Recently read a book "Qian Yingyi Dialogue". Qian Yingyi, dean of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, presided over a "Dean's Dialogue" event, inviting famous entrepreneurs and students at home and abroad to exchange ideas. These include: Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Peter Till, Ma Huateng, Zhang Yiming, Shen Nanpeng and others. These people have talked about their college life and majors, and I found this part of the content to be very interesting, so I took it out to talk about.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is the most popular entrepreneur in the tech world today, and he founded Tesla Electric Vehicle Company and SpaceX, which develops rockets and flying machines, at the forefront of innovation.
Elon Musk's reasons for going to college are almost the same as anyone else's. At first, he didn't want to go to college. Musk was born in South Africa and came to Canada after graduating from high school. He started out working as a yard farmer, but the people around him were much older than him. He wanted to find a girlfriend, thinking that he could only go to college.
Musk chose two universities, one majoring in computer science at the University of Waterloo and the other at Queen's Business School. He went to the University of Waterloo first and found that there were not many girls. It seems that the engineering subjects in the world are similar, and there are not many girls, so he went to Queen's University. He later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania to complete business. Because I like physics, I began to study physics.
Musk did meet his first wife at Queen's University and got married.
Musk's reasons for studying were the same as the companies he made, very bold and unexpected.
Musk probably likes two things the most, one is physics, and he says he does everything he does according to "first principles." First principles is to return to the most primitive conditions of things and then analyze them. The second thing should be to find a girlfriend. While running a company, he found N more girlfriends, and the two did not delay.
Zhang Yiming
Zhang Yiming is the founder of ByteDance, which is platforms such as "Today's Headlines" and "Douyin". Zhang Yiming was born in 1983, but is now one of the world's top 20 richest people, and has surpassed Ma Huateng in China, and the company has developed very fast.
Zhang Yiming graduated from the Department of Computer Science at Nankai University. He said in the book that when he was in college, his first choice was biology, but the score was not enough, and he was transferred to microelectronics. From biological modulation to microelectronics, this is unimaginable now, and the score of microelectronics is now much higher than that of biology.
However, Zhang Yiming switched to computer science in his sophomore year, because he found that microelectronics could not be experimented, at that time, China's microelectronics level was very low, the level of university laboratories was also very low, and students studied for half a day only on paper. Therefore, Zhang Yiming decisively changed direction and turned to the computer. By the time he graduated, Zhang Yiming had decided what he would do in the future and distributed information.
From the perspective of Zhang Yiming's transfer to a profession, he is very keen, many people may be ignorant of learning, until they find a job to find something wrong, and Zhang Yiming found out earlier than others, turned early, so the development of ByteDance is also very rapid.
However, Zhang Yiming said that although he studied these majors, the biggest influence on him was extracurricular reading, he read a lot of biographies of characters, learned about the experience and process of great people from becoming great figures, he learned from these experiences, and also took a lot of detours.
Shen Nanpeng
Shen Nanpeng is one of the most successful investors in China, once topped for Forbes' list of the world's best investors, and he is the founder of Sequoia Capital China Fund.
Shen Nanpeng was originally a mathematician and won a gold medal in the Mathematics Olympiad during middle school. After graduating from Jiaotong University, he went to Columbia University in the United States to study mathematics, but after a year of study, he went to Yale to study management. According to Shen Nanpeng, when he found that he could not be a good mathematician, he changed careers.
Indeed, it is better to engage in finance, and people who are good at mathematics learn finance to reduce dimensions. Shen Nanpeng said that in fact, in his work, the mathematics he uses is addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but mathematical thinking helps him a lot, can build a model, and has an accurate concept of orders of magnitude. For example, the camera market, if it is 10,000 yuan, how many people are willing to buy, then the total market capacity can be calculated. This ability to build a model allows him to have a basic framework without making too many mistakes.
Peter Till
Many domestic entrepreneurs are born in science and engineering, and many entrepreneurs abroad are graduates of humanities and social sciences. Thiel is a well-known investor in Silicon Valley, investing in a large number of star technology companies such as SpaceX, and he has also written a best-selling book "From 0 to 1".
Tilben's science is philosophy, and his phD is law. Till's thinking is very different from the other entrepreneurs in this book. He believes that people can learn nothing from failure, but learn from success. In addition, he believes that it is much more important to be able to ask a correct question than to solve it. The same is true in investing, where problems are found first, and then there is technology, not the other way around.
As for China, he believes that China has a talent advantage and works particularly hard, but he also believes that China's competition is too fierce, which is not a good thing. Shen Nanpeng also believes that the competition is too fierce and easy to be short-sighted. Now the development of universities is the same, too many examinations, universities are short-sighted.
Thiel also expressed concern about globalization, as well as concerns about the narrowing of the term technology to refer specifically to information technology, and he believed that technology should be much broader than information technology.
From this information, Till's thinking is indeed very profound and forward-looking.
Laurd Blank van
Laurd Blanker is the global chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, where he studied social sciences, history, political science, and more.
He believes that history is very important, and whether you become a scientist or an economist, you must understand the relevant history. While things don't quite turn out the same, there are always similarities.
Satya Nadella
Satya Nadella is An Indian and is now the CEO of Microsoft Corporation. Everyone says that the executives of IT companies in Silicon Valley are now occupied by Indians, why?
An important reason is that they specialize, and they generally have a degree certificate in a technical major and a management major. Nadella received her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in India, then a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin in the United States, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
Generally speaking, a technical person to take a management position, it is best to learn a little MBA or other similar majors, let their minds jump out of the engineer's thinking, from a higher position to see the technical work.
Jin Tielin, Yu Long and Wan Fang
These three are not entrepreneurs, they are professionals. Jin Tielin is a famous singer and vocal educator in mainland China, Yu Long is an outstanding conductor in China, and Wan Fang is a famous screenwriter.
Yu Long and Wan Fang both came from a family, Yu Long's elders were musicians, and Wan Fang's father was Cao Yu. Yu Long studied art when he was a child, but his family did not agree, saying that he still studied music and could control it at home. What is control? When Yu Long was 12 years old, he was playing the piano, and his grandfather pushed open the door and said to him, You can never become a pianist, and suggested that he learn some conducting. This is control, the family knows whether you are this piece of material, which direction you can go.
Wan Fang was influenced from an early age, and was taken to see a drama by his father at the age of 4. She did not go to college, but by virtue of her family studies, she worked as a screenwriter and wrote novels.
Jin Tielin was not from a family, but in his early years, he received guidance from professionals. At that time, he studied instrumental music to take the music attached high school, but did not get admitted, but the examiner at the time, the principal of the music attached middle school, suggested that he develop into vocal music. Jin Tielin went to an ordinary high school, and he consciously went to vocal music in high school.
The growth of these three professionals is very typical, if there is a high person to point out, less detours. This is also what I often tell you, I study my own major, it is best to have someone in my family understand. It's not just about networking, it's about pointing the right path on the path of professional development.
As an entrepreneur, although professionalism is important, what is more important is the characteristics of people.