How many Gates are there in a typical Harvard grad cohort? Are 5% of Harvard grads a Gates?
If we're looking at lightning strikes, it seems like we should look at some of the most successful tech CEO's in history, in no particular order.
Gates & Zuck - Harvard (Microsoft and Facebook; both dropped out by end of second year or earlier)
Larry Ellison (Oracle, third richest man in the world in 2000's and currently 9th richest) - dropped out of Univ Illinois and Chicago
Larry Page, Sergein Brin (Google, dropped out of Stanford)
Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX/X/PayPal/etc, richest man in world, attended Queen's and then transferred to ivy league U Penn, one of the very few that completed a degree, BS in both Physics and Econ)
Jeff Bezos (Amazon, second richest in world, earned BSE in EE/CS from Princeton, summa cum laude)
Steve Jobs (Apple, dropout Reed College)
Of course, these numbers have such a high p-value that really it amounts to nothing more than a guess or, at best, a hypothesis, and I get that you're just suggesting that those who both get admitted to Harvard and actually complete a full education there have much higher than average rates of being successful, but it seems that the extreme ends of such a graph end up being counter-intuitive, because:
From a very quick review of an admittedly hand-picked assortment of the very small number of "most" successful tech CEO's (whatever that might mean), we can identify a few common characteristics:
1. most did attend a university of varying quality.
2. A minority attended an elite school.
3. most did not complete even their second year.
There are a lot of things that can be read into this, but it does seem to be borne out across most less-regulated industries: founders tend to be smart enough to get into university but perhaps too impatient to stay in for the duration, but leaders of older companies (such as larger and public companies) tend to have at least a four-year degree, although I don't have any hard data about this (particularly because there seems to be a dearth of data for "successful" startup founders outside of the VC world, for any meaning of the word "success".)
How many Gates are there in a typical Harvard grad cohort? Are 5% of Harvard grads a Gates?
If we're looking at lightning strikes, it seems like we should look at some of the most successful tech CEO's in history, in no particular order.
Gates & Zuck - Harvard (Microsoft and Facebook; both dropped out by end of second year or earlier)
Larry Ellison (Oracle, third richest man in the world in 2000's and currently 9th richest) - dropped out of Univ Illinois and Chicago
Larry Page, Sergein Brin (Google, dropped out of Stanford)
Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX/X/PayPal/etc, richest man in world, attended Queen's and then transferred to ivy league U Penn, one of the very few that completed a degree, BS in both Physics and Econ)
Jeff Bezos (Amazon, second richest in world, earned BSE in EE/CS from Princeton, summa cum laude)
Steve Jobs (Apple, dropout Reed College)
Of course, these numbers have such a high p-value that really it amounts to nothing more than a guess or, at best, a hypothesis, and I get that you're just suggesting that those who both get admitted to Harvard and actually complete a full education there have much higher than average rates of being successful, but it seems that the extreme ends of such a graph end up being counter-intuitive, because:
From a very quick review of an admittedly hand-picked assortment of the very small number of "most" successful tech CEO's (whatever that might mean), we can identify a few common characteristics:
1. most did attend a university of varying quality.
2. A minority attended an elite school.
3. most did not complete even their second year.
There are a lot of things that can be read into this, but it does seem to be borne out across most less-regulated industries: founders tend to be smart enough to get into university but perhaps too impatient to stay in for the duration, but leaders of older companies (such as larger and public companies) tend to have at least a four-year degree, although I don't have any hard data about this (particularly because there seems to be a dearth of data for "successful" startup founders outside of the VC world, for any meaning of the word "success".)