Grad School Made Me Retarded

Jenny has been fretting because all her high school and college friends are married and/or have children, and she’s not even close. I told her that it’s because we were in grad school. Grad school made us retarded.

Don’t get me wrong; I got really good at circuit design and would make an excellent SPICE monkey for Intel or some such, but beyond that, I came out completely useless.

There’s only one reason anyone would go to grad school for Engineering. It’s not to become a researcher or academic – those people go into hard sciences. Engineering grad students are only there to avoid getting a real job. So not only was I confined to the same group of peers for 6 years, those people were the same wayward infant that I was.

Once you leave school, your teachers are the people you meet. Eventually, you learn everything there is to learn from them. It’s important to move often, change environments and find new teachers.

In an environment as insular as a PhD program, people become like goldfish in a bowl, swimming around in their own biological waste.

gold-fish-in-a-bowl_f0y5i_r

Change your bowl before you outgrow it.

An Idle Mind is the Devil’s Workshop

I decided to change the title of this site. It seemed appropriate in light of some recent events. Someday it’ll be funny. Not today.

The Startup Bubble Has Only Begun

I asked a couple of angel investors last week about the current state of the startup bubble. Sentiment was mixed:

Most of the companies getting VC funding generate a small amount of ad revenue, at best.

But many get acquired. As far as investors are concerned, these companies are highly profitable, even if they don’t generate revenue.

If these startups are highly profitable for their investors, is it really a bubble?

A bubble arises from unreasonable expectations of indefinite future growth. There has certainly been explosive growth in seed funding and acquisitions:

Seed Investing Activity

It used to be that angel investors wrote off their investments as charitable donations. But now, seeded companies are getting their Series A financing in months. The expectation is that Yahoo and Facebook will keep buying these pump-and-dump startups, just like AIG kept buying toxic credit instruments from Goldman Sachs back in 2007.

follow-on-financing

Who will get burned this time?

In 2001, it was the stay-at-home daytraders. But this time, nobody is going to feel sorry for accredited angel investors. So who are the unwashed masses who will ultimately get burned? Maybe it’s the kids who work long hours at crappy seed-stage startups for chump wages and 0.001% equity. Nothing’s cooler than a job at a hot Silicon Valley startup, right? So they work in indentured servitude, hoping to be forever remembered as Employee #X of the Next Google.

Bring in the sheep!

Crowdfunding for startup investments has only just begun. If the JOBS act goes into effect later this year as expected, even non-accredited investors will be able to put seed money into startups. And sites like Wefunder will be right there to help funnel cash from the masses. If this becomes a reality, then the real bubble can begin!

wefunder

See Also:

There’s A Lot Of Sickness In The Startup World Right Now –BusinessInsider

Obama To Name New SEC Chair, Crowdfunding May Finally Move Forward –TechCrunch

As Crowdfunding Takes Off, SEC Greenlights AngelList’s Investment Platform –TechCrunch

The First Social Network

My 10-year college reunion is at Caltech this weekend. I’m not there right now because I am an antisocial loser. But here’s a blast from the past:

screenshot_ecircles

The summer before my freshman year at Caltech, my future classmate Jon set up a “Class of 2003” group on eCircles. eCircles was the Facebook of 1999, a site where users could congregate and share photos and messages. Of course, it died in the dot-com crash, and now, 14 years later, Jon works for Facebook.

ECircles Closes, Latest Web Community Casualty –PCWorld 2001 (how much longer is this going to be a thing?)

The Progressive Doctor on Android

I published the Android version of The Progressive Doctor this evening. Somehow, I am most productive when I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing. Why is that?

The Progressive Doctor on Android

I really want to rewrite the search engine for this thing as well.