prgibbons

yes, with money that was formerly reserved for a downpayment on a house. Just did a pitch practice at the Vegas Jelly and got great feedback from the VegasTech community too. We are excited!

same boat - 3 liberal art degrees...from an engineering school.... sigh...

1 year into my project I have a back end developer, designer, graphic artist, illustrator and startup lawyer... Still a long way to go but I'm amazed how far the idea has come.

My comment on a Techcrunch article awhile back sparks a new article and debate. Is technology really a zero sum game?

I still say no...but it seems we're mostly arguing semantics.

112F feels great.... in the pool.

That said, NY is really hot in the summer and really cold in the winter. I've been to SF and the weather seems too cold and gloomy (50 and overcast in August!!!!)

I would consider having design skills as a technical skill. Try doing a tech startup with a liberal arts degree (or three) ;)

Good article!

Try Vegas. You can get a luxury 1 bedroom high rise condo on the strip for $1,500/month. Off strip a great 1 bedroom is $800-900 and it comes with an attached garage. The entire Vegas valley is only about 20 miles in diameter so you are never far from anywhere. Commute times are short and off strip, traffic is not bad at all.

$65,000 in Vegas buys you the same quality of life as $100,000 in SF.

The near future. Korean students already get celebrity teachers (teachers who teach hundreds of thousands of students through video and software). This is new to the U.S only because competitive pressure between students isn't that great (we are pretty complacent even though ed quality in K-12 isn't great).

We can try to identify more of these celebrity teachers and put them in front of millions of students but in the long run we will probably have something a-la Matrix http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AOpomu9V6Q&feature=relat...

The size of the market and obstacles in the way. For example, K-College education in the U.S. is about a $1 trillion a year economy. Government and self-interested trade organizations stands in the way of disruption (they don't want to be disrupted they want to keep their jobs at the expense of everyone else).

1 strategy might be to buy an established university and get rid of the wasteful excess.

Another strategy would be to attract the brightest away via some sort of YC/Theil education combo (we provide an education for a cut in your future income and we put you in touch with the brightest minds). You'd then have to overcome all the problems with licensing associated with the alliance between higher ed and local/state government (you can't train engineers, doctors, lawyers without approval from certification schemes, ...software engineers don't require certification yet). You would do this by demonstrating your students are smarter and more capable than the certified students.

Once you've taken down the licensing and certification scheme you open the road to disrupt higher education for everyone else.

If you want to disrupt higher ed first you have to realize how bloated it is and how it tries to do everything but educate students.

more on bloat: http://goldwaterinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Administra...

I've written some more about how oversold education is here:

http://www.thewesternwrangler.com/search/label/administrativ...

http://www.thewesternwrangler.com/2011/03/higher-education-r...