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Having a grandfather worth $20 million.

Seriously, don't kid yourself. It was a VERY DIFFERENT world back then. You graduated college and hoped you could find a job. There was no www and you needed 5 to 10 grand just for hardware and proprietary software. It's utterly stunning how easy it is to get started today compared to then.

(Bill Gates and Paul Allen went to the private Lakeside School which had a privately donated PDP-11 in 1968. Imagine being 13 years old and having access to the same computing power as Stanford University. The other 99.99% of us had to wait another 10 years for access to a computer.)



Software was a lot harder to write when I was in high school.

Also, entrepreneurship wasn't encouraged.


Which means there was a lot less competition.




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