Very clever though.

You're right: these "genius entrepreneurs" were selling the time of their classmates. The 3-minute slot had no value if their classmates didn't tolerate the fact that their time became a commercial - one which they certainly didn't opt into.

On the one hand, it's probably true that the timeslot they sold was the most valuable thing they had, for the purposes of the demonstration - and on that basis, they get a "gold star" for making the identification.

On the other hand, their actions were questionable at best, and unethical at worst. Imagine, for example, if professors routinely sold part of their lecture time to any startup that wanted a few interns. It's a strategy that doesn't scale, because it erodes trust and reduces the chances that it will work in the future. Therefore, it's a bad strategy and a bad "moral of the story."

Recap: good exercise in identifying valuable things, bad exercise for determining sustainable growth.

I don't need to imagine. Most of the conferences I've been to work this way.

There are many ways to look at this. One is to note that, if I needed a job, I would probably pay cash money to attend a series of 3-minute commercials by companies that were looking to hire interns. Indeed, this is a lot of what Stanford students are paying tuition for. In the building next door to your college classroom is a job placement office that specializes in exactly this. So I'm kind of dubious about the assertion that this is some kind of terrible disservice to the students.

Another way to look at it: "sustainable growth" is highly overrated. It's not merely that it wasn't a criteria of the original problem -- which it wasn't -- but also that judging what is and isn't "sustainable" is an exercise in predicting the future. And, like all exercises in predicting the future, it tends to miss a lot of the good stuff. You find yourself saying things like "This business plan won't scale past the first 5000 customers!" or "If Netflix catches on, Blockbuster will get into the business and crush Netflix like a bug!" or "How could I ever make a million dollars doing something this trivial?" or "How can Twitter succeed after the open-source open-protocol Twitter Substitute comes along, as it surely will, any minute now?" [1]

But the most obvious conclusion is: Just because you can't do it twice doesn't mean it isn't worth doing once. If I were a student in that class, I would surely have been happy to sit through a three-minute presentation, though I'm not sure I would have heard much of it, because I would have been too busy rolling on the floor with laughter at the scope of the other students' awesome hack. But, yeah, it won't work a second time. Everybody knows the punch line now.

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[1] Hey, if people didn't believe stuff like this I wouldn't see it pop up on HN every three months, like clockwork.

Exactly. But you miss the fact that they already had the time of their classmates to sell. No matter what happened, the classmates would have to sit through 3 minutes from this group.