I think Thomas is saying that, if the process is repeatable, then the person who possesses a black box which ingests smart person on the left end and outputs a programmer can rent that box to industry and charge, well, billions of dollars for its use. (Fermi estimate; cost of college education to credential the number of engineers AppAmaGooBookSoft will hire this year was on the order of 10^5 * 10^4 = a billion dollars.)
