School vs VC

Here's a company founder who groks what's wrong with current schooling system:

Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas

Here's where he gets it:

I think the problem with many, as with people in their early twenties generally, is that they've been trained their whole lives to jump through predefined hoops. They've spent 15-20 years solving problems other people have set for them. And how much time deciding what problems would be good to solve? Two or three course projects? They're good at solving problems, but bad choosing them.
But that, I'm convinced, is just the effect of training. Or more precisely, the effect of grading. To make grading efficient, everyone has to solve the same problem, and that means it has to be decided in advance. It would be great if schools taught students how to choose problems as well as how to solve them, but I don't know how you'd run such a class in practice.

However, he misses the mark with:

And compared to the sort of problems hackers are used to solving, giving customers what they want is easy.

Unfortunately, if it was so easy, they would all be minting money.

When I bought my parents a Macintosh for Christmas 2002, I was hoping they would catch on to GUI and we can start sharing email and maybe even show our children's pictures and videos via the web. They had not really used any computers all their lives (their last job before retirement, they had to use a PC for accounting but it was DOS based). I've been using a Macintosh off and on since it first came out in 1984 and have owned 3 other Mac's since 1986 (MacPlus, Duo 230 and Quadra 605). (I only use Windows at home, at work mainly Linux and Windows -- some AIX.)

How wrong I was! I spent hours trying to teach them mouse and stuff but they never got the hang of it. Every time I visit them I try to teach them a little but no progress at all. On the other hand, my boys 10 and 12 have no problem picking up the mouse and using so called educational programs on a Windows box.

So, it takes more than just giving the customers what they want. If I knew the answer, I would be minting the money, instead (grin).