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by joezydeco 3936 days ago
'oh, you go to UIUC.... they've produced one famous tech entrepreneur (Marc Andreessen), maybe you can be the second

Let's get history straight first. UIUC didn't turn pmarca into an entrepreneur. Jim Clark did that.

2 comments

Andreesesen is overly celebrated because of his extreme luck, and is certainly not the first. Look up John Bardeen and Nick Holonyak for examples.
The school actually does highlight John Bardeen and Nick Holonyak a ton! John Bardeen was the first person mentioned on my tour of the college of engineering and Nick Holonyak gave the keynote at my ECE orientation.

My posts were meant to highlight entrepreneurship which is why I didn't mention them (they'd be in a class of amazing innovators who studied/worked at UIUC). There's also a ton of awesome alumni that have gone on to be C level execs at big companies, but again they were omitted because these posts were specifically targeted at entrepreneurial alumni.

Be that as it may, they forgot Max Levchin and the entire Paypal Mafia. That's a pretty large omission IMO
Max Levchin and many of the other members of the Mafia (Luke Nosek, Jeremy Stoppelman, etc.) are mentioned in the post.

They are also not forgotten on campus. Max was on campus last year and there was a ton of excitement in the college of engineering among students.