The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [132]
The Project is inspired by the work of successful serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, who argues in his books and teachings that a startup is an organization that should be designed specifically to learn. “A startup needs to learn about the problem, the solution, who the customers are, the market, and getting all these pieces to fit together. An early-stage startup is a set of assumptions, and you need to test those assumptions systematically,” Max told me. His project is designed to help guide startups in going through that learning curve.
Notably, he is walking his talk and learning at a rapid clip through the launch of his company. He has traded theoretical education in college courses, which cost him a fortune, for real-world education in his own startup, in which he’s instead earning money while he learns. He has simply bypassed the higher education bubble. “I believe the education system as a whole is broken beyond repair, and starting anew via creative destruction is our only hope for system-wide improvement,” Max wrote in a blog post announcing his decision to leave Stanford.9
This reminded me of a sentiment that Marc Ecko shared with me: “I hate the word ‘reform.’ You don’t ‘reform’ the iPod into the iPhone! You change it! You reimagine it! It’s not reform, it’s reimagination.”
(For those who say Max is losing out on gaining “wisdom,” “critical thinking skills,” “perspective on life,” and all the other humanistic value one can undeniably gain from a college education: I can’t imagine an educational environment where one can gain more critical thinking skills, perspective, and life wisdom than in an early-stage startup, whether the startup ultimately succeeds or fails. And Max is gaining these now, however this first startup of his turns out. I have many more answers to objections such as these in my companion PDF report The Dropout Revolution: Why Today’s Savviest Kids Are Forsaking Debt and Educating Themselves, available for free via the note at the beginning of this book.)
I was interviewing Max in the eleventh-floor dining room of the Celebrity Century cruise liner, somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean, in April 2011. The entire boat—normally occupied by retirees and honeymooners—was taken over by a thousand young entrepreneurs, mostly in their twenties, networking, partying, and plotting in various ways to make a massive impact on the world.
It was my first time attending Summit Series, dubbed the “Davos of Generation Y.” I had met the founders when I had interviewed them six months earlier for the chapter Success Skill #2; they had upped their game this year and had put the whole conference, previously held in convention centers, on a gargantuan boat. Young people buzzed around, chatting over the music, dancing, trading contact information. As I spoke with Max, overlooking the sea, a friend of Max’s spotted him and walked up to us. Max introduced us: “Hey Michael, this is Trevor. He’s also an entrepreneur who’s leaving school.”
“Leaving school?” Trevor cut in as if to correct an insulting slight. “I’ve already left school!” Trevor Owens had left NYU during his senior year to help build The Lean Startup Machine (http://theleanstartupmachine.com), a series of intensive boot camps designed to promote entrepreneurialism and train entrepreneurs in the business principles of “lean thinking.”
I had never been on a cruise before. The series was originally the brainchild of Elliott Bisnow, who had left Wisconsin to pursue his dreams. Three years later he was hosting some of the world’s most powerful people at his own cruise liner weekend event/party. Sir Richard Branson—who did not complete high