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Why Mark Zuckerberg Is a Bad Role Model For Aspiring Tech Execs
coondoggie writes "Want to run a successful high-tech company? Don't drop out of college. The myth of the brilliant Ivy League student who starts a business in his dorm room, drops out of school, and goes on to run a successful high-tech start-up for many decades to come is essentially just that: a myth. Despite a few high-profile exceptions — such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates — the vast majority of CEOs running successful U.S. high-tech firms have college degrees, and more than half have at least one graduate degree."
It's not a myth if it happened on multiple occasions...
run a successful high-tech start-up for many decades
How can you possibly say that Zuckerberg will run a company for many decades, when he isn't even many decades old? He hasn't even been old enough to drive a car for a decade, let alone old enough to run a company for "many decades". Being as facebook is doing less-than-brilliantly in the stock market, it seems at the very least overly optimistic to say that it will be around for "many decades".
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Be careful not to automatically interpret correlation as causation.
In other words, the degree may not be what's making the CEO, but rather that the odds of CEO material also having a degree is high.
CEOs also tend to own more than one car. Doesn't mean you should go buy a second car to improve your odds of becoming a CEO.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Ellison
Gates
Jobs
Zuckerberg
That's most of the tech money that isn't IBM or HP.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
...just pretend. I'm pretty sure eBay and Yahoo won't even notice.
If you have a great idea, you should see it through. You can always go back to college later, and the experience of pursuing it will be far more beneficial to you than any class you could possibly take.
If you don't have a great idea, than dropping out of college is stupid and will gain you very little.
Hey Philosophy Major, is my latte ready yet?
Being as big as a Gates or a Zuckerberg is more a function of opportunity than pure education or even talent. Not to underestimate their abilities, of course, but I'd say there are plenty of people with the academic capabilities (or better) of both of those two, but they will never be more than well-paid employees.
The important thing is finding and knowing what to do with opportunities, and then learning what you need to in order to take advantage of it. People with more education will have more specialized knowledge, but interestingly, I'd say that they gain more from the currency of simply having the piece of paper and any networking they can do in the graduate programs. In this way, I'd say that it is 100% true that the higher education *system* helps find more opportunities for advancement, starting with the requirement for a graduate degree for a better job, but going even further than that.
Still, the right opportunity and the means to take advantage of it is what is actually required. The rest of it is just positioning. In the end, you don't get rich being a great practitioner of a particular science or engineering field, you get rich either managing your business, or getting it to the point where others can manage it for you. Of course, dropping out is like buying only one lottery ticket instead of multiple tickets. You can still win it all on the one ticket, but chances are much better you win if you invest more.
Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning...
I read it as the only thing better than being surrounded in class by nymphomaniac college girls is being a multimillionaire tech startup CEO surrounded in class by nymphomaniac college girls.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
There are always going to be exceptions to any rule. But if you are a betting person, you would increase your odds of becoming a tech executive if you have a college education and a senior executive if you have a management degree.
I respectfully disagree. What do Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniac, Michael Dell, and Mark Zuckerberg have in common? They were smart enough to realize that you have to strike while the iron is hot. All staying in school would have done for these guys is ensure that they missed the boat on their respective opportunities and found themselves in arguably more menial jobs as a result.
This article sounds like it was sponsored by a bunch of universities or something.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks.
How to be rich and successful in corporate America: be a selfish, backstabbing cunt with no conscience!
That's what we want! That's what we select for! The compassionate, mature guy well he can just go on welfare, fuck him. We love our sociopaths. Sociopath?! Where?!?!?! Here, Mr. Sociopath, let me give you some money and power, yeahhhh that's the stuff.
THIS
Forget any minor shit about his education, Zuckerberg is a real-life supervillain, destroying humanity's concept of privacy and commercializing human relationships for his own personal gain.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
OK, BofA is stretching "high tech" a little...
Richard Branson - Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Galactic, plus all of http://www.virgin.com/company
David Geffen - Dreamworks
Ted Murphy - izea.com
Tom Anderson - myspace.com
David Karp - Tumblr.com
Y.C. Wang - fpusa.com
Rob Kalin - etsy.com
Theodore Waitt - gateway.com
Shawn Fanning - napster.com
Steve Wozniak - apple.com
Kevin Rose - digg.com
Dustin Moskovitz - Cofounder, Facebook
Jerry Yang - yahoo.com
Amadeo Peter Giannini - Bank of America, perhaps you've heard of it
Craig McCaw - McCaw Cellular
Ashley Qualls - whateverlife.com
Pete Cashmore - mashable.com
Jeffrey Kalmikoff - Threadless.com
Ben Kaufman - kluster.com
Red McComb - Clear Channel
Bram Cohen - BitTorrent
Gurbaksh Chahal - Blue Lithium, Click Again
Remember the woman who played the young John Connor's step/foster mother in T2? Yeah, I don't know her name either, and that's my point. She's one of those actors/actresses whose face you remember, but whose name you don't. But as a result of having small parts in so many movies, she's pulling in somewhere at the low seven figures from royalties. She's not Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham-Carter or any other famous professional from the acting world, but she embodies a more likely form of success to anyone who would choose acting as a career. But alas, the center of the bell curve is never all that interesting...and nobody wants to be at the lower side of what falls off the slope. So everyone focuses on the exceptional and strange (in a good way) examples.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The real thing these guys have in common is they didn't just create companies they helped created industries.
So if you want to start a company that does something other companies do it would make sense to go to school and learn about those industries. But if you want to create an industry that doesn't exist you are not going to learn it in school.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
If that passes for a supervillain in your universe, where's the portal to get there?
In my universe the run of the mill villains slaughter people without remorse or conscience; win public office based on lies and then force their demented wills on the people with the full force of government agencies (staffed by personality types that love to get all up in your shit with force) at their backs; wage wars with vague purpose and no end game, or just because someone's great great grandparent did some uncertain bad thing to someone else's great great grandparent; head up thuggish dictatorships that commit genocide and slavery; run hideous anti-science, misogynist religions; leave dozens of decapitated bodies hanging from bridges merely as a warning to others; hire physicists to build economic models that eventually crash the economy; write laws that lead to the hiring of physicists to build models that eventually crash the economy; refuse to see the society destroying fallacies of their own ideologies despite endless empirical evidence, and, oh, so many other things.
Geez, your universe considered some jackass offering a free and voluntary service with dubious fine print a supervillain? Let me pack my bags!
On behalf of every would-be tyrant, autocrat, dictator, and fiend, I'd like to THANK Zuck. I mean Christ, who needs to invest in expensive and complicated counter-terrorism and surveillance services when you can just put a person in front of a computer and they'll happily blab away their every secret in exchange for links to silly cats and pictures with text over them?
Facebook is the best thing to happen to dictators in a while. It's a tremendous source of information, it's not hard to hack (and has BEEN hacked on numerous occasions), and gives the tyrant an almost complete picture of who you hang out with, when, where, and what you discuss. DickTater know what you like, what you do, where you work, where you studied, and who your co-subversives are.
So thanks, Zuck. Being a tyrant was never so easy. In fact "using Facebook" makes up a large part of chapter 9 (Communications & Media) of the Dictators Handbook (http://www.dictatorshandbook.net/). True!
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
[...] but it's no different than what dozens of other corps want to do or are doing with your data[...]
That does not make it right.
So, you discriminate against people upon how they dress?
It's great to be comfortable or a rebel and all, but the way humans (and computers) interact seamlessly is through standards. Clothing may seem trivial to you, but dressing for business is a statement that you are there *for* business. You can still be there for business if you wear a hoodie, but it becomes open to interpretation, just as Zuck's choice of apparel was.
That lack of clarity can ruffle feathers and be enough to make a difficult negotiation impossible. Sometimes, that sort of clash is a statement, and as such, may be a good idea, but it comes with a risk.
One way or the other, anyone who expects their bits to arrive in an expected manner, but rails against people who arrive dressed in an expected manner isn't considering the value of convention to efficient and clear communication.
Nah, we're not posting this from a cave because the cave didn't impress women, so we built houses with electricity in them and running water.
Absolutely everything on earth came about because of pussy. If there were no pussy, we would be sitting in caves gnawing on raw meat.
To be fair, we'd have probably invented beer without pussy. But we may have invented it sooner so as to engage the really fat cave girls.