Knighty

There's something of a survivor bias to this story. That is to say, there are probably a lot more people who drop out of college and don't amount to very much. Those guys don't tend to shout from the rooftops very much. Which should mean applying his approach, to college, for our own situations it might not necessarily be wise.

Having said that, there are probably quite a lot of successful people who didn't amount to much in college. And I think being a free-thinking, rebel, hustler doesn't necessarily make a good student but might very well make a good captain of business. But how cool would it be to have/be both?

But he's right, if it's not for you it doesn't necessarily mean you've failed.

Yes, that makes more sense. In which case it feels like the point of the post is more to do with following your own path before accepting the path that is 'mapped' out?

Perhaps you actually say this in the post somewhere, but it I don't recall seeing it. IMHO it would make an interesting article if you emphasised that point more.

In my experience there is something to be said for NOT always following the money but following the 'fun'. More than once the 'fun' turned out to be surprisingly lucrative after all ... :)

The author, rightly, makes the point that finance, like most things, is primarily about trust. But that's about the most interesting thing in the article.

Capital introductions are hard, and everyone wants to cosy up to someone looking for a 'home' for their excess millions. It's an environment where a couple of dudes/dudettes with laptops and an idea might have a potentially successful hedge-fund idea but lack the credibility and track record to make the risk worthwhile for a potential investor. The investor could lose a lot of money very quickly if your idea is wrong. The chances are, that if your idea is 'right' they'll listen to you explain it (because you really will need to explain it in depth) and then go and find someone who they do trust to implement it for them.

My point is that, it would be very hard for me to gain sufficient trust from prospective investors to raise $200m because I don't have any contacts or access to the necessary capital.

However, the daughter of a financial advisor for high-net worth individuals is playing a very different game to me. She very well might easily be able to do, what I easily can not. So, for me at least, there's nothing of interest in this article. I'm pleased for Elle to be in such a great position and wish her well.

Absolutely, people have been studying motivation theory for decades. Making up 'stories' might help, but without any supporting evidence or research it seems mostly like pseudo-science to call this the 'Psychology of retention'.

For instance, how many people did he poll? Where did they work? Are they representative of the startup phenomena as a whole? What question was asked and what were their verbatim responses?

Well if demand can sustain the price on a daily basis then good luck to him/her ... and I'm very jealous.

Work like this would tend to be ad-hoc, not 9-5, and the work he's received so far (in his example) would seem more like what an architect might charge to make a drawing or two.

So the price seems entirely fair if the skills really are specialist enough to demand it.

>> The first sentence says that you must use object data structures to write OOP.

Actually I don't think it does. It says that: "objects are data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions". There is no obligation.

True it would be easier implemented in a language provided data-structure. But if you were crazy enough you could place the data-structure all in global variables and try to tie them up using reflection.