Ask HN: Who changed your life?

This one remark transformed me from being someone who was content to work entirely with theory to being someone who went out and built systems -- because however confident I was with my theory, I wanted the confirmation offered by seeing it work.

This doesn't have much to do with entrepreneurialism, but it's certainly something which changed my life. :-)

The story of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs was my first fascination I guess. I read a lot on and off the web and I guess I have seen a lot of fantastic articles, lectures and advices that helped me a lot.

I was studying in college and my AI teacher was using LISP. He redirected us toward pg's essays... and I have to say that it was truly inspiring.

It took 3 more years before I actually started to work on my startup, but without this teacher and pg's essays I'm sure it wouldn't have happened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

He was so far ahead of his time, you probably never heard of him. He was agile, hashed, and object-oriented in 1965!

When I discovered this technology, an entire world opened up to me in an instant. I've been thinking outside the polygon and making things happen ever since.

I've never met either of them. I kind of grew up without a father, so both functioned as surrogates who lovingly fostered two things I've dedicated a lot of my time to -- writing and understanding intelligence.

Thanks for being awesome, if either of you read this.

I was living on the streets as I turned 20, and a chance encounter led me to hang out with the band at one of their early gigs. Donna made me feel pretty welcome and off I went on tour with them.

During the tour I started a fanzine to make money and help keep me alive. That fanzine was assisted by her (providing material) and I sold it to the fans.

The bit where it became more was after the tour had finished. How now to find money for food? I still had the fanzine but Elastica were on the cover and Elastica were not playing. I removed the cover, and would make a new cover according to whoever was in town headlining that night. Having the band on the cover is the difference between selling 20 copies and selling 150 copies.

Something about that first transformation from being on the streets to earning a decent wage off my own back has pretty much influenced every action since: I won't go back to the street, and there are always new ways to approach existing problems.

I could cite many more that are related to what we do, are more recent, are more obvious, etc... but none provided an epiphany greater than that first one.

PG is probably the biggest since it was due to him saying "if you don't know how to code, learn to" that caused me to switch from mechanical engineering to CS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhante_Vimalaramsi

From an entrepreneurial point of view, I'm sure that the fact that my best friend (and cofounder on my first business) had been running businesses successfully for years was a major influence in convincing me that it makes sense to make that leap.

I know I may catch flack for that, but the guy didn't attend an Ivy League or Stanford level school, didn't live in the valley, but also started two successful tech companies without VC money. His methods and marketing are different, but he's bound to break convention as he grew up so far from the web/software conventions of the day.

The first was a guy I met on my first weekend, who lived in a house next door to mine on campus, and later became one of my best friends. He was/is working on a social networking site in PHP and MySQL, and taught me the basics of those two languages. Originally I planned to help him out, but soon realised I knew enough to start my own projects.

The second was a fourth year Engineering student who was starting his own humanitarian aid agency. He's also started a business when he was 16 (IIRC, it provided ICT recovery to companies, eg, carting IBM servers and emergency generators when their systems went down). Meeting someone doing something so balls-to-the-wall ambitious, but realising they don't seem much smarter than you, inspires you as to what is possible.

The third was a Nigerian postgrad student, who told me that he was trying to encourage his country-people to get rich through entrepreneurship rather than fraud, and also wanted to encourage a startup hub at my own university (he's pretty involved in the UK startup scene). Somehow I've found myself in charge of a campus society to bring together those working on web applications and businesses. The community is still small, but I've already found meeting other people working on web projects has motivated me to work harder on my own.