How much overlap is there between the types of companies in this article and the typical "we can't find anyone qualified to hire!" company? I suspect it's not total, but there's probably some overlap.
I can't wait until these 22 year olds of today hit their 40s and they reap what they've sown.
Zuckerburg said "younger people are just smarter"? Certainly there's a degree of hubris in youth that you don't lose without experiences of failure and compromise. But that's usually not "smarts" - just youth. I've had similar encounters with people where I've been able to guess parts of their business (and failures), and it's because I've already had my own.
One example - pardon the long rant...
I did a bit of prototyping with some college students about 15 months ago. Core idea was "coursera/udacity for medical students" - something like that. Being medical students, they saw a lack of useful material focusing on them, and wanted to fill that niche. "You'll have trouble getting content, and will likely run in to IP issues with professors and universities". I said this within the first 10 minutes of meeting them. "Oh no, we've already got people lined up, ready to create content," was the reply.
That intrigued me, because content is the hardest part. We met again, and again, and I did a small (small - like weekend prototype) set of code to let people upload instruction content based on the structure we'd laid out. Then.... nothing. Days to weeks to months... Nothing. What happened? They mistook "hey, great idea! yeah, I'll do it" sort of nice/polite feedback as real commitment. The few instructors who actually were interested in going further discovered they had to clear their involvement with their respective universities, as it seemed to constitute teaching and would conflict with their existing contracts (IIRC it could have been worked out with money/licensing, but there was no revenue at this point).
So... months later after a lot of legwork on their end, they came to the conclusion that I'd come to after 10 minutes. That's not to say "Ha, I was right, dumb idea" - the idea will happen, imo. They just sort of ignored me - I was an 'outsider' - they 'knew the space', etc. I'm the old guy who's not at university - how could I possibly know what student life is like now, in 2012? They could have saved themselves a lot of time by focusing on the issues I'd identified up front (which... was not just tooting my horn here - an older colleague identified the same issues on the same initial evening meeting).
But hey, "younger people are just smarter," right? Nothing is so cut and dried. Smarter people are smarter, energetic people are energetic, etc. There are 50 year olds that run rings around many 25 year olds that I know, both physically and activity-wise.
I wonder how much of the "younger people are just smarter" Zuckemberg quote is he actually thinking that and how much is "People here in Springfield really know how to rock!"
I don't think this anecdote really illustrates your point. One day, some naive kid will actually be stupid enough to solve this problem. For that matter, I would guess a large number of highly successful startups solve exactly these sorts of problems. pg calls these schlep problems- http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html. I agree, this is not a cut and dry space.
But see... in my view, the work involved is not contacting people saying "would you write content for this?". I can't say I was entirely naive, but I trusted them too much early on that they understood my concerns - they didn't.
In this case, if you want 50 well-respected professors, you have to go out of your way to identify 100, then identify potential concerns (licensing issues with existing publishers and universities) and solve that problem. Building a website for people to upload slideshows and movies is a solved problem (hundreds of times over). Building a process to extract out valuable content from people who would otherwise not create digital content, then monetize that, that is not at all a solved problem, at least in many verticals.
Yes, someday, someone's going to crack this. I really don't think it'll be "some naive kid". The way you're saying it makes it sound like it's the "naiveté" which is the magic potion in all this (gosh he just didn't know what he didn't know and just 'made it happen'). That's a nice narrative, and does happen now and then - people win the lottery now and then too. But by and large it doesn't happen that way.
Certainly this space will get solved - probably in the next few years - but it'll be a licensing deal between the larger publishers and universities and someone who builds a platform for them to generate revenue from these captive audiences.
Of course, I might be 100% wrong, but judging by the number of students I talk to with "why isn't there a ..." ideas, I don't think so. most of the time the reason there isn't a good FOO when you're in the education world (as a student or teacher) it's because there's policies and purchasing procedures which prohibit it, not because someone hasn't thought of the idea yet.
Sure, that's true. But he'll actually DO THE WORK rather than simply HOPING others will do it for him. AirBnB founders went around doing non-scalable things. The founders of the aforementioned company did not. So in a way the ancient, decrepit person was right. Maybe not exactly, but sorta.
It has happened before. A 60s trope was "Don't trust anyone over 30" [1]. The Who sang "Hope I die before I get old" in 1965 (Pete Townsend is now 70, Roger Daltry 68).
I can't wait until these 22 year olds of today hit their 40s and they reap what they've sown.
Zuckerburg said "younger people are just smarter"? Certainly there's a degree of hubris in youth that you don't lose without experiences of failure and compromise. But that's usually not "smarts" - just youth. I've had similar encounters with people where I've been able to guess parts of their business (and failures), and it's because I've already had my own.
One example - pardon the long rant...
I did a bit of prototyping with some college students about 15 months ago. Core idea was "coursera/udacity for medical students" - something like that. Being medical students, they saw a lack of useful material focusing on them, and wanted to fill that niche. "You'll have trouble getting content, and will likely run in to IP issues with professors and universities". I said this within the first 10 minutes of meeting them. "Oh no, we've already got people lined up, ready to create content," was the reply.
That intrigued me, because content is the hardest part. We met again, and again, and I did a small (small - like weekend prototype) set of code to let people upload instruction content based on the structure we'd laid out. Then.... nothing. Days to weeks to months... Nothing. What happened? They mistook "hey, great idea! yeah, I'll do it" sort of nice/polite feedback as real commitment. The few instructors who actually were interested in going further discovered they had to clear their involvement with their respective universities, as it seemed to constitute teaching and would conflict with their existing contracts (IIRC it could have been worked out with money/licensing, but there was no revenue at this point).
So... months later after a lot of legwork on their end, they came to the conclusion that I'd come to after 10 minutes. That's not to say "Ha, I was right, dumb idea" - the idea will happen, imo. They just sort of ignored me - I was an 'outsider' - they 'knew the space', etc. I'm the old guy who's not at university - how could I possibly know what student life is like now, in 2012? They could have saved themselves a lot of time by focusing on the issues I'd identified up front (which... was not just tooting my horn here - an older colleague identified the same issues on the same initial evening meeting).
But hey, "younger people are just smarter," right? Nothing is so cut and dried. Smarter people are smarter, energetic people are energetic, etc. There are 50 year olds that run rings around many 25 year olds that I know, both physically and activity-wise.