October 18, 2009
Smart people = fail?
Great observation by Calvin Trillin on what went wrong with Wall Street -- basically, it used to be Ivy League, good family C-earners that filled banks (smart people became judges or professors), but as the money got nuts and the cost of college got nuttier, the smartest kids started going for Wall St instead of PhDs. Where they invented dangerously complex things that the top guys (a generation of C-earners) didn't understand. Disaster ensued.
I wonder if startup land is filled with the "best and the brightest". I don't think it is actually -- folks I know of that ilk have always seemed to favor safer things. Even in 1998, when I graduated from Columbia, most of the really smart kids were trying to go to Wall St jobs at Goldman Sachs, not to startup like Netscape or Google.
So maybe that's good for the startup economy.
Posted by amol at October 18, 2009 9:46 PM
