not uncommon theme in the US, where a significant child population lives on food deserts.

Rest assured, I really, really think that if Brin and Page had been to any other university with a not-so-stellar track record of professors being intimately involved in Silicon Valley corporations, they would have been "merely" very good researchers. There's a ton of people who have the skills to study in Stanford, yet for monetary issues, difficult childhoods, and the plain fact that a lot kids have no idea what CS education is about, they never get the chance to be exposed to the people, and most importantly, the money there.

> Also, dude, what part of being a PhD student at Stanford doesn't scream a tremendous amount of privilege?

Grad school is often fully paid for, particularly in STEM fields, because it's like indentured servitude. Undergrad at a fancy US school is much harder financially, but you can still go for free if you're on an elite scholarship and poor. So, go to a cheap undergrad / master's somewhere and then transfer to Stanford for the PhD, if that's what you want and are capable of doing.

Is one privileged to have the opportunity to attend grad school at Stanford? Yes, but that doesn't make it categorically unfair.

I did not say it is categorically unfair. However, the conditions required for this are far, far removed from the conventional reality of the vast majority of people. For those of us who come from families who have had an ongoing involvement in ther child's education, especially in science, it's hard to grasp just how describing that as a career path might as well be speaking Mandarin to most children from the 70% lower social stratum.

I've had TAs go to high schools for very affluent children of a developed country (not a first-world country but there was true wealth here), with a lot of advanced courses in computer science, where 90% of the kids didn't even know that computer science research was actually a thing that existed. Never mind the entire notion of a circle of people who do computer-related entrepreneurship.

But what's so special about getting into a PhD at Stanford? If you do your undergraduate degree at another university, you can transfer if you're good enough. Nobody told me about CS research/business in high school either, and I too went to a good school in a developed country. You can learn and decide a lot of things in undergrad.

Well, in my experience with my CS degree:

* a minuscule portion of the population signs up for the first year of CS * the vast majority drop out because they lack the fundamentals in maths and physics and lack the patience and persistence to learn them * half of the remaining bunch drop out on second and third year where highly technical topics such as metaheuristics and OS internals are introduced, which assume that the student has complete and utter dedication to their studies (which is many times not the case since they have to support themselves financially) * The remaining straggle for a while, most end up going straight to the private sector. Out of the graduates, a third go into the academia gauntlet, where half can expect to not get grants or funding or be forever thrown into shitty unpaid roles

Yes, at some point dropping out is not that big a deal and alternative paths emerge, but the idea of doing a business based on a fundamental piece of research becomes unrealistic too, which is where some of the best opportunities lie.

In the cases I've identified, almost all the people that go into academia, even in this public uni, come from professional families of homeowners who don't have issues supporting their children well into the mid-twenties.

Strange, all of the grad students I know in CS get funding, it's guaranteed by the department. Women's Studies, not so much. By that token, academics in CS are privileged relative to academics in the humanities, tremendously even. But, I like some of your arguments, particularly that having to work while studying makes it harder to get the grades needed to go to the grad school of your choice.

All the parent is saying is they were not upper or elite class. You're saying that much of the middle class in the US is privileged enough, and that these people had more going for them than money in the bank, which is the exact opposite of what the article was saying. It was basically saying you had to be rich to be risk-adverse. You don't. You just need enough of a cushion and a support system.

> but also being raised in families from highly educated backgrounds, a culture of hard work, a selection of professions that promote entrepreneurial and technical values, the sheer luck of having chosen a field that's expanded exponentially

None are the result of plain wealth.

> None are the result of plain wealth.

But they are a result of class.

You can have people hitting up wealth from very specific opportunities. But the knowledge that comes from being raised from class is how to maintain and further that wealth.

My parents are from the professional middle class, but they never taught me the value of networking, self-promotion, and corporate speak because they never found a use for it. I had to learn it from friends of mine from far more affluent backgrounds, who told me exactly what recruiters look for, what investors look for, how to dress the part and how to talk the part.

That knowledge, concentrated in just two years of meeting these people, has easily made a different of 50% in my income, if not more. And my ceiling is now essentially unlimited because of the access that has given me.

If I hadn't gone to an expensive private school I would have never acquired those social codes which are key to getting funding and interest in the larger public sphere. I am forever grateful for that knowledge, but I'd be naive to say it's something anyone can learn by themselves without prior exposure.

Your emphasis is on intellect, not wealth class. Middle class is enough to have access to intellect and nurture it with a top tier education. Obama and Dave Chappelle are also products of middle class intellects raising (dare i say) unicorn children. The original article is bs and your points are not about wealth. Most of the rich are not entrepreneurial. There is no causation let alone correlation. What you are citing is intellect.

As for how to dress and behave, they are far easier to pick up than what makes anyone intrinsically smart. Yourself included, you did not need to be rich for a little "class" to rub off on you. It's like learning proper English. At places like Harvard, it truly does rub off (often along with the Haaavd-ness or MIT-ness etc etc).

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