College, Parents, Society

You guys are missing out

I am in Philly this week visiting my brother and talking with users, school officials, Penn people, and students VCs. I am meeting brilliant people on a consistent basis and am truly enjoying my time here.

For the past year I have been teaching myself programming and how to do a startup. This is my second one in that time and the experience has been phenomenal.

What is amazing to me though is sitting across from people smarter than me and listening to their level of ambition and what happens in technology. It is jarring.

A lot of the people I have been meeting talk about what they’re working on and future plans. They are so tied up in the set course of school that I have to think again about what they said.

We had an event yesterday for our Domi users which was amazing. People asked us if we were Entrepreneurship majors.

Entrepreneurship majors?! I would never dream of it. The funny thing was that they believed that in order to start a company you had to be an entrepreneurship major.

I laughed inside but got a little worried. Other people I talked to talked about how they would only take a class in their schedule to see if they wanted to learn something. So in a sense they would not pick up programming but maybe take a programming class next semester.

Despite being a search query away from knowledge they were one semester from knowledge. This made me think how contrarian my thinking was.

College, Parents, Society still preach the “study hard, get into a good school, get a good job” approach pretty successfully. And many of these brilliant students are doing just that. They are optimizing for 98 instead of 97 instead of optimizing for life.

These kids have so much potential. They could change the world. But of course they cannot do so becuase On Campus Recruiting is coming up and my resume and cover letter must be in order. Oh boy.