I wonder who got the Amazon job, and what he's worth today. It says meaningful equity, so let's say they gave him 1.5% equity. With dilution and stock splits, let's say that equity got divided 20 times. So that guy now owns .075% of Amazon. At $170 billion market cap, his stake would be worth $127 million
You hit the nail on the head. Survivorship bias is a bitch! There are millions of such postings from remarkably talented people starting out interesting projects all over the world. Only a few will get the recognition they deserve and in hindsight it will look like the successful ones were somehow special or different from the rest.
Jeff Bezos had a fairly long career on Wall Street before founding Amazon. I believe he was ~30 when he first flew to Seattle to start it in his garage
Jeff Bezos' job post looking for talented engineers to "pioneer commerce on the Internet"... A startup description that certainly delivered on that promise.
Google used to have a great list of these. I can't seem to find the link anymore. Not only did it include ones like the Tim Berners Lee post, but also the first posts they could find mentioning AIDS, Tiananmen Square and more.
Back when people typed two spaces after the end of a sentence. When the convention changed is not clear, but 'tis been a tough thing for me to un-learn.
Ah, I had wondered who said "Apparently the Internet, Google, Amazon, and other successful tech companies and products don’t come out of no where." before. How could I forget, of course it was Lao Tzu.
True, but I guess theres's value in "legacy" means of communication in the modern day - just take pager communication with Yo. Actually, Yo might not be the best example, but nonetheless.
I wouldn't want anyone to see some of the code I was paid to write when I was just starting out.
This article makes me sad, because it is easy to find posts by Chris Schefler, who along with Thomas Leavitt founded Web Communications, the world's first private web hosting service. Before WebCom, if you wanted to have a web page, you needed your own server with an Internet connection - or a good friend with those.
Chris and Thomas had lots of questions about the HTTP protocol, apache, Solaris and so on.
They eventually sold WebCom to their direct competitor, Verio. Chris got $4,500,000.00 out of it, and retired young. I only saw him once after that, out in the Santa Cruz Mountains, riding a mountain bike with a friend.
Chris was later brought by the police - in handcuffs - to a psychiatric hospital, but was turned away as "not sick enough to hospitalize". The very next day he shot himself in the head.
I myself have quite a severe mental illness - Bipolar Type Schizoaffective Disorder. It is somewhat like being manic depressive and schizophrenic at the same time.
There are all manner of social workers, case managers and the like who have urged me to go on the disability check, get into subsidized housing and so on. The specific reason I always refuse is that I am - for the most part - well enough to take care of myself.
There are plenty of people who are not. I don't want to take the resources away from them.
There is a case manager at my mental health clinic whose job it is to fetch prescription medicine from the pharmacy then hand-deliver it to us clients. I asked her not to do that and said "I don't want you to do for me what I can do for myself". However she kept fetching my medicine for me; as a result I request a written prescription from my shrink, so I can fill it myself, with money I earn myself.
Dominic Giampaolo asked at at Be Developer's Conference, for a show of hands as to whether we would prefer a case-sensitive, or a case-preserving but -insensitive filesystem.
We overwhelming voted for case-sensitive, so that's what he implemented.
He later claimed that BFS did not need a filesystem consistently check tool; with its journaling, he said it was simply not possible to screw up the filesystem.
I owned two BeOS computers back then - one a PowerPC mac, the other a Pentium II box that I built myself. I powered off one with the intention of removing its external SCSI drive, but cluelessly detached the drive from the box that was still powered on.
In a panic, I plugged the cable back on. Rather oddly, most of the filesystem was just fine, but other parts were totally brain-damaged.
I reported this on the bedevtalk list. Dominic personally apologize. A few months later, Be released a filesystem tool.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.infosystems.wais/...