Actually, Google does have one major challenge -- how to motivate its people. I'm not talking about fresh college graduates, but rather people who are high up in the organization because they happened to join early on. Many of these people are worth a lot of money, and presumably see day to day work at Google as a way to spend their time, socialize, and to flex their political muscle.
In such a place, bringing in new hungry blood is very difficult to do, especially since the old crowd will try very hard to protect their power structure. In the long term, this does cause problems in the ranks, since success within the company starts to become a measure of how well you can navigate politically, vs. the quality of work produced.
By your logic, one could have seriously hampered your self confidence by suggesting that your reasoning about this is faulty, and the only reason you beat your parents at chess was because they werent very good at it.
I dont mean to be coming across as rude, but I believe the better way to handle the six year old is to encourage the process of creativity and imagination. There are enough people in his life (at least a Quadrupillion!!) that will try to tell him that hes being impractical and unrealistic, no need to add to that count.
Actually, not only do you want to know the number of outstanding shares, you also want to find out what kind of liquidation preferences exist for the VC's. Depending on the liquidation preferences you could end up making $0 even if the company sells for 2-3X their series A funding.
It is absolutely unreasonable for the company to not specify the number of outstanding shares.
I believe that the author makes one fundamental mistake: Assuming that there is one great filter, and that its common across all civilizations. It seems to me there are a large number of filters, some of which applied (to dinosaurs, for example). Some filters may cause end of all life (on earth), some others may simply eradicate all human life..
Either way, on a cosmic scale, all this is beyond our control (I'd worry about the sun going nova some day, but I have more pressing things to do), so not much point worrying about it.
Actually, its a little strange that they would do this for a spreadsheet program. Spreadsheets are, by nature functional, and would yield themselves to approaches like quickcheck.
I would say that there are two important things to consider:
1. Understanding how a compiler works without getting bogged down by programming language details - This means that you should try and look at compilers written in Standard ML or Ocaml (my favorite), since that would be much easier to follow. For example -- a datatype can be much more succinctly expressed as
type any_value = Int | String | Float
rather than across 4 classes (as in the Java case).
2. Start small, and understand it in chunks. For these, a lot of web based resources are ideal. For example, to understand regular expressions, it would be nice if you were able to visualize them, and play around with them visually -