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Steve Jobs was 21 years old when he co-founded Apple Computers. Bill Gates was 19 years old when he co-founded Microsoft, as was Mark Zuckerberg when he founded

Steve Jobs was 21 years old when he co-founded Apple Computers. Bill Gates was 19 years old when he co-founded Microsoft, as was Mark Zuckerberg when he founded Facebook.

the_jeremy 4y ago
If you are offering billions of dollars, you have a chance at convincing the next Steve Jobs to interview at your company.
esrauch 4y ago
And Alex the Great conquered from Greece to India in his 20s. Doesn't mean random 20 year olds should expect to be able to now.
sneak 4y ago
I was older than 21 when I learned about survivorship bias.
mold_aid 4y ago
I love the point in the thread when someone piously intones the Names of the Founders
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  Just it irked me that the parent comment tried to paint all 21y olds as incapable idiots.
rvba 4y ago
Most people are not geniuses though. Of course one should benchmark against the best, but those you listed some real outliers here. For start all 3 were from top Universities? Gates and Zuck were at Harvard, Jobs was I think at Reed and partially at Stanford. How many people graduate from there? How many graduates of top universities go straight to FAANG for those fat salaries? How many go to work at their rich parents' companies? Steve Jobs founded his company (with the genius Wozniak) at young age. Why would the theoretical "next Jobs" want to work at OPs company? The "next Jobs" (whoever they are) probably had already funded their own company. Also founders are outliers, since most new companies fail, you dont hear about those who tried and lost. Bill Gates knew how to program well enough to get BASIC by the time he dropped out. There are people like this nowadays too. But they wont work as a junior in OPs company, when they can be hired as a mid or even a senior. They probably did few internships since year one university, so they can go to FAANG and earn a ton of money, or they just get hired by the place where they did the first internship.
kragen 4y ago
none of the three of them knew about database systems, relational algebra, sql, or concurrent programming; zuck might have known things about network programming but he wrote fecebutt in php, he wasn't writing a tcp/ip stack or even invoking socket(), bind(), and listen()
fuzzfactor 4y ago
All three would have been better companies today, and along the way, if the founders would have been more mature. They just wouldn't have gotten as early of a start. Edit: Not my downvote. Corrective upvote in fact.
- scarface74 4y ago
  If the purpose of a for profit company is to make a profit and keep shareholders happy. How much “better” could Microsoft and Apple be than 2 of the top 5 most valuable companies in the US?
  - oska 4y ago
    Your starting assumption is invalid.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      So what do you think the purpose of a for profit public company is?
      - oska 4y ago
        The goals the company was founded to meet. Profit is necessary to stay in business so it's important. But it can't be the only and exclusive goal. A company is just a structure to make things happen / collectively achieve things.
        scarface74 4y ago
        The goal of every company for profit company is fact to make its investors money. Do you really think that any investor cared about anything besides making money? Please don’t tell me that you believe in sone BS “mission statement” that companies spout? Did you also believe Google’s “Don’t be Evil” motto thru had for years?
        4y ago
adhesive_wombat 4y ago
Bill Gates was in the 0.01% in terms of access to computing resources at the time: a Teletype 33 and time on a GE mainframe via his private school. There are 19 year olds and 19 year olds when it comes to bring set up for Big Things.
- Verdex 4y ago
  I read about how Bill Gates made a significant contribution to the pancake sorting problem in 1979 (iirc). Apparently, his results were bleeding edge for something like 30 years until someone managed to get a result that was slightly better (~1%). A result that was accomplished with a lot of computer assistance. So, also exceptional in terms of wetware.
  - oska 4y ago
    I strongly doubt that Gates made any significant contributions to computer science. So I'd appreciate a source to what you've claimed here. Gates had a 'genius' for ruthlessly exploiting a monopoly in business; apart from that there is nothing else exceptional about the man apart from being a thoroughly unlikeable and harmful person, in my view.
    - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
      "In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou gave a lower bound of 1.06n flips and an upper bound of (5n+5)/3. The upper bound was improved, thirty years later, to 18n/11 by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough." --https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting The original paper seems to be https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79900682?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79... Rather interesting, I didn't know that about his history either.
      - oska 4y ago
        > The original paper seems to be https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79... Cheers. I've found the full paper is accessible through Sci-Hub [1]. I've had a very quick glance over it. The paper was submitted in January 1978 (when he'd already been at Microsoft for 2 years). But this NPR transcript [2] of a chat with Gates' Harvard professor Harry Lewis describes him as coming up with the solution a few days after the professor referenced the problem in class (in either 1974 or '75). Gates' co-author Christos Papadimitriou was an assistant professor at Harvard at the time. Papadimitriou went on to a glittering academic career and he recounts his recollection of the collaboration with Gates in a 2013 ACM profile [3]. So it appears that I do have to concede Gates this one contribution towards computer science. Although the paper contains a somewhat intriguing note right at the bottom : > Ervin Györi of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and György Turán of J. Atilla University have independently discovered a proof of Theorem 1 [the five-thirds solution]. Their algorithm and proof are essentially the same as ours. And their paper [4] was published in 1978, preceding publication of the Gates & Papadimitriou paper in 1979. [1] https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/0012-365X(79)90068-2 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/0012-365X(79)9006... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110919161456/http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92236781 https://web.archive.org/web/20110919161456/http://www.npr.or... [3] https://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2013/christos-papadimitriou https://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2013/christos-pap... [4] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=LbDqMpIAAAAJ&cstart=100&pagesize=100&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=LbDqMpIAAAAJ:i6LplTXqhpIC https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
goodpoint 4y ago
...and that has nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with being born in the right family.
chinchilla2020 4y ago
These are founders, owners, not software engineers. We are talking about software engineers, which is an entirely different career path.

Steve Jobs was 21 years old when he co-founded Apple Computers. Bill Gates was 19 years old when he co-founded Microsoft, as was Mark Zuckerberg when he founded Facebook.

the_jeremy 4y ago

If you are offering billions of dollars, you have a chance at convincing the next Steve Jobs to interview at your company.

esrauch 4y ago

And Alex the Great conquered from Greece to India in his 20s. Doesn't mean random 20 year olds should expect to be able to now.

sneak 4y ago

I was older than 21 when I learned about survivorship bias.

mold_aid 4y ago

I love the point in the thread when someone piously intones the Names of the Founders

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
Just it irked me that the parent comment tried to paint all 21y olds as incapable idiots.

rvba 4y ago

Most people are not geniuses though. Of course one should benchmark against the best, but those you listed some real outliers here. For start all 3 were from top Universities? Gates and Zuck were at Harvard, Jobs was I think at Reed and partially at Stanford. How many people graduate from there? How many graduates of top universities go straight to FAANG for those fat salaries? How many go to work at their rich parents' companies? Steve Jobs founded his company (with the genius Wozniak) at young age. Why would the theoretical "next Jobs" want to work at OPs company? The "next Jobs" (whoever they are) probably had already funded their own company. Also founders are outliers, since most new companies fail, you dont hear about those who tried and lost. Bill Gates knew how to program well enough to get BASIC by the time he dropped out. There are people like this nowadays too. But they wont work as a junior in OPs company, when they can be hired as a mid or even a senior. They probably did few internships since year one university, so they can go to FAANG and earn a ton of money, or they just get hired by the place where they did the first internship.

kragen 4y ago

none of the three of them knew about database systems, relational algebra, sql, or concurrent programming; zuck might have known things about network programming but he wrote fecebutt in php, he wasn't writing a tcp/ip stack or even invoking socket(), bind(), and listen()

fuzzfactor 4y ago

All three would have been better companies today, and along the way, if the founders would have been more mature. They just wouldn't have gotten as early of a start. Edit: Not my downvote. Corrective upvote in fact.

scarface74 4y ago
If the purpose of a for profit company is to make a profit and keep shareholders happy. How much “better” could Microsoft and Apple be than 2 of the top 5 most valuable companies in the US?
- oska 4y ago
  Your starting assumption is invalid.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So what do you think the purpose of a for profit public company is?
    - oska 4y ago
      The goals the company was founded to meet. Profit is necessary to stay in business so it's important. But it can't be the only and exclusive goal. A company is just a structure to make things happen / collectively achieve things.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        The goal of every company for profit company is fact to make its investors money. Do you really think that any investor cared about anything besides making money? Please don’t tell me that you believe in sone BS “mission statement” that companies spout? Did you also believe Google’s “Don’t be Evil” motto thru had for years?
        4y ago

adhesive_wombat 4y ago

Bill Gates was in the 0.01% in terms of access to computing resources at the time: a Teletype 33 and time on a GE mainframe via his private school. There are 19 year olds and 19 year olds when it comes to bring set up for Big Things.

Verdex 4y ago
I read about how Bill Gates made a significant contribution to the pancake sorting problem in 1979 (iirc). Apparently, his results were bleeding edge for something like 30 years until someone managed to get a result that was slightly better (~1%). A result that was accomplished with a lot of computer assistance. So, also exceptional in terms of wetware.
- oska 4y ago
  I strongly doubt that Gates made any significant contributions to computer science. So I'd appreciate a source to what you've claimed here. Gates had a 'genius' for ruthlessly exploiting a monopoly in business; apart from that there is nothing else exceptional about the man apart from being a thoroughly unlikeable and harmful person, in my view.
  - ThrowawayR2 4y ago
    "In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou gave a lower bound of 1.06n flips and an upper bound of (5n+5)/3. The upper bound was improved, thirty years later, to 18n/11 by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough." --https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting The original paper seems to be https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79900682?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79... Rather interesting, I didn't know that about his history either.
    - oska 4y ago
      > The original paper seems to be https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79... Cheers. I've found the full paper is accessible through Sci-Hub [1]. I've had a very quick glance over it. The paper was submitted in January 1978 (when he'd already been at Microsoft for 2 years). But this NPR transcript [2] of a chat with Gates' Harvard professor Harry Lewis describes him as coming up with the solution a few days after the professor referenced the problem in class (in either 1974 or '75). Gates' co-author Christos Papadimitriou was an assistant professor at Harvard at the time. Papadimitriou went on to a glittering academic career and he recounts his recollection of the collaboration with Gates in a 2013 ACM profile [3]. So it appears that I do have to concede Gates this one contribution towards computer science. Although the paper contains a somewhat intriguing note right at the bottom : > Ervin Györi of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and György Turán of J. Atilla University have independently discovered a proof of Theorem 1 [the five-thirds solution]. Their algorithm and proof are essentially the same as ours. And their paper [4] was published in 1978, preceding publication of the Gates & Papadimitriou paper in 1979. [1] https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/0012-365X(79)90068-2 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/0012-365X(79)9006... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110919161456/http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92236781 https://web.archive.org/web/20110919161456/http://www.npr.or... [3] https://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2013/christos-papadimitriou https://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2013/christos-pap... [4] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=LbDqMpIAAAAJ&cstart=100&pagesize=100&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=LbDqMpIAAAAJ:i6LplTXqhpIC https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

goodpoint 4y ago

...and that has nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with being born in the right family.

chinchilla2020 4y ago

These are founders, owners, not software engineers. We are talking about software engineers, which is an entirely different career path.