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Just to calibrate, tech unicorn founders are much rarer than pro athletes. https://t.co/Fauk5QXhYA Fundamentals over founderitis. A few decades ago, the concept of becoming a tech founder wasn’t even understood as something you could do. In the 80s and the early 90s, you saw businessmen on TV, but there was no well-understood playbook for starting a company. Kids were encouraged to graduate and get a salary-paying job. This started to change by the mid/late 2000s. And since then, the Internet has done a good job of encouraging entrepreneurship. Perhaps too good. Perhaps we’ve overcorrected. Perhaps we have to start discouraging it, or at least start injecting a note of realism. Because I see far too many people these days who are simply unrealistic in their personal ambitions. I mean, if you can do the technical equivalent of dunking from the free throw line, and if you also have exceptional pain tolerance, and if you’re truly driven to build something you can’t buy, sure, you can try founding. But otherwise you are likely better off getting a stable job. The related issue is that the last ten years of wokeness, COVID, and now AI have led to a pipeline problem in education…where basic fundamentals are lacking in young people that nevertheless have a stated ambition to do high tech. Essentially: too many are interested in “tech” (by which they mean money) but they aren’t interested in tech (by which I mean math). They do a cargo cult thing where they copy the superficial characteristics of famous entrepreneurs (like meditation retreats, or wearing hoodies, or what have you) without copying the substantive characteristics (like years of heads-down technical study). Anyway, I think we need to stress realism more, and fundamentals far more. Need to walk before you run, and run before you fly, and many will never fly, and that’s ok too.