mkbrody

As someone who dropped out of college and had to cope with the consequences, I often think if college is worth it for the typical use-case in HN discussions: an ambitious & hard-working American citizen < 24.

While there's plenty of edge-cases in that definition (esp. the orders of magnitude over-represented college dropout billionaire), indubitably I think it is worth it for the vast majority of people for these two reasons:

1) The majority of society (aka the people who work in HR) still thinks it's important. Being the guinea pig (or crusader) isn't fun. While people like Peter Thiel, who graduated from Stanford 2x, pontificate about the outdatedness of education, note that before becoming a billionaire he leveraged his education to earn serious money and experience in respected careers that unanimously goto college graduates: finance & law. This gave him the financial foundation & creditability to invest in Max Levchin and ultimately run PayPal.

The same opportunities are not offered in our society to people who graduate from top 10 universities vs drop out from the average American university. The latter will have to prove themselves 5x more to compete for the same opportunities - whether it is jobs, capital, co-founders, or even dating. Theres nearly no statistically likely argument where dropping out leads to better outcomes for the typical HN user over the long run across almost any metric.

2) Wait till you want to change careers or move into senior management to earn more money. Want an MBA so you can double your salary for the next 25 years? Want to become a teacher or a professor? How about a lawyer. Great, now take a bunch of classes with 18 y.o. know-it-alls and earn zero money for 4 extra years of undergrad tacked onto grad school when your opportunity cost is literally $500k (just for undergrad).

I fought the good fight, and the lesson is it's generals and politicians who win wars, not soldiers.

I took a course on DesignLab, a platform for learning how to design as a hacker, and it was really good. Learned all the basics of how to MVP my own sites with some polish. www.trydesignlab.com

Does this package include priority SEO placement?

That would be a real value add ;)

I'm sure I still would have had plenty of hurdles even with a degree, and I don't mean to discount that starting a career is hard for anyone, but the matter at stake here is whether it's optimal for smart, young people to go to college or skip it/drop out.

My personal experience is full of rejection, stress, and closed doors (I still can't go to grad school to get a higher paying job such as an MBA or Law Degree in my 30's, and finishing my bachelors has a huge opportunity cost).

Compare that to liberal arts students at Ivy League colleges who a few years ago were getting handed $100 bills to attend a 1 hour on-campus recruitment session with the hedge fund Bridgewater. That path for capable people seems much better to me than what I had to go through.

If you're a smart, talented young person, I advocate studying hard and going to a top college rather than dropping out. You might just end up becoming a billionaire and paying people to skip college as part of a personal experiment :)

As someone who was influenced by Peter Thiel to drop out of college and do a startup with my room mate, I can say it was a mistake in hindsight. Even though I was able to land on my feet (I'm now 25 and making 6 figures), I had to go through a lot of extra hurdles, stress, and doubt to prove my worth to the world and employers when starting out my career.

The odds were greatly against it working out favorably in my circumstances (I went to a tier 3 school, didn't get my startup funded, etc) and I had to possess serious hustle and grit to make it to where I am. I see people who simply studied hard, followed a plan, and graduated from an Ivy or similar college coasting by much easier - that's the path I would take if I could do it over again.

Because Peter Thiel was a big influence on my decision 4-5 years ago to drop out, I look back in hindsight on my experience and think he is wrong to advocate a path he didn't take. He went to Stanford, then got a JD, worked at a hedge fund (try getting that job as a college dropout), and then became a monstrous success at PayPal & Founders Fund after building credibility & success. To think he could have replicated his career path as a college dropout is incredulous. The odds are 10x more against you, and many more doors are closed than open (finance, grad school, etc).

If you want to be successful there is a very easy path if you're mature enough to work hard during high school: goto the best school you can, study a science, engineering, or finance major, and you will have >50% chance of becoming rich enough to live comfortably and retire if you continue to work hard and hustle after you graduate.

Thanks Nick, I just emailed you with more details.

It appears to be working now!

All teams who applied by the application deadline have been, but YC's homepage states they'll review late applications that are submitted on a rolling basis until June, before S14 actually starts.

Amazon's UI will never be considered beautiful, but it's core strategy of focusing on the numbers has allowed it to accomplish more than 99.9% of companies ever formed.

I'm sure they've sacrificed many redesigns in the name of numbers to get to where they are.

FB could implement a redesign, look cool for another 15 minutes, and then have ad revenue dry up, less money for R&D and acquisitions, look bad in the press & on Wall Street, and then blip out after another "cool" redesign.

To also back up my point, if Zuckerberg and the upper echelon of Facebook think this way, they're probably right, considering they have a proven track record of making good decisions and more insider knowledge than anyone else on the subject.

Culture is internal marketing. The numbers are what really matters.

Would it be easy to sell a more advance EHR to hospitals if you could show it would cut down on malpractice? Sounds like all the comments are saying penetrating the hospital market has huge barriers. But if this is obviously better, and could save time & lives, they should use it.

Nice job Kyro!

Hey Matt,

I'm sorry to reach out to you directly on a public forum like this, but my company's website encountered a major negative SEO attack last month and we were hit with a manual penalty by Google today. I thought you might be interested to hear about what happened, and I of course I would like to resolve it as I do my best to always keep my company's SEO efforts within Google's guidelines. Please reach out via email to me at mbrody@myclean.com if we can help each other fix this! Thanks again for everything you do to help make the web a better place, and in advance I understand if you're too busy to respond.

Best regards,

Mike B.

What I'm trying to get at is that a bank is only as secure as it's regulators say it is. The Government is what insures all depositors money up to $100,000, as well as theoretically stops it from taking too great of risk and losing your capital.

The other purpose a bank serves is to protect your money; A bank at it's most basic level is physical security: steel vaults doors, security deposit boxes, security processes, guards, etc. All ancillary (and highly profitable) services flow up from providing this primary need for it's depositors.

Because BitCoin relies on technology to secure your money, so long as users could find an acceptable level of security to replicate this with "high"-technology, there wouldn't be a need for traditional banks to store your money.

Great synopsis. However, maybe this is more of a publicity stunt? He probably knows the case isn't going to work out in his favor, but perhaps he thinks the headlines will.

“The bank that is storing my money is highly regulated by federal regulators and backed by a government with a huge army behind it,” James Angel, a business professor at Georgetown University, told Ars last month.

The irony is that:

1. Bitcoin doesn't need a highly regulated financial institution to securely store your money (but it does require highly secure technology).

2. Acknowledging that the only thing backing legal tender post gold-standard is coercive force (you could even argue that implied force is the main driver behind market demand for $USD - i.e. petrodollars, the EURO, the Federal Reserve, government agencies that only accept payment in $USD, etc.).

Hello ThomPete, we actually do clean a ton of offices and hope to expand further into the facility management space :) Thanks for the post!

Thanks Marcamillion, we have a lot of cool idea's around referral incentives and customer rewards points moving forward as well. stay tuned!

Thanks sizQuarks, now that we have some technical expertise in-house. Stay tuned. The best is yet to come!

Eventually Mike Scharf realized he needed some true technical expertise in house. Once we nail this component sky is the limit!

Lots of challenges Bratsche. Most of the liability is handled by carrying very expensive insurance. The taxes are also expensive and there is a lot of paperwork involved with having so many employee's.

Best of luck with this Jeffyee, to reach out to us email us at contact@myclean.com and mention that you'd like to get in touch with Michael Scharf.

Sorry Aardwolf, https://www.myclean.com/

Hello bkmartin, our strategy so far has been to hire and train cleaners from the ground up. We provide training, steady work, and a path to numerous promotions. I'm not sure we add much value for cleaners who already have a business?

Exec and Homejoy are amazing companies and we have nothing but positive things to say about our competitors. However, I am fairly certain that they 1099 their employee's which means they use independent contractors. This is a different labor model and makes expansion a lot easier. It also has a lot of risks. All MyClean employee's are W-2 employee's and work for the company full-time. We will also be expanding soon!

You're right nthj, we didn't mean to complain or to understate the important of amazing development!

Hello revelation, all of our employee's are W-2 employee's and work full-time for our company. We pay payroll tax for each employee and while the economics is not as beneficial as the contractor model, if we were ever audited we would be just fine. Thanks, Mike

Best of luck with your new business lex. Michael Scharf will be reaching out to you shortly.

Sorry Jazzychad, all will be fixed with the new site! Michael Scharf also sends his apologies to all reading this.

Hello Marcamillion, without going into too many specifics about our numbers we actually get a lot less than 30k unique visitors per month. However, 80% of our business is from repeat customers and our customer retention numbers are very strong. This is the core of our business and how we plan to grow. We have done basically zero off-line marketing.

Thanks at-fates-hands, we're a service business and care about our clients. Mike preaches this quote: “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” ~ Sam Walton