I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently – and Lucas’s tragic passing is a powerful catalyst for reflection. I cannot imagine the pain his family is going through, and my heart goes out to them. Even as someone who never knew Lucas, I feel a sense of loss. The world has lost a person with the potential to do great things.
What happened to Lucas reveals something we don’t talk about enough: the dangerous mythology surrounding elite institutions. Getting into a top school isn’t a validation of your worth – it is merely evidence that you understand the game. You, likely with the help of parents and counselors, learned to navigate college admissions with a magic thing called “extracurricular activities”. You somehow convince some strangers in a small room completely isolated from the main campus, who have zero interactions with the actual student body, within 15 minutes that you are the perfect fit to their esteemed institutions; and you, along with thousands of other lucky applicants who receive an offer letter, will make the statistics of their incoming class look spectacular on paper.
We live because we want to do great things. What matters isn’t where you go, but what you do with the opportunity.
On the flip side, let’s say you are a driven builder who built an AI startup with $1M ARR in your junior year of high school. Impressive, but they just admitted someone with $1.1M yesterday. Sorry, no spot for you. But don’t worry, you’ll be “waitlisted.” And for some unknown magical reason that the admission officers still could not figure out, if that kid chooses Stanford over CMU, you will be admitted to the “#1 Computer Science School in the World” according to rankings put together by a bunch of other folks who got their degree in journalism and work at a media company called “US News” or “Forbes”.
College doesn’t define who you are. The name is at most a conversation starter at the driest dinner party filled with older people who nod approvingly at your school’s prestige and assure you of a bright future.
We live because we want to do great things. What matters isn’t where you go, but what you do with the opportunity. College gives you the chance to meet people and encounter new ideas before the rest of the world. The guy in crocs sitting next to you in your theoretical computer science class might share his crazy startup ideas on a sleepy Wednesday afternoon – two years before Bay-Area-Big-Name-Investors and seven years before the IPO. A good school gives you more resources – but only if you have the dream to do something. The name on your diploma won’t build the next great company or solve climate change – your ambitions and work will.
Having the “right dream” is extremely difficult. We don’t start anything from scratch – if so, please go ahead and buy some aluminum and copper and iron to make a phone before you read this essay. Instead, we build on others’ work. We learn and understand their designs, recognize the fundamental flaws, and then improve upon them. Occasionally, we completely overwrite what they had initially, and then we have something groundbreaking.
If you are truly passionate about designing the next-gen dating app, consider this: make a 3D reconstructed interactive model of users and allow them to virtually interact before deciding to swipe left or right with a VR headset.
This is why engineers often dislike talking to business majors. I’ve been pitched random ideas by business majors countless times, and surprisingly or unsurprisingly, these ideas almost always relate to “social networking”. Dating apps and next-gen Facebook clones are the recurring themes. My theory is that networking dominates business students’ lives – it’s the center of their universe. So naturally, they dream of designing new social apps. But what makes their ideas unique? Usually, nothing.
This approach is exactly what you should avoid. A young college student sits alone in their dorm, thinking in darkness (both literally and metaphorically), without understanding the underlying mechanisms of the existing players, yet hoping to outcompete tech giants flush with talent. This approach is fundamentally flawed. If you are truly passionate about designing the next-gen dating app, consider this: make a 3D reconstructed interactive model of users and allow them to virtually interact before deciding to swipe left or right with a VR headset. How does that sound? Pretty cool, but technologically challenging. And that’s precisely why you need to learn.
Great ideas typically emerge from academia – the first computer, ENIAC, was designed and built by two people at Penn with a US Army grant. The first Internet message traveled from UCLA to Stanford, originating from the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network funded by the US Department of Defense. Self-driving began with a DARPA grant to CMU. The pattern is clear: Academia is the birthplace of world-changing technologies, which entrepreneurs later transform into business with the financial support from investors. If you want to do something meaningful, join a research lab that fascinates you. A good university will offer more resources for this than almost anywhere else.
This essay might read like advice for startup founders. But my core message is simpler: do what genuinely interests you. College provides resources to help you explore your passions better than most places in the world. If making money is what truly excites you – pursue it wholeheartedly. I have a close friend joining a prominent hedge fund who’s genuinely passionate about wealth: his eyes bulge and saliva forms at the corners of his mouth when discussing investing. He writes trading algorithms for sports betting; most recently, he discovered a design flaw in a particular sport that I shall not name here and made a good amount of money off that. Did he celebrate? He did not, and he put all that profit into the next bet. And anecdotally, we made a fortune arbitraging among different sites in the 2024 presidential election. You can tell immediately that wealth is his singular focus. I neither endorse nor condemn this – it’s his interest, and who am I to judge? If you want to become a great painter, spend more time painting. If you want to become a great hacker, spend more time hacking. Focus on your passion obsessively, and everything else will follow.
