ryanlchan

Oligopolies, which are dependent on a limited number of competitors, are ripe for corruption, collusion, and cooperative behavior. This is pretty much exactly why the US has antitrust law. Its history is an interesting read on wikipedia if you have the time.

While I do think that higher education needs an overhaul, the larger problem is that HE is too often misunderstood. It's not a place where you learn skills that explicitly help you get a job; that's called vocational training, and a whole bunch of places do that extremely well. Hell, if all you're looking to do is work, you probably don't need college at all. Zoho's been hiring kid straight out of high school, with no discernible difference in productivity with their college educated counterparts (http://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-crede...).

HE is a place where you go to interact with people and ideas fundamentally different from what you know, receive mentoring on how to consider such ideas, and how to create those ideas on your own. It does not claim to make you a smarter individual, and its value is largely dependent on your own drive to make the experience a success. In essence, it is exactly the same as YCombinator - even in the obfuscated and oft frustrating admissions processes, which is what I believe the article refers to.

I find this true for just about every professional services field. Hiring a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, or a consultant often comes at a rate multiple times their own salaries.

But the difference is that the lawyer was probably working 50-60 billable hours a week, whereas an escort (or a business coach, presumably) will work significantly less than that.

Perhaps not, but it certainly says something about the fragility of the US monopole mentality. Even if they get to just half of the US GDP, it would be a major coup for China.

Dubai strikes me as the ultimate endorsement for agile development. Even seemingly unlimited investment, near dictatorial power, and a war room stocked with the smartest development minds in the world could not turn a small patch of desert into a world class tourism and financial center. None of the pieces made sense, yet they charged onwards to some higher, more perfect vision only Dubai could see. Could've been a lot easier if they'd just failed early, and failed fast.

I'm always surprised by the hard lines people draw between technical and business cofounders. 'Technical founders' mock the business side's naivite and reject the notion that any less than 50% of the work in building a business is programming. 'Business founders' think they have all the right stuff and see 16 year olds building facemash or yousquare, then assume anyone can program with a book and an afternoon.

Truth is, if you can slot yourself into one of these classifications that easily you're probably not going to be a very good startup cofounder. A startup requires people to wear lots of different hats, with some being in the technical side and others being on the business side. While normal people, aka business and technical founders, can wear one, maybe two hats at a time, start up founders need to be 12 headed hydras.

I'm not saying that there's no specialization on a startup team; it's necessary. But how will your programming ninja respond when an investor asks about how your branding fits the specific niche you're targeting? Or what will the business dude say when questioned about what stack you're going to deploy on?

Maybe it's time we stopped thinking about business/technical cofounders and started evaluating people as startup cofounders.