Of course startups sometimes lose; they certainly aren't invincible. But startups out-competing companies that are dozens or hundreds of times larger does happen with some regularity. Eg. Google in 1998.
"If you ever get out into the world you will find plenty of people who will make you feel like your dumb and that make EYs intellect look infantile."
(citation needed)
Ok, here are some people:
Nick Bostrom (http://www.nickbostrom.com/cv.pdf) Stephen Wolfram (Published his first particle physics paper at 16 I think, invented one of, if not, the most successful math programs ever and in my opinion the best ever) A couple people who's names I won't mention since I doubt you'd know them from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab where I did some work. etc.
I say this because these people have numerous significant contributions to their fields of study. I mean real technical contributions that move the field forward not just terms...
As promised, here is the "Q" part of the Less Wrong Video Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The Rules
1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).
2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed to a few paragraphs, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).
3) Eliezer hasn't been subpoenaed. He will simply ignore the questions he doesn't want to answer, even if they somehow received 3^^^3 votes.
4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.
5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for at least 7 days. After that, it is up to Eliezer to decide when the best time to film his answers will be. [Update: Today, November 18, marks the 7th day since this thread was posted. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to review the questions and vote for your favorites.]
Suggestions
Don't limit yourself to things that have been mentioned on OB/LW. I expect that this will be the majority of questions, but you shouldn't feel limited to these topics. I've always found that a wide variety of topics makes a Q&A more interesting. If you're uncertain, ask anyway and let the voting sort out the wheat from the chaff.
It's okay to attempt humor (but good luck, it's a tough crowd).
If a discussion breaks out about a question (f.ex. to ask for clarifications) and the original poster decides to modify the question, the top level comment should be updated with the modified question (make it easy to find your question, don't have the latest version buried in a long thread).
Update: Eliezer's video answers to 30 questions from this thread can be found here.