A programmer who studied psychology at Harvard describes learning entrepreneurship through building experimental projects since age 10. They created a natural-language MP3 interface and a Harvard "Hot or Not" site, then quickly built a website that unexpectedly succeeded, crediting hands-on practice over formal management training.
Chapters
I actually studied psychology at Harvard, not computer science, although a little bit of computer science. I've been programming since I was, like, 10. And I think that it kind of, like, went, just kind of reached a point where it went into my intuition. I wasn't really thinking that much about it consciously. So that was pretty good. And then, I mean, when I started thinking about all the people issues, doing psychology and just being at a university and interacting with a lot of people, it just occurred to me that this would be something that was interesting. I knew how to do it, so I just did. It took me a couple of weeks or even less to throw together the site. I remember that by the time I was done throwing together the site, I had no idea how successful it would end up being. I was actually thinking that after day 8 or day 9, I had a different idea that I wanted to do, and I was going to scrap it. Do this. So I'm happy that I didn't do that. But— so I think that it's more of like how you spend your time doing stuff type of question— or type of answer than like something that I learned specifically from college. I always— like, I made a ton of random things when I was at Harvard, and most of them no one ever saw. Like, a lot of them just weren't meant for other people to and they were just things that I made for myself because I thought that they would be cool. I used to make stuff like a natural language interface to play my MP3s, you know? Or the thing I made before this was a Hot or Not program out of everyone's IDs at Harvard that almost got me kicked out. But, like— so I don't know. I mean, I just like to— I spend a lot of time making random stuff, you know? And I think that that definitely made it so that by the time it— came, like, by the time it came time to, like, make this random project, I was pretty well tuned towards making that, you know. In terms of managing this whole process, nothing, you know, nothing. Like, I have no idea what I'm doing, you know.