abiekatz

What rule, that you should only drop out of college if you are working on a startup that looks like it could be incredibly successful? I don't think that is a great rule for everybody. Each individual has to look at the path that is correct for them.

Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone are other examples of college dropouts who left not to start startups and then became successful entrepreneurs. Matt Cohler left college for two years, working for a startup in China and playing in a band, before finishing up his college degree.

Each individual has to choose the path that is right for them. Every incredibly successful person is an outlier. You can learn from them but you can't just copy them

Though I wonder, what is the best way to spend those years? Would working at and/or creating a startup at 19 better prepare the 22 year old to start a successful startup than attending college?

Of course there is more to college than just making an individual ready for a career in the real world but I think that college should evolve and find better ways to teach students than the current model.

Steve Jobs would be the notable exception to this, he dropped out well before creating Apple

Does anyone have any statistics on the success rate of startups in Silicon Valley versus elsewhere? It would be interesting to see some data that supports pg's claim.

Mike Moritz' biggest mistake (according to a 2000 interview with Forbes): Not getting into the VC business sooner. http://www.forbes.com/asap/2000/0529/098_4.html

Here is a crazy option. Buy Square. Make Jack Dorsey CEO. Square could be the "PayPal for Yahoo" and Jack Dorsey is probably the closest person to Steve Jobs that you could get to run a company today.

Allow Square to operate separately, making Keith Rabois CEO of Square and put Jack Dorsey in charge of revitalizing the rest of Yahoo.

I think Yahoo's suite of verticals with the traffic that Yahoo has, if done right, could be the biggest asset for Yahoo and the closest thing to a unique asset that they have. So as a portal, Yahoo links to a lot of vertical services currently (Monster for jobs, Match for dating) or has there own owned-and-operated subsidiary (finance, autos, flickr).

Find ways that the verticals can be improved and invest heavily to do so. Preferably re-create verticals that are currently outsourced, but be patient with doing so. Be willing to shrink margins in the short term to gain market share. What is needed for each vertical will be different, but I imagine there is room for innovation and improvement in each. A lot of personnel changes will probably have to be made. The CEO (for this example Jack Dorsey) will need his cadets that he trusts to run the different products. I think a similar org-chart to Google's reorganization makes sense...a few people at the very top and then put someone in charge of each product and give them a lot of responsibility.

I think it may be possible to provide a rich and effective user experience so that overtime users would go directly to a Yahoo vertical instead of searching on Google or Bing/Yahoo. Also, Yahoo could then place some results from their vertical properties on top of the Yahoo search results to better serve Yahoo users (if they can actually do the verticals right). This could be a very interesting twist on search and a differentiator. It would be a risk, but I think something like that is needed to have a fighting chance to grow search market share which is currently at 17.9% and makes up 53% of Yahoo's revenue.

I wonder WWSJD? In Steve Job's 1997 keynote when he returned to Apple, he talked about vertical integration being the biggest strength of Apple, even though many others considered it a burden and a weakness. He admitted that many current Apple products sucked and that they needed to improved dramatically improve core products and kill off others in order to be competitive. He admitted the importance of integrating more tightly with Microsoft and didn't want to think of the situation as being Apple vs. Microsoft.

For Yahoo, their nearly complete suite of vertical products is potentially their biggest strength even though many consider it a burden and weakness. Yahoo has to admit that a lot of their products currently suck and will need to kill some off while dramatically improving others. Yahoo already admitted that they couldn’t cut it in the resource intensive search game and got out.

I know it sounds crazy, but maybe the portal can make a come back. SEO spammers have dramatically lowered search quality in certain areas and has made it harder for people to find the content that they really want to find. A portal can make it easy for the average web user to find what they looking for with a higher signal to noise ratio by a combination of high-quality curated content, vertical sites and a Bing-powered search engine with a Yahoo twist.

In reality, I don't know whether Yahoo really has the assets, the cachet or the people needed to pull off this turn around. If I was on the board, I would seriously consider a buy out offer if a sweet enough one came to the table. That being said, this plan would be a whole lot more fun to see being played out.

You could also travel for a year or less at some point when you are young. Also, working abroad is a great potential way to get some travel experience while not falling behind.

Running an additional product, especially one that takes off requires a lot of resources and attention, is very difficult to manage when your primary focus is on a different business. From Justin.tv and their investor's perspective, they are able to maximize the chance of success of Socialcam while likely maintaining an equity stake. Also, the Justin.tv team can focus all of their energy on growing their primary service rather than managing multiple services.

I like the analogy that having a business with multiple very different businesses is like a multi-front war.

I wonder if this service will become more of a business or a non-profit. I feel that this site is providing a great public good, akin to Khan Academy, and it would be great if donations could cover the costs of further developing the site. That way, price is not a deterrent to any users getting started with learning to code.

Sounds like it was Heroku's $212 million sale to Salesforce that pushed YC into the black. Though, I imagine if you also include on paper gains, you were in the black much earlier.

Thanks for the offer. I think having a quality editor critiquing your work is key to improving your writing ability.

Congrats on taking the leap and I look forward to seeing what you end up working on.

The post provides a great anecdote but I am just saying that more research should be done on the issue.

Yeah, I think not giving grades is a great potential way to encourage intellectual curiosity. Has there been any controlled experiments on this issue? Also is this practical during primary and secondary education? I don't know.

I think some students without marks would become more intellectually curious while other students might just not do the work and just play video games instead. It's a tricky topic.

With sales, in the very beginning you can just work in whichever way makes the most sense and test many different things out, not worrying too much about process. Mark Suster calls this "evangelical sales" http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/10/12/startup-sales-...

Though as a sales team scales, a sales team need to become more process driven so that the company can keep better track of everything that is going on and make sure that everything can be kept track of and organized.

I wonder why some people end up being intellectually curious while others are not. I think intellectual curiosity is very important, especially now since the majority of the world's information is available for free online.

The person who grows up being intellectually curious will have a big heads up in the job market since they will have acquired more information than the other applicants. Plus, I think a lover for knowledge can enrich an individuals life as well.

I don't know exactly how schools and parents can instill intellectual curiosity into their students and children but I think the subject matter should be researched and prioritized.