cowmoo, The vast majority of startups fail. An important corollary: The vast majority of social networking startups will fail. Social networking has, predictab

cowmoo, The vast majority of startups fail. An important corollary: The vast majority of social networking startups will fail. Social networking has, predictably, massive network effects. There's only going to be room for maybe a dozen major winners. Everything else will be a niche or be eventually undercut by open source. For some reason most founders don't recognize that. I'm someone who can't handle corporate dronery. In a graduate school environment (at a top school in physics) I was, intellectually, quite happy -- some of the smartest people in the world go to grad school, and while they're shirking on their advisors they can be incredibly interesting and productive. So far, the only experience I have with startups is trying to, unsuccessfully, suggest to them what to do (it's difficult to convince people to modify their sacred ideas...) and trying to found two (one, something that was to be a working web annotation engine, I was working on this before Diigo was announced and got millions in funding, in retrospect I could have beaten them anyway because their entire approach is ill-conceived) and my project that I'm working on now (it's going to change the paradigm of Healthcare online and perhaps fix healthcare in the USA -- no joke. I merely need to avoid being jailed for hyperbole -- email me if interested, especially if interested in cofounding for the winter founders program.) But grad school in CS isn't really school. You're given a lot of free time, a license to basically study what you want, if you play it right. That's extremely valuable, but it isn't necessary, and it might be more productive to learn how to do that without going to grad school at all. Just avoid the corporate vampires, that's all. Dani (Dani <dot> Fong <at symbol> gmail)