His point was that there are many many many more students who don't make it to IIT, and feel that not going to IIT has led them to not be confident in their abilities.
My office was next door to Seymour's office at the Media Lab. This was before the motorcycle accident in Vietnam. I was a freshly arrived student from India. His main observation about India was about how the IITs were terrible for the country because they left such a profound debilitating effect on those who did not make it to those schools.
This is just amazing stuff. With this, Facebook is going to revolutionize telecom in developing countries. Villagers will be able to get together and run 'bandit' networks and provide coverage to all. Laws dont apply much to startups like facebook and Airbnb, and liability is definitely not on FB.
How this happened:
- Mesos was largely the brainchild of Andy Konwinski (also co founder of Databricks - both Spark and Mesos were born in the AmpLab at Berkeley). Ben Hindman then interned/worked at Twitter and they needed cluster management. Ben used Andy's stuff (but contributed a lot to it). The mesosphere co-founders also used mesosphere after their experience at Twitter. They figured that everyone else would need it too.
- The key to this is that Andy interned at Google the year before, and worked on 'borg' and Omega. These are schedulers used at Google. Andy then took ideas from Borg and, to some degree, Omega, and just made it outside of Google.
- So this is basically technology that is 1-2 generations older than what Google has. I dont know what they have, but while Andy et al. were building Mesos, Google et al. weren't just sitting there, warming there asses.
Unfortunately for them, Yahoo may have stopped acquiring companies, but otherwise I would imagine HRH Marissa Mayer would have brought flipboard for $2B+. I know they try buying everything shitty.
This is the difference between airbnb and google. Google would have Hal Varian look at this. Airbnb has a music major re-invent the wheel (not sure if the managed to re-invent the whole thing).
There is a whole field of study called pricing mechanisms. For example, second price auctions work well because of a reason.
Our very own Marissa Mayer. We also have Kevin Systrom on teh WM board.