Comment by garry
6 years ago
I guess what I wanted to say was that if you are capable of building great software, you should join the .01%, because that was my experience.
I started as a reader of Hacker News just out of college, and it taught me a lot. Many of the founders we back came through Y Combinator and learned about startups here.
I have a hard time not reading this as a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps".
I grew up poor as the child of refugee immigrants. I was food insecure. My dad was an alcoholic. Being obsessed with computers was literally the thing that changed my life.
That's just my experience, YMMV.
> That's just my experience, YMMV.
The vast majority of people like that aren't (and don't) getting into Stanford, period, because impressive-to-admissions-committee folks are usually children of other impressive people (not always, usually). I don't think it's possible to interpret this as anything but "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps".
2 replies →