About Me

Who are you to criticize capitalist icon Ayn Rand?

My name is Scott, and I'm a California native living in Europe. I am a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur who literally spent two years running a technology start-up out of a suburban Palo Alto garage. I have an MBA from a top-10 business school (where I was in the top 5% of my class), as well as degrees in Sociology and Computer Science. I have worked as a management consultant for some of the largest companies in the world, as well as in strategy for a multinational company in New York and London. You could say that I am like those "heroes" from Atlas Shrugged; at least, I have more in common with the protagonists of the book than most of its readers (or Rand herself, since she never worked in corporate management).

I'm also a lover of old movies, particularly those made in the 1930s, when Ayn Rand was trying to make it in Hollywood as a screenwriter (I've even seen the 1949 film adaptation of Rand's "The Fountainhead", which is as awful a film as you could ever see). Having seen literally hundreds of movies from this period, I understand the context of popular storytelling from which Rand's novels originate, and I know the sources of cinematic melodrama that inspired her.

And while I'm not proud of it, I must also confess to having been very arrogant as a child. I attended several elementary schools and rarely doubted that I was the smartest kid in the room, and later loafed through my high school and undergraduate years content that I was better than my peers (regardless of my lack of academic achievement). In short, I was exactly the type of teenager who adopts the Ayn Rand worldview at a young age to sooth their insecurities and tell them what they want to hear; I never did, but I do recognize what it is in people that make them grasp for such nonsense as truth.