When Grant Hill was asked why he stayed at Duke for all 4 years instead of jumping to the NBA after his freshman season, his answer was simple: College is fun.
The single best response I heard from you Dan is that you enjoy school and you enjoy bootstrapping Airtime. That's it. It's one of the things I love about you--you spend a good deal of time in reflecting on what you actually want. When you enjoy what you're doing, you should just keep doing it. When the north wind blows and you're ready for something different, you'll go after it then. The world will still be there, full of problems that need solving.
Doing startups in San Francisco is not some fleeting magical opportunity. It's hard, it's stressful, and 99.9% of time doesn't end like Instagram did. And you'll probably be doing it for the next decade of your life at least. So there's no rush. We'll all be here waiting when you're ready.
The basketball reference is a good one - even if you're the best player you've ever known coming out of HS, the odds of making it in the NBA are obscenely low.
Spending every weekend and vacation throughout childhood hacking really limits your perspective on the world. Sure, you might get the inspiration to write a GitHub that targets developers. Then you have things like Instagram, Facebook & Basecamp that require actual life experience to understand the need.
Get out and experience the world, take the liberal arts classes, make friends with 'normal people', get laid, work some shitty jobs The Man - whatever it takes to expand your mind. There's a lot of things that a middle-class, tech-obsessed geek just out of high school, no matter how bright, just doesn't get.
> Spending every weekend and vacation throughout childhood hacking really limits your perspective on the world.
No disagreement there, but what kind of perspective on the world do a project management app, a social network and a photo app require? Surely, there are better examples out there.
Well, to be fair, a project management app designer should really have significant project management experience, preferably in an enterprise setting, since that's where things go plaid most regularly and spectacularly.
The single best response I heard from you Dan is that you enjoy school and you enjoy bootstrapping Airtime. That's it. It's one of the things I love about you--you spend a good deal of time in reflecting on what you actually want. When you enjoy what you're doing, you should just keep doing it. When the north wind blows and you're ready for something different, you'll go after it then. The world will still be there, full of problems that need solving.
Doing startups in San Francisco is not some fleeting magical opportunity. It's hard, it's stressful, and 99.9% of time doesn't end like Instagram did. And you'll probably be doing it for the next decade of your life at least. So there's no rush. We'll all be here waiting when you're ready.