
The world's youngest self-made billionaire - kartikkumar
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-41859941
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selectodude
I can't help but appreciate that they're aware that they're not billionaires
anywhere but on paper.

~~~
wil421
Reminds me of a show I watched a while back about the dot com bubble. A guy
was worth 100s of millions on paper and couldn’t pay a dinner bill for the
company.

~~~
WalterBright
I remember that one. He was not allowed by SEC rules to sell any of his stock
for a while. By the time the waiting period expired, the stock price had
tanked.

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johnsimer
I (almost) met Patrick Collison at a conference a month ago where he gave a
talk. He seemed extremely smart and interesting and I had no idea he was rich
and famous. So after he gives his talk, I stand in line to get his phone
number to see if we could meet up sometime so that I could pick his brain.
While I was in line to talk to him, I mentioned to the guy next to me "Man
that guy sure is interesting", and he said "Yeah, most billionaires are pretty
smart".

I was floored that Patrick was a billionaire, and then got super nervous and
exited the line.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
What is that makes people so intimidated about addressing someeone rich or
famous? I see it all the time. Why put yourself beneath him, you’re a human
being and so is he, he goes to the toilet and takes a dump and so do you. He
will die and so will you. We’re all just people.

~~~
justboxing
> he goes to the toilet and takes a dump and so do you

I say the same exact thing to my friends who are mesmerized by rich and famous
people. Both money and fame are man-made and didn't exist in pre-historic
reptile era of the earth.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
Alpha males has been a part of animal (including human) psychology for
millions of years.

~~~
tomkarlo
The concept of "alpha" leaders, especially as derived from wolf pack behavior,
has been largely debunked. It was based on faulty research.

~~~
Shorel
There are still hierarchies. Both male and female hierarchies are present in
primates. It's not alpha and the rest, it's the whole alphabet and each level
dominates the next.

Whenever the hierarchies are unestable primates can behave very violently.
Hierarchies preserve status quo and reduce violence.

Also, the studies done with Bonobos were flawed as well, because they were
only studied in captivity. Bonobos when free are only a bit less aggressive
than chimpanzees, and they don't avoid all violence by using sex.

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Firebrand
>Stripe is not widely known because it doesn't sell anything that consumers
can buy. Instead its software systems enable companies around the world to
more easily accept online payments and run their websites.

What does Stripe do that makes it a better choice for companies than PayPal?

~~~
coldacid
Well, they don't steal their clients' money through abuse of their own terms
of service, so that's one thing. Mainly, though, it's because they have a
fairly simple API, compared to PayPal, which makes their service easier to
integrate into others.

~~~
jondubois
Yes the PayPal API and its documentation has always been terrible. It really
wasn't hard to beat.

That said, I think that Y Combinator was crucial for Stripe's success. So many
developers read HN and pracyically all of them needed a better alternative to
PayPal.

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tabeth
I really wonder what the purpose of these kinds of articles are. Millionaires
become billionaires? People who attend prestigious universities get rich?

~~~
gutnor
It pleases the HN crowd, after all a lot of people here are in the startup
business so that's sort of understandable.

What worries more is that this article, like the one about Musk, are really
too ego driven. Not a word on teams. That is more understandable here I guess,
but the Musk article took it to the next level - the lone genius furiously and
successfully solving the world biggest issues with nothing else than his own
brain and the moral support of his family.

The moral of those article: there is no place for sidekicks in this world, you
are at the top, or you are a loser. And that's where all those ultra-
secretive, "I will give you 1% of the company, all you have to do is implement
this idea in software", "that will make you a millionaire if we exit don't
complain", founders are born.

~~~
cjsawyer
The more I read about Musk the more parallels I see with Edison.

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gech
I don't follow whats special about what they did? They were able to land big
merchant account connections?

~~~
ryantbrown
If you’ve never used Stripe or had to implement a payment system it may be
hard to understand. Like others have said, Stripe made it simple to accept
credit cards online and since have expanded to offer several different
products that focus on helping internet companies (sass, ecommerce,
marketplace payments).

What they did right was their developer first approach. They eliminated all of
the bullshit you had to do to start accepting payments. They took something
that more and more companies needed to do, was unusually complex, and made it
easy. It certainly qualifies as “special” if you’ve ever had to do it.

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dtzuzu
Congrats. Very happy for him/them since Stripe is awesome!

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Sandorie
Okay congrats ..you are a billionaire on paper, now what?

What was the point of this article ?- To showcase an already predictable
scenario ?

Either way, congratulations nonetheless, I do admire and respect the work they
put in for Stripe.

~~~
saagarjha
By this logic, isn't Bill Gates a billionaire "on paper" as well? His wealth
is all stock and assets.

~~~
scarmig
It all depends on how liquid those assets are. "Paper" billionaire or
millionaire typically refers to situations where someone is a millionaire but
wouldn't be able to come up with a million dollars in funds in the short term
(in less than a week, say).

Paper ones might be able to take a haircut on their assets for additional
liquidity, but that haircut might be enough to make them not a millionaire.

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aphextron
tl;dr: Start selling picks and shovels.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Oh even better. They decided to lease them to you. Forever.

------
mrwong
That article is incorrect. The youngest self made billionaire is Vitalik
Buterin at an age of 23, the founder of Ethereum. Ethereum has a market cap of
currently 35B. Its rumoured that he has 5-10% of the coin supply.

~~~
jonny_eh
Could he get full value for all that ETH? Wouldn't a sell-off cause a crash in
value?

~~~
lojack
Absolutely... market depth wouldn’t come close to supporting selling that much
ETH without dropping the price. Markets would also react quickly on the news
that the balances in his wallets were changing significantly.

Saying he isn’t a billionaire because of that is sort of a double standard
though. Most billionaires don’t have billions in liquid cash, they almost all
have illiquid property, stocks, bonds, etc. Selling off some of these assets
would cause a very similar effect, and often they can’t easily be sold at all.

~~~
Veratyr
> Most billionaires don’t have billions in liquid cash, they almost all have
> illiquid property, stocks, bonds, etc.

Agreed on the first, the latter are pretty liquid, save for say 20% of
Stripe's market cap, for which a private buyer can likely be found.

> Selling off some of these assets would cause a very similar effect, and
> often they can’t easily be sold at all.

I'm sure you can find buyers for them though, I'm not sure who's going to buy
>$1B of ETH.

------
rconti
I had a laugh at this:

"Patrick successfully applied to study maths at the prestigious Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in Cambridge, near Boston in 2007. Two years later
John was accepted nearby, at the equally well respected Harvard University."

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Well, that might be true. They're respected in different ways and among
different circles of people, though...

~~~
rconti
Right. I think virtually everyone reading the BBC would know what Harvard is;
MIT less so (especially when written out more formally and not referenced by
acronym).

In the context of saying that MIT is highly respected for math(s), it was then
important to point out that Harvard is also highly respected in the subject
(and not, say, a globally-known liberal arts college that might be
surprisingly weak in math).

Still, it amused me.

~~~
celticninja
I think MIT is fairly well known in the UK, on a similar level to Harvard.

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bpicolo
Not that they aren't both impressive people, but Evan Spiegel has him beat by
a hair.

~~~
dharmon
Literally the 7th sentence points out that Spiegel is older than him.

~~~
bpicolo
Edit: Don't lack sleep and math, me

~~~
RmDen
June is before August, so Spiegel was born before John no?

~~~
bpicolo
Edit: Woops

~~~
matthewowen
so... spiegel's older then. and hence not the world's youngest self-made
billionaire.

