Academic Professor v.s. Millionaire Businessmen
- Thread starter Wicked Ice
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A better questions would be do you think the 99.9999% of dropouts that didn't become billionaires would have made more if they stayed in?
The professor in that video is actually a co-founder of Lavalife, so he did make his millions. I still don't know wtf he went into a rant though.
Why do you need a degree when you have the internet? Everything you can learn on a degree you can learn in your own time online if you have drive. Most people take a degree as a step to a job, and never use what they learned in their degree in their job anyway.
The exception is stuff like chemistry/physics/medicine, where you need a lab and equipment, patients etc. For the average person doing a comp sci. degree, or business, english, history, etc.. You can learn that stuff either online or from books.
Heck, you can get a good theoretical grounding in chemistry/physics and so forth that way too.
That's not a good question. Most people dropout for the wrong reason. They typically dropout because they are lazy. Ambitious people who drop out for other reasons will be more successful. Having a degree won't make a difference in whether an ambitious person is successful or not. Ambitious, intelligent people find a way to make things work, and execute. Whether they know about Shakespeare, the political landscape in malaysia, fourier transforms or not.
Dropout statistics are vastly skewered, as are how earning potentials vary for drop-outs vs college grads, simply because intelligent people are taught that you go to university and you get a good job repeatedly throughout school, and they get the grades to do so. Therefore most dropouts are failures rather than people dropping out to pursue opportunities.
Academic education does not correlate with real world education. You should be able to take a degree in something which teaches you:
- Entrepreneurship / Lean Start-up Model
- Fund Raising Skills
- Presentation Skills
- Persuasion
- Sales Techniques
- Copywriting Techniques
- Introduction to financial accounting
- Interview techniques
Practical skills which will help you to be successful in the real world of business. Unfortunately no university teaches that stuff, you graduate, put your knowledge to the side and then get your real world education in the graduate job you get. (Again, with the exception of doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc)
2 years ago I did an internship at a start-up to get a feel for how a successful start-up is run from inside. I was mainly doing development work & SEO. They'd hired and fired 2 CS grads from good universities before I joined, and said that the work I did in the internship when I'd just come out of school was much better than the graduates they had employed previously - because I got shit done. Having a degree doesn't mean you'll be good in a work environment.
You don't get what value they bring to the table. It's not about the $200k or the 50%. It's about having 4-5 extremely experienced and respected people on your board of directors who obviously want the business to grow beyond $400k in value.
50% for $200k is a great deal and they were idiots to bail out like that. They would have had a much easier time building a great business and would have made a lot more than the 'low 7 figures' when they sold. I mean what's low 7 figures divided by all the founders? $150k? $200k? Well done!
This is great in theory, but I know several different people who have taken investment from Dragons. They get very little support and help as a rule.
The Dragons are all far too busy being TV celebrities to be good non-execs. Their attention is very diluted, because the investments they make are so small compared to their total wealth and other commitments.
Look at Kevin O'Leary for example - no doubt he's an extremely capable investor and businessman. But think about how many TV appearances and interviews he does. He only has the same 24 hours in a day that you and I do.
It's like me giving some guy I meet down the pub £200 to start a business. Sure, I'll be interested to hear how he does, and I might meet him for a drink twice a year, but I'm not going to invest my time beyond that.
The only real benefit of being on Dragon's Den is the TV exposure, and that IS worth a lot of money. One person I know who got investment from being on UK Dragon's Den told me that she made more money from the rush of traffic to her website than she did from the investment the Dragon gave her. But you don't need to give your equity away to get exposure.
If you want angel investment, you'd be much better off going to a real angel network, and finding some guy who is working with <5-10 other businesses, then you will get help and support (if they are a decent angel).
Yes, but you don't go to the Dragons or Sharks to get a millionaire / billionaire to hold your hands while running your business. If you want to sell your product at Walmart or Toys R Us (or scale in any way), I'm pretty sure that Kevin O'Leary doesn't pick up the phone to ring his friend who owns the shit to get the products to the stores. He has people for that and him being a billionaire, I'm pretty sure that his guys know their shit. I think they would've made more money in the long run with having a bunch of millionaires / billionaires as investors.
Going to an institution only guarantees that you learn the skills to balance beer and classes. It has nothing to do with "education".
This.
It was quite funny listening to the reaction of a friend (who's now at University) when I said I might start dropping into University classes that I found interesting. "Why? Pretty much the only reason to go to Uni is for the degree, why bother?"
I guess that really depends on what Uni you go to (and for what reasons)? I rarely (if ever) felt that way while at Uni.
Just saying. Not everyone's a dumbass like your friend. lulz
If you're talking about girls, partying, developing your social skills etc. then I agree, but at the end of the when it comes to business I agree with joe's friend. If you want to do something you don't need school. You should just go out and make it happen.
Intelligence isn't something school can give you.
Learning doesn't happen only in the classroom although colleges and the people who issue student loans want you to believe that.
A lot of successful business people are dropouts or never went to college.
And yet, people have really only been getting degrees in any significant number for about 40 years.
Opportunity costs.
As I said, it depends.
Uni is simply a tool to help you achieve your goals. Most people don't have any.
(and of course you can do great things in life without going to Uni, everyone's got different goals/needs/reasons/motivation)
If you can apply your knowledge into doing some shit that people will buy, you could be ' successful'.
If you're driven by the hunger and love for what you do, you might just become a millionaire.
From there on, your journey to becoming a billionaire will depend on how good you're in scaling things up. It will need people skills/ finance skills/ and most of all, strategic skills-- all of which requires some sort of education.
If you're only bothered about 'earning' degrees you should be ready for helping someone else become richer, someone that is able and deserving to be 'more successful' than you are.
If you're driven by the hunger and love for what you do, you might just become a millionaire.
From there on, your journey to becoming a billionaire will depend on how good you're in scaling things up. It will need people skills/ finance skills/ and most of all, strategic skills-- all of which requires some sort of education.
If you're only bothered about 'earning' degrees you should be ready for helping someone else become richer, someone that is able and deserving to be 'more successful' than you are.