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How To Bet Money On Your Future Success
waderoush writes "Say you're in your early 20s, you're finishing college or graduate school, and you're smart but poor — and you've got some big student loans hanging over you. You're pretty sure that within 10 years you'll be selling your first startup or earning a high-six-figure salary. But you need some money *now* so that you can actually start the company, and avoid taking a corporate job. Shouldn't there be a way to calculate how much you'll be worth, and borrow against that promise of future success? Upstart, a new Palo Alto investing operation founded by a group of ex-Google employees, thinks the answer is yes. In a new spin on the crowdfunding model, the organization gathers data from recent graduates such as schools attended, academic transcripts, job offers, and credit scores. Its 'pricing engine,' based partly on techniques developed to assess job applicants at Google, determines how much each aspiring 'upstart' should be allowed to raise from investors per each percentage point of their future income. Upstart has already helped 35 young people raise amounts varying from $10,000 to $170,000; the upstarts, who must pay the money back over a 10-year period, say they're using the funds mainly to retire student debt or bootstrap startups. 'We can look at a 25-year-old and very quickly assess whether he or she would be successful at Google,' says Upstart founder Dave Girouard, formerly the head of Googles $1 billion enterprise apps division. 'My whole thesis was, if you could use the same algorithms to predict whether he or she would be successful beyond that, in the business world, that would be pretty useful.'"
I'm in a bettin' mood. How can I short this guy?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Someone at Google thinks that a) they have figured out a way to predict future success and b) this is the best way they can take advantage of that knowledge? Just... wow.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
When I was in my late thirties, a young (around 24 years old) programmer smugly and condescendingly told me that by the time he was 30, he'd be "retired and on a beach somewhere". It was quite insulting.
So I sighed loudly and said "When I was your age, I said the same exact thing." Then I looked around, held out my arms, and said "So, how do you like your future? It's not bad, there's a pension at some point."
This was at a government agency, where careers go to die. He turned white as a ghost and changed the subject.