The PhD student dropping out of a top-10 school to try to do a startup after attending a month-long LW event I heard secondhand from a friend. I will edit my post to avoid spreading rumors, but I trust the source.
If it did happen, then I want to know that it happened. It’s just that this is the first time I even heard about a month-long LW event. (Which may be an information about my ignorance—EDIT: it was, indeed --, since till yesterday I didn’t even know SPARC takes two weeks, so I thought one week was a maximum for an LW event.)
I heard a lot of “quit the school, see how successful and rich Zuckerberg is” advice, but it was all from non-LW sources.
I can imagine people at some LW meetup giving this kind of advice, since there is nothing preventing people with opinions of this kind to visit LW meetups and give advice. It just seems unlikely, and it certainly is not the LW “crowd wisdom”.
That said, as his friend I think the situation is a lot less sinister than it’s been made out to sound here. He didn’t quit to go to the program, he quit a year or so afterwards to found a startup. He wasn’t all that excited about his PHD program and he was really excited about startups, so he quit and founded a startup with some friends.
If it did happen, then I want to know that it happened. It’s just that this is the first time I even heard about a month-long LW event. (Which may be an information about my ignorance—EDIT: it was, indeed --, since till yesterday I didn’t even know SPARC takes two weeks, so I thought one week was a maximum for an LW event.)
I heard a lot of “quit the school, see how successful and rich Zuckerberg is” advice, but it was all from non-LW sources.
I can imagine people at some LW meetup giving this kind of advice, since there is nothing preventing people with opinions of this kind to visit LW meetups and give advice. It just seems unlikely, and it certainly is not the LW “crowd wisdom”.
Here’s the program he went to, which did happen exactly once. It was a precursor to the much shorter CFAR workshops: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4wm/rationality_boot_camp/
That said, as his friend I think the situation is a lot less sinister than it’s been made out to sound here. He didn’t quit to go to the program, he quit a year or so afterwards to found a startup. He wasn’t all that excited about his PHD program and he was really excited about startups, so he quit and founded a startup with some friends.
Thanks!
Now I remember I heard about that in the past, but I forgot completely. It actually took ten weeks!