Bamafan's comments

It was this deep understanding that made Occulus valuable and it was seemingly funded on Zenimax's time and dime.

That all depends on if the demo was the deciding factor in the multi-billion dollar buyout.

Check out 4:06 from this scene from "The Aviator": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z1pPyarKhA

Lady: "We don't care about money here, Mr. Hughes"

Howard Hughes: "That's because you have it"

This works for people like Carmack because he's always gotten to choose precisely what he wants to do in each of those 40+ hours.

Replace "education" with software and still applies. :)

[1] What did you spend that initial $100 on? (Even the cheapest overseas programmer can't do jack for $100)

[2]You mention $400 million in revenue, but how much of that is profit?

[3] What exactly does Trace3 do (if it was so great, I would have heard of it on my own, or you would have explained it in the article, without me having to Google research it)

[4] If things are going so great, why are you writing articles for websites like entrepreneur.com? (oh yeah, you have another thing called POP you're promoting)

[5] You mentioned a "bold" client's advice. How did yo know this was advice worth listening to vs advice to be ignored?

I'll probably get voted down into oblivion, but IMO these kinds of articles say a lot and nothing at all.

Did you simply release that app and customers come after? Or did you have to pay a certain amount to acquire customers (i.e. paid advertising)? Or did you acquire customers some other way?

It's unbelievably annoying when this happens. I have a number of bookmarks to incredibly insightful posts, whose usefulness has been corroborated by literally hundreds of people...all closed because they are deemed "off-topic" or some such by an admin.

My theory is that SO was essentially "done" years ago. But people are still on staff and needed something to do. Thus, unrelenting navel gazing ensued.

Point blank - without Romero, there is iD Software (it was his idea to form a new company). There is no Doom. There is no Quake. Romero was one of the primary creative forces behind iD.

Carmack was the tech genius who made their ideas come to life.

(Was not obvious back when it happened though, at least not to me.)

But this ignores the cost of paying someone to setup/maintain that rack, cost to fix the server when something goes wrong, etc.

Setup/maintenance of physical infrastructure has a cost too.

I was referring to medical school accreditation itself.

Another reason is the supply of doctors is artificially restricted by the AMA.

Ding ding ding! That's my real issue with stories like this. They don't explain how these young geniuses got capitol to build their ideas or how they were able to market them to people with influence or how they are able to convince influencers like Marissa Meyer to fork over $30 million.

Not hating on the kid, but without proper explanation of those three aforementioned things, there's no real story here.

I might be going way out on a limb here, but I think this kind of thing is a subtle driver of age/family discrimination.

What kind of workers are more likely to live by the office, and thus able to drop in on a moment's notice? Young, single workers.

What type of workers are less likely to do this? Older workers or workers with families who have to deal with commute/spouses/children/etc.