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Comment by tatsuke95 | Hacker News Reader

>"You're only a sophomore in college, but you've already started several companies."

Pray tell, how are those companies doing? What are their financials? How many people are in their employ?

Oh, right, I forgot. A "business" in the Valley involves none of the things that it does anywhere else in the world.

I don't know why you feel the need to hate on his success because he doesn't have any employees. It's as if whatever he built counts for nothing. Whatever you did while you were a sophomore in college it probably wasn't anything close to what Dan has achieved. From his blog: "a little app I built in a few days to review websites that's grossed a few thousand dollars to date" and "I programmed and sold apps for BlackBerry and iPhone including the first BlackBerry anti-theft program called FindIt". So yeah, he's made money.

I know I was still finding my way in college at that point, cruising by in my classes without much to show for it.

I'm not knocking the guy's talents. I'm knocking what is considered "a few companies".

I have nothing ill to think of Mr. Shipman either, he's probably both a nice guy and a smart guy. But I do agree with you that there's a recent trend going on over the last year or so with people (especially younger people, and especially web programmers) who create a few different small websites and then present themselves as having started/built/run/sold businesses. Lots of CEOs of, well, simple Rails apps. "I'm the CEO of a WordPress blog!" There are things we can say which can be strictly true, but which waters down and muddles the meaning and importance of what the words originally meant. Which makes it hard to separate signal from noise. Which is bad.

I'm tempted to issue a challenge to Silicon Valley: I start a cooperative kosher bakery with some friends and a bank loan, and you all start web 2.0 ninja-rockstar-mobile-social app companies with VC funding. We'll see who's actually making any money a few years down the road.

I really think the handful of incredible home-runs we've seen in tech obscure the fact that tech businesses are generally pretty hard to get off the ground. I have a feeling that most of the people that have the skill and drive to build a profitable tech company could do as well or better in a lot of other fields.

And here's the other fun bit: you can add scaling and a web store to a brick-and-mortar business, but you can't add a brick-and-mortar business to lines of code.

To me, the difference lies in starting a "company" vs starting a "business." For the former, you need do little more than fill out some paperwork.

Actually, from talking to Dan and his co-founder Patrick, Airtime for Email is doing quite well, and I believe they've hired interns for the summer.

I agree with the sentiment, but in this case it's misplaced.

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