The Stanford Class That Built Apps and Made Fortunes 125
The NY Times has a story about a group of students who took a 2007 course in app development at Stanford that turned out far better than any of them expected. Quoting:
"... by teaching students to build no-frills apps, distribute them quickly and worry about perfecting them later, the Facebook Class stumbled upon what has become standard operating procedure for a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. ... Early on, the Facebook Class became a microcosm of Silicon Valley. Working in teams of three, the 75 students created apps that collectively had 16 million users in just 10 weeks. Many of those apps were sort of silly: Mr. De Lombaert’s, for example, allowed users to send “hotness” points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue."
Re:The best minds (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, the telling quotes from the original article are:
Hammerbacher quit Facebook in 2008, took some time off, and then co-founded Cloudera, a data-analysis software startup.
Unlike one of his more prominent Harvard acquaintances—Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg—Hammerbacher graduated. He took a job at Bear Stearns.
On Wall Street, the math geeks are known as quants. They're the ones who create sophisticated trading algorithms that can ingest vast amounts of market data and then form buy and sell decisions in milliseconds.
So basically, he says that the "brightest minds of a generation" are being squandered targetting ads at users, and that's why he left Facebook. But before he went to Facebook he was a quant, that most hated of evil on /., making money from having a picosecond headstart on the competition. And after he left Facebook, he started Cloudera. Hardly curing all the world's ills is he?