Successful founders are comfortable being uncomfortable. Forging a new path as an entrepreneur isn't easy work. There may be times when you're the only person who believes in your idea, or where you're the only person who looks like you do in a meeting room.
Why do I get to be the runner, and these guys get to be the homeless guys on the corner? Why can't we all be runners? She didn't have an answer. It would've been easy to let that question dissolve with her footsteps. Most people would have. But Mahlum saw something in those men that others had missed.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Curt" who once worked as IT security manager at a company where the helpdesk manager routinely ignored company policy by not logging out of his PC. The machine sat there ready for use, instead of reverting to a password-protected screensaver that could only be dispelled by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to spawn a login dialog.
I was like, 'What do you mean, I can actually work and take some classes?' I didn't even know there were apprenticeships out there, because I thought it was something of the past. That was my dream-to go into some field of engineering-so it was great to find something like AT&T, which has an apprenticeship program where you can jump into it, which later becomes software engineering.
According to federal data, 24 percent of New York adults are at the lowest levels of literacy, defined by the advocacy organization Literacy New York as being either functionally illiterate (reading below a fifth grade level), lacking a high school diploma, or being unable to speak English. That same data shows Brooklyn and Queens rates are roughly ten percent higher than the state average, and in the Bronx, a whopping 50 percent of adults do not have basic literacy skills.
Delaying, dropping out of, or skipping college altogether have long been popular in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison have all done some version of it. As artificial intelligence hype draws young founders to San Francisco, programs at companies like Palantir Technologies are rolling out anti-college initiatives for high school graduates. Meanwhile, startup entrepreneurship programs like Y Combinator skew increasingly younger, as taking a gap year has become less contrarian and more mainstream for aspiring technocrats.
Young people are "experiencing higher education differently, and that is shaping much of what parents are saying," said Lammers. "[Parents] are reacting to the questions their children are asking and trying to find the best way to help them navigate the next steps."
