I ask Thrun if it isn't odd that someone like him--someone for whom the traditional education system has done so much--would wind up railing against it. "Innovation means change," he says. "I could restrict myself to helping a class of 20 insanely smart Stanford students who would be fine without me. But how could that impact not be dwarfed by teaching 160,000 students?"
All visionary entrepreneurs must, at some point, find their own sense of romance in the compromises they make to build a profitable business, and the size of the crowd is where Thrun finds his. He's moved by the idea of many, many students from many, many places learning something because of him--even if it's something as mundane as a Salesforce.com API. I have a hard time believing that he really wants his son to get Salesforce certified rather than Stanford educated, but in this one thing Thrun seems entirely earnest.
Two days after our bike ride, I return to the Udacity offices, where Thrun is rerecording a segment for his statistics class. He'd mistakenly used an incorrect notation in writing out a math problem, and he's returned to the studio to get it right, spending an hour or so alone in the dark room, talking into the microphone and scribbling on a tablet. "It's kind of like being onstage, where you have all these lights in your face and can't see the audience, but you still have to be able to excite them," he says. "So I think of the football stadium full of people that I'm facing. I get a kick out of that." Thrun's taken the red pill. There's no going back.
- More Here
All visionary entrepreneurs must, at some point, find their own sense of romance in the compromises they make to build a profitable business, and the size of the crowd is where Thrun finds his. He's moved by the idea of many, many students from many, many places learning something because of him--even if it's something as mundane as a Salesforce.com API. I have a hard time believing that he really wants his son to get Salesforce certified rather than Stanford educated, but in this one thing Thrun seems entirely earnest.
Two days after our bike ride, I return to the Udacity offices, where Thrun is rerecording a segment for his statistics class. He'd mistakenly used an incorrect notation in writing out a math problem, and he's returned to the studio to get it right, spending an hour or so alone in the dark room, talking into the microphone and scribbling on a tablet. "It's kind of like being onstage, where you have all these lights in your face and can't see the audience, but you still have to be able to excite them," he says. "So I think of the football stadium full of people that I'm facing. I get a kick out of that." Thrun's taken the red pill. There's no going back.
- More Here
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