I take it you didn't read the article. The whole point is to provide more options than the single track path that has dominated the post high school mindset, not to say they have to go one way or another.
Plenty of great entrepreneurs start their company with little to no experience. Having done both, I think you can learn a lot more starting a company than you can at college.
I am not sure that "starting something" is a good idea when one of the two alternatives can be completed succesfully by applying yourself diligently (i.e. studying hard enough to pass with good grades) while the other can fail for any of a large number of reasons, mostly outside of your control.
I.e. if the author's son or daughter opts for starting a company, works hard and diligently, and after three years it goes bankrupt due to:
- A competitor cuts them out of the market
- New regulatory laws make the original idea unprofitable/untenable
- A technical breakthrough makes the product unappealing
The boy/girl may have worked as hard as if they were in college, or even way harder. And after three years their company is in debt, they have nothing worth selling/salvaging, and they are 3 years late to go to college.
Also, it is not clear if the parent intends to provide something more than just seeding money. From the article it looks like that. Is this really so?
Suppose that the "baby-entrepreneur" has a really dumb idea for a start-up, but they are "passionate" about this (how many 18-years old can be passionate about financially untenable ideas?). Will the author provide money even if he cannot see anything reasonable getting out of it?
And after it has failed, will he have enough money to pay an equivalent sum for going back to college?
I left an amazing job at a high tech company to start my own company. We had a successful exit five years later, but I've always said that if the company went belly up after 2 or 3 years it would have been WELL worth it. I don't associate being a successful entrepreneur or having success with a big exit. The point is to learn and try new things.
Of course I'd help my kid get the company off the ground in whatever capacity they'd like. I help a half dozen companies now in an advisory role and I'd do the same for them.
The technology is significantly more complicated than simple search and replace a bunch of variables. Trust me, if we did millions of stories by swapping out the same sentence every time it wouldn't work.
Also, the part of the value of what we do is describe "insights" not just spit back raw numbers (which again wouldn't be very valuable).
I didn't mean to demean the work, there is clearly a whole lot going on behind the scenes here. It was more of a rebuttal of the "more data is bad" idea. My point above was unclear, but this idea doesn't necessarily represent more data, just the same data presented in a more human-friendly manner.
I really like what the team has done, this could have a long-lasting impact on anything with heavy use of stats and figures. I honestly have a few enterprise applications that would benefit from a similar treatment. e.g. reports that aggregate certain operational stats and must be hand-written every week.
There are still many cases where there is too much data to digest. What Automated Insights does is take data and turn it into interesting and hopefully insightful bits of digestible content.
I'm conflicted about this. On the one hand I don't want to be hooked up to a ventilator or go through extreme suffering to prolong life. On the other hand, my grandmother (who recently passed away) went through late stage breast cancer in her mid-50s, lung cancer in her 60s, had a severe heart attack in her 70s and died in her 80s. It was so bad one time the doctors told us she would die in a matter of days. After she recuperated, she lived another 8 years. She was a tough bird.
How many times have we all heard: "The doctors gave him 6 months to live and that was 5 years ago". So if I knew I could go through 3-6 months of severe pain and get another 5-10 years of high quality life with my family, I'd probably do it. The problem is you may go through 3-6 months of severe pain and then die in month 7.
Right now being in my mid-30s and with a young daughter I enjoy, I'd take on the fight. If I was in my 80s, probably not.
How was your grandmother's quality of life in those last 8 years after the doctors said she had just a few days left?
As for "The doctors gave him 6 months to live and that was 5 years ago," keep in mind that you get a horribly biased sample. People don't generally go around saying "The doctors gave him 6 months to live and he died 6 months later," even if that may happen far more often.
