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The Stanford Class That Built Apps and Made Fortunes
The NY Times has a story about a group of students who took a 2007 course in app development at Stanford that turned out far better than any of them expected. Quoting:
"... by teaching students to build no-frills apps, distribute them quickly and worry about perfecting them later, the Facebook Class stumbled upon what has become standard operating procedure for a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. ... Early on, the Facebook Class became a microcosm of Silicon Valley. Working in teams of three, the 75 students created apps that collectively had 16 million users in just 10 weeks. Many of those apps were sort of silly: Mr. De Lombaert’s, for example, allowed users to send “hotness” points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue."
This is what business schools teach? No wonder the US is going down the toilet.
"send âoehotnessâ points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue."
Somebody please just put me out of my misery. Humanity is fucked as a species.
I'd send you hotness but I'm out of mod points.
Maybe if you see your personal wealth as an optimization problem, and thus if you're doing consumer software - things like traction, user experience, virality as optimization problems - you'll begin to appreciate the complexities inherent in building successful products (which can look deceptively simple, but the reasoning behind something simple can be very complicated) and by extension, companies that actually work well instead of "work" like a Dilbert comic strip.
I can understand the left-leaning and socialists among Slashdotters will hate what I just said. But at the end of the day, whatever technological and scientific advance you or I made have to serve human interests. You can't say "I like to do [math|quantum mechanics|machine learning|art|product design|rockets|science fiction|...] because it's fun" without "I".
The best minds of our generation are occupied finding the best ways to leverage advertising revenue.
a university teaches students to create product for a private corporation.
that corporation claims fantastic profits of 1 million dollars, and the professors involved claim a massive educational success.
What the fuck is really going on here? Let's read the fucking article for some clues.
"His team’s app netted $3,000 a day and morphed into a company that later sold for a six-figure sum."
Where have i heard this shit before? Oh yes. 1999. Pets.com. What was behind that tech bubble? It sure as hell wasn't technology, students, or legitimate business activitity. Rather, it was a massive fraud perpetrated by investment bank 'equity research analysts' who were riding a gigantic speculative bubble, which was no different than any other speculative bubble in history, from Tulipmania to the CDO market.
"Venture capitalists also began rethinking their approach. Some created investment funds tailored to the new, bare-bones start-ups."
Ahh yes. The same shitbags who drove VA Linux to become the largest IPO in history, selling shares to the clueless masses. If you want to know what an IPO is, read Running Money by Andy Kessler, and Trading with the Enemy by Nicholas Maier. IPOs like this nothing but a fucking scam. They are the transfer of wealth from the ignorant to the well connected.
I know that 'true techies' like to harsh on Best Buy for selling people 'extended warranties' and Kaspersky's Smirking Douchebag Suite 9.5 but think about it; the IPO scam is no different than what Best Buy does. It sells shit product to ignorant people for profit. It is not much different than from any other street hustle.
Now, let's look at what kind of 'income' these people are bringing in. "Their apps caught on with millions of people and were soon bringing in nearly $100,000 a month in ads."
What kind of ads do you see on facebook? "One tip for a flat belly". "Acai berry revealed". "Obama gives mom's money for college". "Earn your bachelors degree from Diplomamill Subprime University".
The whole fucking edicife of this 'app industry' is propped up by bullshit and intellectual prostitution.
Am I Jealous? Yes I'm fucking jealous. I will sit on my shitty treadmill of a job at my evil corporation where It is timed to the minute when I take a piss and where my email is monitored, and I wish I could make $1000 a day selling 'hug apps' on facebook. Yes I'm jealous.
But I am glad for one thing. At least I understand what I am doing, and why I'm doing it, and don't lie to myself about the true nature of my work.
I say congrats to these students. Yes, some of these apps are really stupid, but so was the ChiaPet, the pet rock, Lava Lamps, etc. In fact, there have been a lot of stupid products over the years that have made their inventors/developers/etc. millions. This class accomplished exactly what business schools want students to learn: develop a product, find a market, sell the product, make money. From TFA one former student is now employing 30 people and just raised 6 million dollars in venture capital. At least he is now affecting the economy in a positive way by providing jobs. I wish more schools would take risks like this to encourage students to do create businesses. Perhaps a lot of the products will be basic and not technically innovate, but some of them will. And as one person posted, over time as the phone app market matures, silly apps will be less attractive and people will want good games and productivity tools for their phones.
Only one thing is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet. --Mark Twain
Incidentally what did take weeks or months on Novell or Unix that took hours on Windows 95/NT?
The period between system restarts?
An intriguing solution to a problem that should never have existed in the first place...
Dude! We can see your prostrate!
Support SETI@home
This.
Wall St. has been giving all the stock broker jobs to geeks.
Advertising jobs are going to geeks.
We might actually create a fairly pleasant world eventually.
There is also the issue that people who don't understand jake shit are being dis-enfranchised, but that might be temporary, i.e. eventually we might create a society in which ignorance of mathematics, science, and programming is widely understood to directly lead to poverty.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I liked it too...
One can question the whole issue of graduate / business schools in other ways too:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
And this: ... Professors, lecturers and researchers have been entrusted by society with the task of serving the society through their search for a better understanding of reality. Only in this context does academic freedom have a real meaning. ..."
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
http://dublinopinion.com/2011/05/06/an-appeal-from-teachers-and-researchers-of-economics/
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged.
The question is, how repeatable is it for everyone to be in on something at the right time in the right place? How about instead building a world that works for everyone?
"RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
True, but how much have you been paid by the college classes *you've* taken? I've never taken a college class that paid me 13 thousand dollars in a semester.
A guy at my university put together a (fairly basic) interactive website with a slightly inventive concept a year or so ago - it got some good publicity, then was taken down by the university, causing a controversy that netted him much, much more publicity.
Oh, FitFinder, done by someone at University College, London. Now if that had happened at Stanford, the student would have been hooked up with a venture capitalist and encouraged.
Stanford is really a venture capital and real estate firm which runs a university as a sideline. In 1992, Stanford University spun off the management of its endowment to the Stanford Management Company. They set up shop at 2770 Sand Hill Road, which is where almost all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists have their headquarters. Within a few years, Stanford was investing in venture capital funds, executives were moving between the academic business unit and the financial unit, and Stanford was turning into a major player in the VC industry.
Stanford actively helps to create startups and takes equity stakes in them. Stanford owns part of Cisco, part of Yahoo, part of Google, etc. They're not just a passive investor, like most universities.