<story><title>Who is Mark Bao? Meet the 18-year old entrepreneur behind Threewords.me</title><url>http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-bao-meet-the-18-year-old-entrepreneur-behind-threewords-me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>markbao</author><text>Thank you all so much for the awesome support. :) It&apos;s been a pretty insane roller coaster of a month, and I&apos;m (unfortunately) starting college again in a few hours.&lt;p&gt;The interesting part of all this is that it&apos;s actually helping me develop my next step. Not in terms of startups, but in terms of life. In other words, is college something I&apos;m sticking with long-term? Or is time of the essence and the need (and my parents&apos; need) for a degree less vital?&lt;p&gt;Edit: also, how good is the startup community in NYC? I love the city, but not sure about the startup environment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxawaytoolong</author><text>If you already are running a startup from your dorm, the main reason to stay in college is to meet women. Honestly, there is no easier venue, and the chance to have a captive audience of thousands of women looking for a boyfriend will never happen again in your life. You should be one of the most ballin&apos; dudes at Bentley.&lt;p&gt;NYC is the second easiest place in the USA to meet women. It&apos;s not as easy as when you&apos;re in college. But it&apos;s about 100x better than Silicon Valley.&lt;p&gt;Relationships might seem unimportant when compared to your potential bazillion dollar website, but even the most autistic geeky weirdos want companions - see all of livejournal as evidence. I did startups in SV/SF for 10 years and could count the number of women I worked with on 2 hands. If you&apos;re working 12 hours a day, when are you going to meet the other women who aren&apos;t working at startups? At the bar, after work. But, you could go to any bar and there would be no women there, either. You end up condemning yourself to a life of near chastity hoping your startup sells so you can maybe attract a mate based on your bank account. That probably won&apos;t even work, there are loads of rich dudes in SF/SV who can&apos;t get a date.&lt;p&gt;The NYC startup scene is OK but kind of stupid.  
There is a lot of dumb money. For example, GroupMe got $10M for a product that took 24 hours to build and has already been built by a dozen other companies over the years. The guys working on it are basically drunks and stoners and guys who follow jam bands around. (Check their twitter history, I&apos;m not just being snide.) I actually think they are cool dudes but I&apos;m just using them as an example that the bar for funding in NYC is way lower compared to SV.  The nouveau startup wunderkinds in SF/SV are now all straight-laced type-a achievers who went to Philips Andover, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc.&lt;p&gt;(This is actually really weird, cuz it&apos;s the opposite of the previous bubble where SV/SF was a bunch of bipolar freaks and dropouts with purple dreadlocks, and you needed to go to Choate and Princeton and wear a suit to get a job in NYC)&lt;p&gt;I spent about 2 years in NYC hanging out with startups and came to the conclusion that most of them are just &quot;playing startup.&quot; The startups that make the most sense there are startups that target the NYC market first, like Gilt and Foursquare and media/blog empire things like Gawker, Tumblr, and DailyBeast. GroupMe works well in NYC, too, as the main activity is to go out at night and you can use it to sync up. So if your plan is to service the NYC market first and then see how it spreads from there, it&apos;s not a bad place to be and it should be trivial for you to get funding $$$.</text></comment>
<story><title>Who is Mark Bao? Meet the 18-year old entrepreneur behind Threewords.me</title><url>http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-bao-meet-the-18-year-old-entrepreneur-behind-threewords-me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>markbao</author><text>Thank you all so much for the awesome support. :) It&apos;s been a pretty insane roller coaster of a month, and I&apos;m (unfortunately) starting college again in a few hours.&lt;p&gt;The interesting part of all this is that it&apos;s actually helping me develop my next step. Not in terms of startups, but in terms of life. In other words, is college something I&apos;m sticking with long-term? Or is time of the essence and the need (and my parents&apos; need) for a degree less vital?&lt;p&gt;Edit: also, how good is the startup community in NYC? I love the city, but not sure about the startup environment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hartror</author><text>There are many conflicting viewpoints on college especially on HN. I took the view that college was an opportunity that while not impossible to be taken at a later stage isn&apos;t easy to &quot;go back to&quot; later. College is what you make of it and assuming you&apos;ve gotten into a half decent school for your vocation you can get a lot out of being embedded with a lot of like minded people for a few years.&lt;p&gt;College won&apos;t exclude you following your entrepreneurial dreams at the same time and you can leverage a lot from the experience.&lt;p&gt;Good luck!</text></comment>