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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.
No joke. Get rich quick! Don't worry about making something you're proud of. Be proud of the money you tricked people into giving you for broken functionality. Then call them morons for ever trusting you.
What the hell are you talking about? These students made shit tons of money from this. That IS GOOD BUSINESS sense and strategy.
You two are talking about different things. GP wasn't lamenting the plight of business sense and strategy. GP was saying that the US is going to pot because of the philosophies of "release the alpha, never plan on releasing good product" and "ad money! ad money! ad money!" are decreasing the quality of everything we use. Not just in software, either.
If "making gobs of money before anyone figures out you don't provide value (or you provide negative value)" is the only arbiter of good business strategy, then muggers are incredible businessmen.
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.
Not a zero sum game. It's not like, if this class didn't exist, these students would all be working on improving Folding@Home, or developing a new kind of algorithm to help power companies optimise their electricity transmission infrastructure or some other equally "socially beneficial" task. Hell, some of those same students might be doing those things in one of their other classes.
As for bemoaning Facebook itself (if that's what you're doing) and crying out for a cure for cancer or for research into green energy, again, it's not a zero sum game. If not for Facebook, would Mark Zuckerberg have started a cobbled together laboratory out of his apartment and grown it to a billion-dollar medical research facility within the same time period? Could he have built the next "Mr. Fusion"? No. In this alternate reality, he'd just be another nameless droid in a big company. And you'd be completely ignorant of the fact that e.g. he managed to deliver that company's new Intranet application, and you'd be complaining about whatever other social network replaced MySpace.
What we should be discussing, (instead of bitching and moaning that them young folks are making money from silly ideas), is that instead of developing a web app for a project in class that helps a fictional hotelier manage bookings, billing etc. they developed a real product and put it out into the world. This, surely, is a good thing, no matter how trivial their product.
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.