“Anytime I have to repeat something over and over,” he told me, “I get bored.” In his final year of college, he decided that the whole structure of the college system was weirdly inefficient: You had kids taking basically the same classes at different institutions, often with the same lessons, running into the same problems with their work. But these far-flung students didn’t have any easy way to talk together. He put together Qaboom.com, a question-answering site that tried to cluster students across the US by common subjects. Though a few investors in Silicon Valley liked it, it never took off because Ho couldn’t crack the cultural piece: how to get students to post good-quality questions and answers. As a coder, he was concerned with making the site so elegantly designed and robust that it would scale. But since nobody was posting anything, a million people would never show up, he realized. Content mattered, and he didn’t really know how to get that snowball rolling. He shut the site down and, his degree program nearly over, interviewed at a few firms like Google. But he sunk into a funk. He didn’t want to work for someone else. Considered as a question of value creation, being an employee was a terrible proposition, he felt. Sure, you earned a check. But most of the value of your labor was captured by the founders. He had the skills to build something, soup to nuts—these “magical powers.” He just needed to find something that needed that gift.