3 ms·
If stuff you already own includes a bank account with 2 million bucks in it, and you burn through it in order to excel in one class, that's a lesson in itself.
by senko 17y ago
If stuff you already own includes a bank account with 2 million bucks in it, and you burn through it in order to excel in one class, that's a lesson in itself. Or, more realistically, if a student had $100 in their pocket and used it as additional funding.
You can easily be in a similar situation in real life. You can get a mortgage on your house, or sell your car, or pawn family heirloom, etc. You can extend your runway (and hopefully increase the possibility or size of success), while ensuring deeper fall if you do fall.
So back to the class, if one group did spend invest their $100 along with the initial $5 seed funding, they'd have to earn more than the other groups to have a comparable return.
- mechanical_fish 17y agoI wish I could mod this up twice. This is, like, Confucius deep. If a student weren't allowed to sacrifice their entire life and all of their resources to excel at this one stupid class exercise, it wouldn't be a very good simulation of the entrepreneurial experience, would it? You know what would have made for a great class? If one of the students had invested $2 million out of pocket to create an additional $100k in two hours. They would have presented that to the class. Everyone would have to agree that, objectively speaking, in dollars and cents, they would have "won". The next question to ask them is: do you feel successful? Have you accomplished whatever it is that you wanted to accomplish, when you signed up for a class on entrepreneurship? And does that make you happy? Whatever their answer was, it would probably be educational. For me, a take-home lesson from Startup School was that a lot of extremely talented and successful entrepreneurs are still searching for their answer to this question. They've invented something great, or they've made N millions of dollars, or both, and yet the question persists.