

Dear Professor - brennanjp
http://sw1tch.com/post/68881874611/dear-professor

======
tomatohs
Hey all, Ian Jennings from Hacker League here. Today is a very exciting day
for my co-founders Mike Swift and Abe Stanway and I. We don't think Hacker
League could have gone to a better company.

Some people were questioning if these emails were real ("who tells their
professor they're slacking?"). I have always chosen to communicate in an open
and honest way.

I'm particularly happy that I was able to dig up this email because it paints
a great picture of our early hustle. We would find hackathon events any way we
could and RSVP right away. Much to our surprise, not every hackathon has a
place to stay overnight, so we often ended up crashing on our friend's
couches. In one specific case I remember pushing 8 chairs together to form a
bed.

At the first hackathon we released Hacker League at, our friend challenged us
to sign up 10 events.

When I presented the company to this class I remember ending the presentation
with "This is a real company, and we've run 13 events to date." The professor
shouted that that was "a success" and that I should be very proud. Since then
we've powered hundreds of events.

At the time it wasn't clear if we were developing an app for hackers, people
who were interested in hackathons, organizers, or just anybody in tech. We
weren't really sure what we were building, just that we wanted it for
ourselves.

I think a key part of our success was determining a market and sticking with
it (thanks professor). At some point we declared Hacker League as "a platform
for hackathons" and although the site was used by everybody in attendance, the
focus was on organizers. If the organizers used it, so would the attendees.

A huge benefit of the hackathon format that for every hackathon we attended,
there were a few people in the audience who were either organizers or thinking
about organizing an event. This helped the site go viral within the hackathon
community.

You also might remember me from Mote.io, an app I launched a few months ago on
HN. [http://mote.io](http://mote.io)

------
michaelochurch
I hate this kind of shit. The plural of anecdote is not "data".

The vast majority of people who drop out of college (or let their grades slip)
to launch startups end up in failure, financial hardship, and misery. You
should not plan your life based on 5-sigma outliers.

The Internet is full of pro-startup propaganda and terrible advice. Move fast
and ruin your life. It's bullshit.

No one is saying, "build your career, work hard and learn a lot, become really
good at things, and get rich slowly." (In part, that's because venture
capitalists _hate_ the idea of a 15-50% per year growth company.) Instead,
it's the "you could be a winner!" Tappy Tibbons nonsense.

Normally, this would just be a new generation of the same damn fraud that has
always existed. However, given the perverted culture of age discrimination
(chickenhawking) in the contemporary Valley it has become apparent that a
whole culture has fallen for this "get rich quick, or you're a loser" nonsense
and the massive wad of impractical, life-wrecking advice that comes with it.

~~~
protomyth
I think your missing the point of this nice little story. A student is asking
for (an presumedly got) some slack because of conflicts with the student's
outside business activity. The student then writes a note 2 years later
validating the professor's decision.

Its not data or a trend, its just a thank you.

~~~
tomatohs
I'm the author of this post.

I agree that there is thin line dividing the positive or negative sentiment
towards schooling here.

In some ways school was incredibly valuable, I met my co-founders at Rutgers
and this class specifically helped develop the company.

At the same time the classwork was getting in the way and I needed to push it
aside to help get the company off the ground.

------
plg
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_error](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_error)

~~~
bjoernw
No one is trying to determine statistical significance here! Why the
negativity?

------
brianwawok
Prof - "C-, would not work in the real work"

~~~
lkrubner
Wikipedia:

"his professor told him that, in order for him to get a C, the idea had to be
feasible"

~~~
tjohns
I had to do some searching to get the context here, so for anyone else
similarly confused:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_W._Smith](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_W._Smith)

This (apocryphal) quote is attributed to Frederick Smith, who described an
overnight shipping company as part of a paper for an economics class at Yale.
He later ended up founding FedEx.

