11–20 of 96 posts
"My rationale is simple. If one wants to succeed, one will succeed. If one does not succeed, one did not want to succeed enough. Consequently, one was not willing to make the proper sacrifices required to succeed. Success is a function of desire. That's it." I admire your ambition, but if you really believe the above you have a lot to learn about life. Best of luck with your endeavors!
Believe it, it's possible to not succeed yet want to succeed more than anyone else on the planet. Go to college. Take 4 years to earn a qualification as something to lean back on just in case anything goes wrong. You'll still be 18 in college. You can still do things on the side. You are 17 years old, and have no experience dealing with other people. The fact you are willing to let anyone invest in you without knowin…
Please realise that societal bullshit doesn't go away after high school. You may find yourself disappointed if you expect a major reduction just because you leave the realm of the underaged.
"I don't care if you've never programmed, developed, or designed in your whole life. My only requisite is that you carry more motivation and determination than all of Y Combinator combined. "
That's a rather high requirement :) Great enthusiasm!
You should take about 5-10 years off for introspection.
Spend some time in the business world learning to "conform to the societal bullshit" and spend your evenings bootstrapping your next startup. You sound like you have the technical skills to be a developer, but lack the maturity. It does not impress people when you use big words. Smart people explain things in a way that dumb people can understand.
You don't need a partner - you need a job.
A couple years ago, I was exactly like you. (I'm from the Champlain Valley myself.) But in the 3 years since, I learned that people are infinitely more important than my technical abilities will ever be. My hubris brought me down. Things like this just aren't going to win you friends. If you want people to invest in you, not your ideas, (a statement which is itself filled with hubris), you have to grow up and realize…
Thanks for your feedback, morgante.
Believe it, it's possible to not succeed yet want to succeed more than anyone else on the planet. Go to college. Take 4 years to earn a qualification as something to lean back on just in case anything goes wrong. You'll still be 18 in college. You can still do things on the side. You are 17 years old, and have no experience dealing with other people. The fact you are willing to let anyone invest in you without knowin…
Taking the time to up your education a bit decreases the downside risk of failure, forces you to learn a wider range of material than you (realistically) will teach yourself, and it doesn't hurt that brain cognitive development doesn't really end till 22-24 age range in most people. These all improve the payoff distribution of any decisions subsequently made.
As someone working on/in entrepreneurial tech myself:
1) the vast majority of interesting engineering challenges are within larger organizations (and thats awesome)
2) Nothing is worth sacrificing your health, nothing. Your health is the best predictor of how productive you can be intellectually. Any willingness to forgo health indicates a deep failure of understanding how to be productive
3) go to school and force yourself to take hard classes. The coolest tech opportunities lie in having DEEP understanding of topics. There are amazing engineers out there who never finished college and they're great people, but they all really regret not having finished their undergraduate. Every single one of them, if they could got back in time, would force themselves to finish undergraduate degrees
4) dropping out is ok come graduate school though :)
1. Focus on your classes now. You're a student, and until that changes, you need to do your best to stay the best student you can be.
2. Don't see YC as an endgame. College will open up more chances to go do stuff than ever before.
3. You shouldn't use your age as an excuse not to build stuff now. Go learn a language or start hacking on a project. Now. Just because you can't sign up for something like AWS (which is just a waste of money compared to other providers) doesn't mean you can't get stuff done on your own box.
Is interesting seeing the difference between all the comments about how useless college is in one thread and here so many recommending college. That said I loved college and couldn't imagine my life if I haven't taken it. Paid for itself within a couple years too.