What struck me about this article is how well it describes proactive students in the classroom. These students work together until they understand the material. Upon understanding the material, they do something original and exciting beyond what was presented in class. And throughout the whole process they always seem to be willing to talk about what they're working on with other people, simply because they find it cool. There's always a group of students in every class like this. For my software engineering class, it was the students that used Lisp, but I'm sure YMMV.<p>It raises an interesting question: why don't more students become entrepreneurs? It's either (A) these skills don't transfer well in practice or (B) a question of motivation and confidence. I'm inclined to believe (B), and I think PG has addressed this in "A Students Guide to Startups".<p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/mit.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/mit.html</a>
The second <i>"Successful entrepreneurs move in packs"</i> might be a product of the YC experience. It is a known fact that tech entrepreneurship is a lonely endeavour - not many people understand or care about what you're doing. Having a whole bunch of people with the same passion that are roughly at the same stage as you will inevitably tend to create a "wolfpack" trying to conquer the world.<p>But whether this is a trait of a successful entrepreneur is not so clear. I'm not saying it isn't so, just that the poster could be biased by the YC wolfpack experience. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, for instance, weren't wellconnected when they started out with Kazaa and in the early days of Skype. I have several friends that are lone wolf entrepreneurs, and don't have many close friends or business associates in the strartup world. And some of them are very succesful.
Am I the only one who thinks articles like this are pure fluff? tl;dr -<p>"Successful people (like me) try real hard."<p>"Successful people (like me) hang out in my elite San Francisco pack of friends."<p>"Successful people (like me) have <i>sparks</i> in their eyes, but not <i>stars</i>."<p>this is not news or hacking, it's ego stroking. /flameoff
<i>The startups that are still alive are the ones who remained in touch.</i><p>Causation runs both ways on this one. It's a lot more fun to hang out with other entrepreneurs when your own startup is kicking ass---and a lot less fun when it's dying. When your startup is struggling, hearing other entrepreneurs talk about how great things are going is like being in a dead-end marriage and hearing other couples talk about how madly in love they are.