The Morris worm is on that list; Robert Morris is a partner at Y Combinator. That incident is the source of the pg quote that would not stop kicking around in m

The Morris worm is on that list; Robert Morris is a partner at Y Combinator. That incident is the source of the pg quote that would not stop kicking around in my mind through the latter half of grad school: "The danger with grad school is that you don't see the scary part upfront. PhD programs start out as college part 2, with several years of classes. So by the time you face the horror of writing a dissertation, you're already several years in. If you quit now, you'll be a grad-school dropout, and you probably won't like that idea. When Robert got kicked out of grad school for writing the Internet worm of 1988, I envied him enormously for finding a way out without the stigma of failure." From http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html Morris is now also a tenured MIT professor, so things ended up okay for him.