Technology

Tech is where the self-made myth lives loudest, so it's worth saying plainly what the records show: the people here started, more often than not, from comfort. Two-parent households, engineer or professional parents, elite or near-elite schools, and a computer in the home years before it was ordinary. The dropout stories are real, but almost all of them are dropouts from Stanford, MIT, or Harvard — a credential kept in reserve, not a bridge burned.

What actually separates the outcomes isn't the coding talent, which is common here, but the structure the talent gets poured into. The largest fortunes belong to founders who kept equity and, usually, voting control through dual-class shares. The same skill deployed as a salaried engineer, or sold early for a paycheck, produces a comfortable life and a fraction of the wealth. Two people can build the same product in the same room and end a decade apart, and the thing that moved them apart was ownership, not merit.

The immigrant founders here complicate the comfort story in a useful way. Several arrived with little money but a great deal of family human capital — scientist parents, an education-first household — and entered through the credentialed pipeline rather than from the bottom. The safety net wasn't cash; it was the near-certainty of a good job if the company failed. That is its own kind of soft landing, and it belongs in the honest picture of how tech founders actually start.