German here. A friend from Grundschule (grades 1-4) is the son of Turkish immigrants.
His parents both didn’t speak German, so he struggled with the language.
They also sent him to a Turkish language Islam school in the afternoons.
As a classmate, I helped him with his homework, and I think I was the only German friend he had.
When my parents bought a new PC (a 386!) I hauled our old 286 to my friend and helped him install games on it.
Then I went to Gymnasium (the secondary school that prepares you for university) and he went to Hauptschule (the most basic secondary school that usually leads to a job involving manual labor, driving a forklift if you’re lucky, or unemployment).
20 years later I met him again.
I had failed to finish a university degree twice in a row and was unemployed at the time. It was still a year before I accepted reality and took up jobs washing dishes or cleaning out houses after their inhabitants had passed away.
In the meantime, he had finished Hauptschule, switched to a school qualifying you for college, finished an MBA, founded an IT consulting company, hired 14 employees, married and had 4 children.
He told me that with the computer my family gave him, he could do the taxes for his parents and learnt a lot about IT and business early on.
Proves that all you need to be a successful founder is grit, determination, a good work ethic, and connections to a privileged family that can hand you the means to get you started.
German here. A friend from Grundschule (grades 1-4) is the son of Turkish immigrants.
His parents both didn’t speak German, so he struggled with the language.
They also sent him to a Turkish language Islam school in the afternoons.
As a classmate, I helped him with his homework, and I think I was the only German friend he had.
When my parents bought a new PC (a 386!) I hauled our old 286 to my friend and helped him install games on it.
Then I went to Gymnasium (the secondary school that prepares you for university) and he went to Hauptschule (the most basic secondary school that usually leads to a job involving manual labor, driving a forklift if you’re lucky, or unemployment).
20 years later I met him again.
I had failed to finish a university degree twice in a row and was unemployed at the time. It was still a year before I accepted reality and took up jobs washing dishes or cleaning out houses after their inhabitants had passed away.
In the meantime, he had finished Hauptschule, switched to a school qualifying you for college, finished an MBA, founded an IT consulting company, hired 14 employees, married and had 4 children.
He told me that with the computer my family gave him, he could do the taxes for his parents and learnt a lot about IT and business early on.
This one might most heartwarming. All it took was a little hand-me-down.
Proves that all you need to be a successful founder is grit, determination, a good work ethic, and connections to a privileged family that can hand you the means to get you started.
Hah! You had me going for the first part.