Mark: What if the smartest thing a Harvard grad can do for the country is get rejected from their dream job at Goldman Sachs? Michelle: Hold on. Getting rejected is a good thing? That sounds like the world’s worst career advice. We spend our whole lives trying to get into those places. Mark: It sounds completely backwards, I know. But it might just be the key to understanding a massive talent misallocation that’s quietly draining our economy. It’s this idea that our best and brightest are being funneled down the wrong path, and it starts on campus. Michelle: Okay, you have my attention. This feels like it’s going to challenge some very established ideas of success. Mark: It absolutely does. That's the provocative heart of Smart People Should Build Things by Andrew Yang. Michelle: The Andrew Yang, right? Before the presidential run and all that, he was a self-described 'recovering lawyer' who jumped headfirst into the startup world. This book is basically his manifesto, born from his experience founding the non-profit Venture for America. Mark: Exactly. And it really sparked a debate when it came out. The book received pretty mixed reviews—some readers and critics found it incredibly inspiring, while others felt it was a bit elitist, focusing so heavily on Ivy League graduates. But it forces a question we absolutely have to ask. Michelle: Which is what? Mark: What if the most prestigious jobs in our country are no longer the most valuable?

Mark: Yang's whole argument starts with this concept he calls the 'Prestige Pathways.' He paints this picture of our top universities as these massive, efficient funnels, channeling our most ambitious graduates into just a handful of careers: finance, management consulting, and law. Michelle: I mean, that checks out. If you go to a top school, those are the companies with the biggest booths at the career fair. They’re the ones flying you out for interviews. It feels like the designated finish line. Mark: It’s the designated, well-lit, perfectly paved superhighway. And Yang argues this creates a huge problem. Because while these jobs are high-status and high-paying, they are often not about creating new value. They're about managing, analyzing, or moving around existing value. He calls it rent-seeking. Michelle: Okay, can you break down 'rent-seeking' for me? It sounds like something a landlord does, but I have a feeling it's more complicated than that. Mark: It's a great question. In simple terms, it's about extracting wealth without creating new wealth. Think of a cybersquatter who buys a domain name and just sits on it, waiting for a company to pay a fortune for it. They didn't build a website or create a service; they just controlled an asset and extracted value. Yang argues that a lot of high finance and corporate law functions in a similar way—shuffling assets, finding tax loopholes, facilitating mergers. It’s lucrative, but it’s not building the next great American company. Michelle: Wait, but these are seen as the pinnacle of success. Are we really saying these incredibly smart people are making a bad choice for themselves, or for the country? Mark: That's the nuance. He's not blaming the students. He's critiquing the system that makes these paths the only obvious, rational choice. The system rewards it. To illustrate this, he tells the story of a guy named Charlie Kroll. Michelle: Okay, I'm ready for a story. Mark: Charlie was a senior at Brown University, treasurer of the investment group, interned at Morgan Stanley. His entire life was geared towards one thing: landing a top job in investment banking in New York. That was the dream. Michelle: The classic path. Mark: The absolute classic. He goes for his final interview at Morgan Stanley, the job he’s been working towards for years. And... he gets rejected. Michelle: Ouch. That’s got to be crushing. Mark: Devastating. But here’s the twist. With his dream path blocked, Charlie is forced to improvise. He starts a little website development company out of his dorm room called Andera. The timing is terrible—the tech bubble bursts in 2001, and the company almost dies. He’s struggling, burning through the little money he raised from friends and family. Michelle: This sounds like a nightmare. So his big finance rejection just led to a different kind of failure? Mark: For a while, yes. But then, in a meeting with a local bank executive, he stumbles upon a real problem. The bank needs a better way to handle online account openings. Suddenly, Charlie has a mission. He pivots Andera to focus exclusively on building software for regional banks. It’s not glamorous. It’s not Wall Street. It's solving a specific, tangible problem. Michelle: And let me guess, it worked? Mark: It worked spectacularly. Andera grew into a multimillion-dollar software company that employed almost a hundred people in Providence, Rhode Island. And Yang’s punchline is this: if Charlie Kroll had gotten that job at Morgan Stanley, those hundred jobs in Providence would likely never have existed. The country would have one more investment banker, and one less job-creating company. Michelle: Wow. So the rejection was the best thing that could have happened, not just for him, but for his entire community. It’s like the system’s failure to absorb him was the system’s biggest success. Mark: Precisely. The 'Prestige Pathway' missed one, and the real economy got a hundred jobs out of it. Yang argues we’re losing thousands of potential Charlie Krolls every single year to these pathways. Michelle: It’s like the campus career fair is this giant, glittering portal to Wall Street, and the startup table is a dusty cardboard box in the corner. You're naturally drawn to the light. Mark: And the data backs it up. At the time of writing, Yang cites that at schools like Harvard, Penn, and Princeton, anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the graduating class who took jobs went into finance or consulting. It's a massive brain drain away from building things. Michelle: That’s a staggering number. It makes you wonder what businesses were never started, what problems were never solved, because the people who could have done it were busy creating complex financial derivatives instead. Mark: That is the billion-dollar question at the heart of this book.

Michelle: That makes sense. We're incentivizing the wrong things. But the alternative, 'building things,' sounds so... romanticized. Like you just need a brilliant idea in a garage, a hoodie, and a dream. Is that what Yang is suggesting everyone should do? Mark: That's the exact myth he wants to bust. He says, and this is a direct quote that hits hard, "Building things is really hard." He argues that entrepreneurship isn't about some flash of creative genius. It’s about the grueling, unglamorous, day-to-day work of organization-building. Michelle: So less about the 'aha!' moment and more about the endless meetings and spreadsheets that follow. Mark: Infinitely more. And he knows this from painful, firsthand experience. He tells this incredible, humbling story about his first company, Stargiving.com. After he quit his soul-crushing corporate law job, he and a partner had this idea to create a website for celebrities to raise money for their favorite charities. Michelle: Sounds like a great idea, especially in the early 2000s. Celebrities, charity, the internet—what could go wrong? Mark: Everything. Absolutely everything. They had no money, no technical expertise, and no celebrity connections. They quit their high-paying law jobs and were suddenly working out of a tiny apartment, trying to convince friends and family to give them money. He describes the sheer desperation of trying to get their first investment. Michelle: Wow, that's a far cry from the heroic founder story we usually hear in movies. Mark: It's the complete opposite. He talks about finally launching the site, getting a bit of press, and then... nothing. Crickets. The dot-com bubble burst, investors vanished, and the company slowly and painfully bled out. It failed. Completely. Michelle: That's brutal. And he puts that right in the book? Mark: He does, and it's the most powerful part. Because his point is that the idea was fine, but building a company is a completely different beast. It's about people, process, and perseverance. He says, "Entrepreneurship isn’t about creativity. It’s about organization building—which, in turn, is about people." Michelle: Ah, so 'Smart People Should Build Things' doesn't just mean 'be a founder.' It means be employee number four at a company that's actually creating something. Mark: You've nailed it. He argues that the real, unsung heroes of innovation are the 'builders.' The early employees who join a team and make it work. The people who can sell, who can code, who can manage a project. He says the plan for most smart, ambitious people shouldn't be "start a company." More realistically, the plan should be "join a team." Michelle: That feels so much more accessible. The pressure to be the next Steve Jobs is paralyzing. But the idea of being a crucial part of a small, growing team? That feels achievable. It reframes the whole idea of what it means to be entrepreneurial. Mark: It completely does. It shifts the spotlight from the 'founder' to the 'builder.' And it recognizes that building is a messy, collaborative, and often painful process. It's not a lottery ticket you cash in with one good idea. It's a craft you learn by doing, and often by failing first.

Mark: And that's the perfect lead-in to his solution. If the current machine is broken, you can't just tell people to opt-out and go build things. You have to build a new machine to fix the old one. Michelle: A machine to fix the machine. I like that. So what does this new machine look like? Mark: It looks like Venture for America. But before he gets to that, he uses this fascinating analogy to explain the cultural shift that's needed. He points to Israel. Michelle: Israel? What does Israel have to do with American startups? Mark: In Israel, there's mandatory military service. Young people, right after high school, are thrown into high-stakes, non-hierarchical environments where they have to solve complex problems with immense responsibility. They build incredibly strong bonds and a shared sense of purpose. After their service, they emerge more mature, more resilient, and with a network of people they trust implicitly. Michelle: And that translates to business? Mark: Directly. Israel has one of the highest rates of venture capital investment and startups per capita in the world. Yang's point is that this national service creates a culture of risk-taking. It forges builders. An Israeli entrepreneur told him, "The notion that one should accumulate credentials before launching a venture simply does not exist." They just do it. Michelle: That is a powerful parallel. So Venture for America is an attempt to create a similar kind of 'service' for entrepreneurship? A boot camp for builders? Mark: That's the perfect way to put it. VFA recruits top graduates and, instead of sending them to Wall Street, sends them to work at startups in emerging cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Baltimore. For two years, they become builders. They learn on the ground, inside a growing company. Michelle: They’re building a new kind of 'Prestige Pathway.' Mark: Exactly! And it comes with its own set of values. VFA has a credo that every Fellow agrees to. It includes lines like, "My career is a choice that indicates my values," and "There is no courage without risk," and "I will create value for myself and others." Michelle: That’s a direct counter-narrative to the culture of just chasing the highest salary. It’s giving them a new definition of achievement. Mark: And it's working. He tells these amazing stories of the first VFA fellows. In Detroit, a group of them pooled their money to buy a foreclosed house, which they renovated themselves to create affordable housing for future fellows. They called it Rebirth Realty. Michelle: Are you serious? They’re not just working at startups, they’re literally rebuilding the city. Mark: Literally. They are living the mission. In New Orleans, other fellows started an after-school program to teach middle-schoolers entrepreneurship. They’re not waiting for permission. They’re seeing a problem and building a solution. Michelle: So it creates this new pathway. A path that leads to Detroit instead of Wall Street, and where the reward is building something real, not just a bigger bonus. It’s a completely different value system. Mark: It is. And it’s designed to be a self-perpetuating engine. The hope is that after their two-year fellowship, many of these VFA alumni will stay in those cities and start their own companies, hiring the next generation of fellows. It’s a long-term vision for economic revitalization, one builder at a time.

Mark: Ultimately, Yang's argument is that talent is our country's most precious resource, and for decades, we've been systematically squandering it. We've optimized our culture and our educational system to reward people who are good at shuffling existing assets, not creating new ones. Michelle: We’ve been training excellent managers of a shrinking pie, instead of bakers who can make the pie bigger. Mark: That’s a perfect analogy. The book is a wake-up call. It's not just an economic argument; it's a cultural one. It’s about what we, as a society, choose to value. Do we honor the clever analyst who finds a tax loophole, or the entrepreneur who creates 50 jobs in a city that desperately needs them? Michelle: And it leaves you with a really powerful, and maybe slightly uncomfortable, question to ask yourself: Are you a builder or a rent-seeker? It’s not about judging, because the system pushes us in one direction. But it’s about being conscious of the choice. What game are you actually playing, and who is it really serving? Mark: It’s a question that sticks with you long after you finish the book. And it’s a question we'd love to hear your thoughts on. What does 'building something' mean to you in your own life or career? Let us know on our socials. Michelle: We’d genuinely love to hear. It’s a conversation that feels more urgent than ever. Mark: Absolutely. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.