I am more interested in the question of how Y-Combinator has changed Stanford over the last two decades rather than the question of how Stanford should change to accommodate Y-Combinator.
Notice there is no mention of ethics, philosophy, or human connection, except maybe Zuck being a psych major. Do we really want the future of education to be an incubator pipeline?
That said I wholehearted agree with the second half of this paragraph: "In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects."
For the first part, I suspect that money, and the safety net it provides, is a bigger impediment to entrepreneurship than its collegiate advocacy. It's hard to start a company or join a fledgling one when you are staring at an immense debt.
I had a similar thought... starting a business is risky. And health insurance (among other things) is expensive. Once the VC class starts pushing for health care reform (among other things), maybe I'll take what they want seriously.
To be fair, I wouldn't pin the blame on YC. Few people go to Ivy League universities to ponder ethics or philosophy. These schools are widely seen - by students and by parents - as an incredibly expensive way to "10x" your earning potential and influence. They were producing Mark Zuckerbergs for a good while.
Yes, they accept some number of gifted people from underprivileged backgrounds, but these people are not the ones defining the school's culture. For most people, success at Harvard is to become a politician or to get very rich (or both).
I am LMFAO about claims that Cornell is too "woke", like there is a woman's studies department, but also a Hotel Management school, a Business school, an Engineering school, ROTC, an ag school, a vet school, etc. Very vocational stuff. My wife studied animal science and she teaches people to ride horses. Yeah I am proud of the Nobel Prize winner who teaches an introductory physics class that I helped with, but I am also proud of the guy who grows potatoes on top of Mt. Pleasant to test their suitability for potato chip production.
> For the first part, I suspect that money, and the safety net it provides, is a bigger impediment to entrepreneurship than its collegiate advocacy.
An old HN comment captured this perfectly, it’s my favorite analogy of entrepreneurship [1]
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
This is shockingly vapid and wishy-washy even for PG.
Leaving this weird, rather Valley-specific, even YC-specific, navel-gazing definition of "founder" aside, universities should do what they promise to do for their students. And if possible for way, way, way less money.
He seems quite out of touch with the level of economic hardship involved in being a student; a huge number of students already work a couple of jobs and are navigating small businesses, especially here in the UK where he apparently now lives. They aren't going to have enough "free time" to play with a "project" even if a bit more is made available by loosening the curriculum.
If any change is necessary it should be that every university student has access to actual education and ongoing (post-graduation) support to start a real, not hypothetical business, rather than leaving them in this "ripe for YC picking" state where they have "done projects" but don't really have any awareness of business.
If students leave university immediately able to run their own businesses, understand how to bootstrap, be closer to self-funding etc., that leaves them in a stronger position than if they can show they have done stuff but need an external startup meat grinder to get them anywhere. Especially since the job market is being screwed the world over.
But YC doesn't want its people to be that independent. It wants them persuadable, overconfident and desperate to sign up to space camp.
30 years ago you needed PG / YC to have a startup. Hardware was expensive, bandwidth wasn't ubiquitous, there wasn't a massive breadth of libraries and lessons online of what to do and not do.
None of that is true today. And though its is possible to build another unicorn there is not a really good reason to do that any more.
Learning about taxes, business structures (CoOp's any one), HR (how not to get sued, how BAD hr means the IRS comes to get you), reading a cap table, reading a contract, accounting are all skills that a solid tech team needs to "build a business". Marketing, Customer acquisition, Customer retention, Customer Service are all places where most recent grads might not have the skills to "do the needful"
LLM's have compressed the early build out stage. The tech portion, getting from zero to one is now partly trivial. If you are going to build out a niche business that does 1-10 million ARR now is the time. Thats not a product at a scale the at PG and other VC's are really interested in, but it is possible to run a project that size with a very small multi-talented team. They need all those other non technical skills to make it happen.
> He seems quite out of touch with the level of economic hardship involved in being a student; a huge number of students already work a couple of jobs and are navigating small businesses, especially here in the UK where he apparently now lives. They aren't going to have enough "free time" to play with a "project" even if a bit more is made available by loosening the curriculum.
Empirically, student free time grew for much of the 20th century, and students spend much less time on school work than they used to. The decline is not explained by students spending more time on work outside of school; much of it has become leisure time.
Now perhaps there has been a sharp change in the years since those two studies (there certainly has been a sharp change in UK tuition costs), but the point is that our intuitions about how hard students must have to work these days are usually wrong.
When I was an undergrad (35 years ago) I had at least 2 days a week where I was so busy that I had to choose between eating or sleeping. I usually picked eating because not sleeping meant I could pick up another shift or grind on a class project (also because I was young... if I tried that now I'd probably die)
I was going to say, "You might not have noticed, but it has been the 21st century for a quarter-century." However, you clearly did notice, so I'm not sure why you bothered to make this post. It's like you came to a conclusion, realized your empirical data was empirically out-of-date, but decided to press on anyhow. Rather than elucidate the subject, you just exposed your biases.
I don't know how a university could package this, or package "experience" or. "building", etc. I went to college, did engineering and also did economics and did "entrepreneurship". The last 2 were useful not in a sense that they unlocked anything, but I was already starting a business by my second or third year, that I run to this day. I took the courses because I felt I needed them as I bootstrapped. Went on to build multiple startups since. Never went to YC though.
So something was already brewing in me much earlier, and idk what advice to give, honestly not sure how a university can inject this into students. But I think the useful part of the advice is to get universities to stop packaging "entrepreneurship" courses as the path to actual entrepreneurship.
What percentage of students in those classes actually go on to become founders? Willing to bet the numbers aren't encouraging.
Right but what percentage of people doing any given class end up specialising in it?
It's not their job to "inject" it but universities are going to have to grapple with the notion that if they want to keep admitting students, then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses.
So some truly functional support for self-employment, startups, small business working generally seems inevitable. If you're going to persuade students to step out of the job market for up to four years and take on vast debt to hand over then I think pastoral care includes providing the framework to teach them to fend for themselves when the jobs in the brochure don't turn up.
Concrete support, rather than "make yourself ready for something like YC".
(Beyond that I actually think prospectuses should be more closely regulated for what they can and cannot suggest is a likely employment outcome. Because at the moment, prospectuses are aimed at kids and are full of misleading content about how likely they are to get a job.)
> then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses.
That has always been the case, because the purpose of universities is not feeding the market with workers or founders, it's feeding society with educated people. Which is incidentally an excellent basis for both founder and worker roles.
Right but the tenor of it is different. In the 90s if you went more than a fortnight of job search after you graduated and didn’t get to being offered an interview, either you only had a third class degree or there was something very wrong with your CV.
These days every job has hundreds of applicants. In the AI era, thousands.
A University education is priced as though as it has near-term ROI. The government has subsidized it on the basis that it's opening an investment with strong near-term ROI to its citizens.
I don't think you can claim that this ROI is not its purpose.
Enough universities in Europe that do this. I am thinking of studying maths at the German distance university. I forgot the name. It would mean that I neef to speak good German. I might just do that too
> The FernUniversität in Hagen is Germany’s only state distance-learning university, and its largest in terms of student numbers. Its flexible degree programs and continuing education options make higher education accessible to students in a variety of life situations. Its five faculties conduct a wide range of theoretical and applied research in their subject areas of Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Economics and Business Administration, and Law.
His point is to rethink the purpose education...
Yes, there's a privellaged sense in assuming every student has equal access to time,resources, and family dynamics and economics. I feel the idea that universities and education system in general needs to move away from purely academic style of education to practical startup-forcused is needed for the new era.
You’re talking about trade schools with 3 units in financial accounting.
This “rethinking of education” you’re on about is already incredibly rigid from the start, and will not give young people the generalist skills to weather cycles of hype and economic downturns.
> move away from purely academic style of education to practical startup-forcused is needed for the new era.
The new era does not seem to be startup or small business focused, that period already was - at around the time google and company started. Back then, startup actually meant small business starting up.
What is puzzling is why do you need to highjack academia, make it stop doing academic and turn it into incubator or business hub. VCs have enough money to create own business hubs. And they can even admit people who are not from most flashy universities there. There is no reason to take over academia and stop it from its original purpose.
I think just as those who have never had kids, those who have never done a (successful) startup do not understand the value of PG's words - the same way those who choose not to have kids do not understand the joy of (having) them. There is great wisdom in PG's essay, and it is not vapid or wishy-washy.
I don’t necessarily disagree with this but is it the universities job to prepare founders at the expense of everyone else? Under his proposal the motivated founders succeed and everyone else is a loser. This is a very VC focused lens that ignores all the other possible outcomes a human could pursue that are valuable. Established corps need workers, unis need new teachers, hospitals need doctors, etc. So we should let all those people suffer to promote a small group of founders by reducing course load?
My first reflex would be to ctiticise PG, but after reading the article, I don't think I agree here.
First he doesn't say universities should prepare founders - his advice is to those universities that do want to do that.
Second, his advice is basically to skip BS business education and make students good professionals, well-rounded intellectuals, not afraid of starting a business. Anyone would benefit from such education, not only prospective founders
There are founders and there also are the rest of the startup workers.
I felt my most valuable formative experience for being a startup worker was the summer I was back from college and the supermarket I worked at in high school felt they owed me a job even though they weren't really hiring.
I was assigned 50% as a bagger in the front end and 50% a pinch hitter attached to the store manager who did whatever random things we needed whether it was deep clean the floor, paint a metal strip around the building, learn to work the meat slicer to sub for somebody in the deli, sub for people in the bakery, etc.
That made me into somebody who did whatever need to be done, but people who haven't had that kind of experience get really hung up on job titles and think "I'm a data scientist, I don't need to do that."
As a university professor, I've seen that all universities want to do everything.
By which I mean, they employ all sorts of people who are pushing a huge range of agendas. You can't meaningfully speak about "what universities want", because various factions tend to expect free rein to pursue their goals, and there is no mechanism to get everyone pushing in the same direction.
"In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects."
I'd argue that both of these would be highly beneficial for all kinds of students, founders and non-founders alike.
Starting a startup could be generalized for all students to having a dream or goal, taking ownership of it, and making it happen. A startup is just one possible path, pg is probably too specific here, I would agree.
Having more free time to work on my own projects is probably the freedom I missed most at university. I think learning to choose what to work on and making something happen would benefit future workers, teachers, doctors, and engineers just as much as entrepreneurs.
It's a trade-off in terms of time and other resources, since parts of the existing curriculum would have to fade away. But I think it's a good starting point for change and a good direction to move in.
Most engineering classes include projects, but they're presented as homework and/or "something you can show an employer."
And "building things" isn't enough. Many projects have zero commercial potential.
I don't think PG is wrong, but I also don't think he's right. I think if universities wanted to do something with startup culture they could filter the more motivated and talented students into incubators of their own - not through some kind of overly academic post-grad degree, but literally a startup school where the university provides resources, subsistence, and access to funding, in return for a share of project equity. The "teaching" would be more about finding customers and handling finances and less about managerial MBA nonsense.
The big win for students would be "You don't have to worry about food, rent, or basic running costs."
Post-grad research overlaps with this, but is more fundamental. The emphasis here would be more on projects with immediate income potential, not on technology that could be commercialised in the future, possibly.
The problem is academic culture is very different to startup culture, so the startup school would need a much looser relationship to its parent than a typical academic department.
> So we should let all those people suffer to promote a small group of founders by reducing course load?
Yes, that is pretty much VC enterprenour philosophy in nutshell. It is value system that value only one small group only. And if that small group has to put in effort into learning in school or doing something other then building unicorns, that is a great unfairness.
> Yes, that is pretty much VC enterprenour philosophy in nutshell.
It's time we all admit the VCs are the best people, and we're just worthless in comparison. Anyone with any value at all is an investor or a founder. No one else matters.
That's why neo-reactionary ideology is so profound: it would put those best people in charge, and clear all the useless garbage out of their way.
N=1 but my dead VC funded YC company taught me more about the ins and outs of what it takes to run a complex successful engineering and sales operation than any number of years in business school or grinding in consultancies.
YMMV you do have to have a different less nihilistic mindset but it really is a bit of a Neo in the Matrix moment because it lets you see through a bit of the corporate veneer to see the complex mess of personal and group foibles that run our major corporations.
In the end it also ends up making you a 10x more effective worker if that’s where you end up even if just to protect your mental health by being able to explain what’s going on.
> VC funded YC company taught me more ... really is a bit of a Neo in the Matrix moment ... ends up making you a 10x more effective corporate worker if that’s where you end up
No doubt there are learnings worth a lifetime, and changes that alter careers. You hope, the sense of superiority the experience seems to breed is not merely a coping mechanism, but an exercise in positive self-image [0]
> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it
Funny enough, this is why I think a PhD is undervalued by many. You spend years focused on a single area, sometimes pivoting topics, and getting hands on experience with operating solo on the outskirts of a particular field.
The overall point of the degree is you learn how to learn. The nice part is you have the padded walls of university equipment, funding, and time; So failure isn't terminal, just an opportunity to figure out what didn't work.
There's a few reasons how and why this message got distorted and lost in modern academia (honestly it would be a great subject for a book). It's no mistake that better known programs and programs with ties to a stream of successful startups are also the ones where there's a culture of builders and makers.
In hindsight it was quite early in my career, but a bit over 20 years ago I felt burnt out in tech and wanted to try something new. I was share trading quite a bit so thought maybe I'd become a stock broker (online trading was only just starting to become a thing, so being a broker was still a real job at the time!). I finished the degree and got qualified, and while I loved the learning I discovered I hated the industry and that it wasn't for me.
But all of that discovery work, the financial planning, what their actual objectives were, having to dig into why someone wanted to buy a house, etc. proved to be some of the most invaluable and transferable skills I've learned (that, and SQL ;). A lot of that part of the course was learning how to ask questions, and learning how to follow-up to get past the superficial and often incorrect initial answers.
To your point I feel like there's these kind of meta skills that are transferable to many domains, but are sadly lacking these days from a lot of education that is hyper-focused on very role-specific qualifications. The ones that immediately come to mind:
- Learning how to learn (i.e., how to understand yourself, and improve)
- How to ask good questions (similar to above, but about others)
- And something I need a better label for because I just clumsily call it "sales", but in the Daniel Pink "To Sell is Human" style. Something like being able to structure a coherent and compelling narrative to other people. Clearly I fall short on this one.
Maybe the failure mode isn't the PhD itself, but environments where publishing becomes the objective rather than a byproduct of getting unusually good at understanding and building things
> (...) a byproduct of getting unusually good at understanding and building things
A PhD is not about getting good at understanding something, let alone "unusually good". It's about being able to explore an uncharted area with little to no help, and write down your learnings so that those that come after you can build upon your work.
Which is ironic, because self-publishing then should automatically qualify you for a PhD. In fact, I believe more people should take this approach. As far as I'm aware, there's no law or regulation from declaring yourself a "PhD" backed by autoresearch.
> Which is ironic, because self-publishing then should automatically qualify you for a PhD.
No. What qualifies you as a researcher is being able to output work that is accepted by your peers. Hence the peer review process is critical. You fail to meet this bar if you publish something in blogspot or even arxiv for that matter.
A key problem is upper-level academia is rife with the same sorts of human-scale power dynamics. Petty squabbles, ideological (and ideological-flavoured) views can and do hold entire fields from time to time. It is only a particular type of tenacity that breaks up the status quo from time to time. (consider the Marvin Minsky era of AI research. A big personality can stifle an entire field). Peers aren't usually the appropriate measuring stick of merit.
> A key problem is upper-level academia is rife with the same sorts of human-scale power dynamics.
You are trying too hard to come up with excuses. The paper review process is double-blind, and nothing prevents you from publishing the same work in multiple journals. If your goal is to do meaningful contributions to science then "power dynamics" are irrelevant.
You do need to develop a meaningful network in the field if your goal is to collaborate with other researchers, but that's basically what everyone needs to do in any professional field.
Entrenched ideas have momentum. Your lone-warrior attitude is admirable if not lacking in substance. Most fields have had occasional hangups on dead ends, such as the aforementioned Minsky "symbolic > connectivist" debacle. Behaviourism in psychology. String theory. The list goes on.
Eh, in theoretical fields we now have good formal verification tools so that someone publishing a code repo on their personal website is more meaningful in pretty much every way than a peer reviewed journal article. The article becomes an archaic formality.
Like I get that the current social norms around "research" might not be there yet, but if they refuse to adapt, I just see that as a reason to defund "research" and start from scratch.
Your role is to publish papers so your PI is able to get grants, and to network, so the lab profile gets better known in the research community, and then as a more senior grad student you can help write grant applications, and you can build a track record of mentoring (e.g. master students). At the end of the day, you want to demonstrate that you can come up with projects and pursue the research up until publication in a top-tier venue, and the ultimate goal (from the point of view of hiring committees) is obtaining prestige and funding for the university.
If you plan to go to industry, your incentives are somewhat misaligned with your PI. In that case you want to pursue multiple internships and getting networked with top companies in your field, and demonstrating practical output, well-released code, demonstrated downstream value for followup projects etc.
> In an ideal world, sure. In reality, a PhD[1] is about publishing papers in the hope that you learn something along the way.
You're being needlessly dismissive of what "publishing papers" mean. Writing down what you learn is what papers are for, and the only papers that count for a PhD are those which are accepted by reference journals, which impose a relatively high bar on what content they accept.
So you still need to explore uncharted areas, and your main output is still writing down what you found for others to build upon. Those are the deliverables. For the person doing the PhD, the primary benefit is developing research skills, such as independente and self-reliance.
> which impose a relatively high bar on what content they accept.
Nope. In fact they accept utter garbage most of the time. I can't count the numbers of times I've caught pure errors (literal logic errors, code errors, mathematical errors) even in highly respected journals. Journals have a high bar of entry because they've gated their communities, only allowing insiders to publish (ie tenured professors, people associated/employed with university labs or their colleagues). If you don't have an industry connection the odds of you self publishing in these journals is zero. And if you _do_ find a connection, say a professor whose willing to help you out, they'll demand to place their name on your paper (without actually contributing anything). This is how you get papers with 50 authors, because every politicker wanted a piece of the pie.
This is also why you see frontier AI labs self-publishing on their websites rather than in journals.
> Nope. In fact they accept utter garbage most of the time.
Unless you enrolled in a fraudulent, make-believe University of Phoenix style program, no. Any real PhD program only counts publications in a closed allowlist of reputable journals. Those journals are peer reviewed and enforce quality and relevance standards.
> I can't count the numbers of times I've caught pure errors (literal logic errors, code errors, mathematical errors) even in highly respected journals.
That's fine and all, specially if what you actually want to do is take a shot at humble bragging, but back in the subject papers are supposed to be snapshots of your understanding of a topic that can be used by others to inspire or advance their exploration. This means they are not infallible or free from criticism. In fact, it is rather ok brand to publish papers improving upon prior publications by correcting errors, improving methodologies, and even presenting contradictory evidence. That is what it means to be at the bleeding edge.
> Funny enough, this is why I think a PhD is undervalued by many
no, the opportunity cost is too great for this field, for people that saw the light in just undergrad or wound up building software for other people without an undergrad CS degree
the moment you start talking about opportunity cost, I think you've already ducked the intent of the majority of startup-strategizers-for-exponential-gains-only, for which the carrot on the stick is "unbounded" gain
can you repeat that in a different way? opportunity cost is prioritizing gains - or at least a window of opportunity for outsized gains - I don't see how "ducked the intent" fits in
but yes I realize that any conversation with academics is going to be skewed from the market, I think its worth representing nonetheless since academics often interpret their privilege of choice as a nobler cause because they made that choice at all
YC seems to be serving its function perfectly well, if you think of it's function as: "start many venture funded SaaS businesses, with the goal of a small number achieving Unicorn or bigger exits".
Stanford, Harvard, and other elite schools seem to be filling YC's applicant pipeline really handily with smart undergraduates. In a sense, YC is kind of like biz school for startup founders.
The path I see unaddressed: what's the development track for an SMB founder?
YC has the startup/tech company development track pretty well on lock. Traditional MBA programs have the "bigco advancement" track sewn up. How do I learn how to start a small business?
I'd love to eventually start an EE / embedded business on the scale of 5-10 people, ideally selling a niche product to other technical businesses. I have no idea where to start here.
I volunteer mentor at the Rady School Sullivan Center at UCSD. It's a very good program that offers no-credit "learn by doing" programs that pairs entrepreneurial-minded students with technology startups. Everybody wins.
The most important lessons for students include: realistic expectations, a new vocabulary, and a real-world understanding of the complexities of building a startup.
I've worked at other universities where startups are treated more like sports to get interest and social media attention: competitions, events, socializing, etc. Those are nice things, but they are superficial in my opinion.
My advice for students would be to find opportunities to get in the trenches and experience the challenges and hardships faced by founders--those are the most important lessons.
As a former lecturer, there's way more concerning blights than preparing founders. For example, the abuse of the disability system, excessive student loans, the lack of standardized testing at higher level courses, the use of LLMs as a crutch, the politics in hiring...
On the statement regarding the students of universities,
> we get them next. We're like grad school.
Really, my bs meter started going off when I saw this kind of posturing, a company positioning itself as a sort of grad school. Then again, grad schools and universities impress me less with each passing year as they transform themselves to be more like companies. And also, thank you to yc for offering a forum where I feel comfortable enough to post a contrary opinion. That’s better than can be said for some universities these days.
Maybe I don’t disagree after all—or maybe if I do disagree with that point, maybe it’s just not that important to defend the unique role of universities these days as the universities themselves are just continuing to forfeit that on their own.
Giving me whiplash how close to home this hit. Same boat, thought I'd studied the right thing, didn't conduct enough research, now sitting here with a student debt dreaming up a way to get myself out of the hole through self-employment. That and just having the insatiable desire of free-agency and not working for someone else but the driving force is definitely the debt and unemployment lmfao.
I don't think there's much value in college anymore outside of as a class signifier, and most schools are signifying that you are not in the right social class.
College is the last and only place most kids (United States) will ever be academically challenged. It would be scary to live in a world where this is not available.
The high rate of college degrees is a historical anomaly, and of course it's a sham. Most are not truly intellectually challenged in some deep formative ways who get some easy BA diploma to then do some generic administrative MS Office point and click job. It's just due to education inflation, where now everyone is pushed though high school regardless of what they know, so it lost its signaling value. In a sane world, tertiary education would be much smaller, for those who actually need it and have aptitude. It would avoid wasting so many years.
In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect
at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a
startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on
their own projects.
I work at a major research university now but spent a lot of time working for various startups. I felt PhD training was great for being involved in startups, I mean, either way it is about making it routine to do things people have never done before. It hurts so much to see the "Ask HN" questions from people who want to do something new but have no idea how to get started... but PhD-track people think they want to work at established companies with prestige like Google.
- I've always thought it was silly my university had an Entrepreneurship major. Starting a company is probably much better achieved by studying something technical or going deep into a problem space and seeing a problem there, not a generic "entrepreneurship" curriculum.
- I think startups starting as side projects was more of an artifact of the early YC days where startups could just be simple software that some engineers built on nights and weekends. Increasingly I feel like the next generation of startups is more capital intensive and requires more time commitment from deeply technical talent. Not in 100% of cases obviously.
"Starting a company is probably much better achieved by studying something technical or going deep into a problem space and seeing a problem there, not a generic "entrepreneurship" curriculum."
I think this is beyond bad.
The #1 thing anyone could ever to do study entrepreneurship is to do 'case studies'.
Liteally just learning/observing how they work - the nature of founding, structure, power relationships, what debt and equity are for.
Learning 'how a VC firm' operates, and indeed how other kinds of investment bankers work is golden.
HBS is almost a glorified 2 years of basic concepts + 'a lot of case studies'.
Learning how IBM, Standard Oil, Apple and a host of companies you've never heard of operate is deeply enlightening.
The 'Naive By Design' approach by the YC people is almost toxic.
There is definitely some insight in it - that 'seasoned executives' are probably worse at starting small companies in many ways, but, understanding why that is is really important. It has a lot to do with risk, the kinds of things CEO's of established companies are good at etc..
It's as absurd as saying 'Don't Learn Nursing By Studying Nursing - Just Do Music and Engineering'.
> Increasingly I feel like the next generation of startups is more capital intensive and requires more time commitment from deeply technical talent.
Would that be more like other engineering fields? An interesting comparison would be aerospace, for example – it took 15 years to build the first A380, and tens of thousands of indispensable technical niches.
I have no idea how you could think a startup is comparable to a project that ended up costing 25 billion dollars to devolop and involved something like 15k engineers. It's began development in 1988 and the first flight wasn't until 2005.
I want to ask you, what do you think a startup is?
It’s not obvious to me that a “nobody wants this” megaproject by a decades old multinational forced to succeed by government mandate wasting over a decade debating national workshare is a great example of a “startup in aerospace”.
There’s tons of startups making cool fused harnesses and phased arrays and trying to get every permutation of diesel and electric and hydrogen engines certified. Drones and rc aircraft spawn many “built in a dorm room” prototypes for people who don’t value their eyebrows
You probably aren't building the next Airbus in a dorm room, but you might build a weird propulsion prototype, simulation tool, control system, manufacturing technique that eventually becomes the reason a company exists
I think side projects still matter, but maybe in a slightly different way now. They don't necessarily have to become the company themselves. They can be how you discover the problem, test an approach, meet the people you eventually build the company with
I really liked my modern Bachelor's called Code & Context, it focussed on creating potential founders.
It combined coding, design and entrepreneurship. I felt like the idea behind this major was being able to go from idea / problem to finished product sold by a company.
The three main fields are very related:
- Coding: How to actually code and build the solution.
- Design: How to identify problems and design solutions around them. So it's actually multiple different fields of design, e.g. including product design and UX and UI design.
- Entrepreneurship: How to actually build and sustain a company around that.
There were many opportunities to work on your own projects. Increasingly so actually by intention (2 weeks to 8 weeks in later semesters). It's also close to many entrepreneurship programs for potential funding for ideas, but also networking and guidance.
Hi Bryan, thanks for digging up that gem! As prof, I‘ve been thinking a lot about how to modernize our Information Systems Bachelor‘s here in Berlin, Germany. Clearly, the old model has become obsolete in the Age of AI. In my own (tech heavy) courses I‘m increasingly weaving product into the curriculum - eg, how to empathize with users, and how to collaborate in a dev team. I‘d love to pick your brain on your experiences in your Bachelor‘s!
The irony is that universities are probably best at producing founders when they're not explicitly trying to produce founders. Teach difficult things, put smart people together, give them access to equipment and enough free time to build weird stuff. The hard part institutionally is that "we gave students fewer assignments and left them alone" is much harder to sell than an Innovation Center with a nice sign on the building...
> there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects
Don't many universities do something like this, to some degree? Pretty sure we had projects where you could either select a project template or propose your own.
> Until you've seen some founders in real life, you tend to think that starting startups is something done by other people. Seeing them pops that bubble.
I've met a few founders and find that they have a totally different personality to me. Extremely self-assured, decisive, much more focused on the high-level than the low. Often from wealthy or privileged backgrounds where taking risks is... well, less risky.
This reads like a voice from the past. The past where someone coded a web site or an "app" and it turned into a big business. Too many people have explored the web and app spaces, and new ideas that don't need a huge infusion of cash for marketing are very rare.
The AI area is different, in that it's still hard to make things work. There are lots of things to be done, but they're not the quick demos and launches YC used to like.
Agreed. A university is a place for learning how to ask questions, and it runs on curiosity. Starting a company is just a means. When there is something you are curious about, or a problem you want solved, a startup is one of the ways to go after it.
I went to university in Korea and I'm on my third startup. I watched startup clubs, government grant programs, and university-run programs all operate with the stated goal of encouraging entrepreneurship. The means became the end: the optimal strategy turned into presenting whatever scores well with the review panel. People took the money and technically started companies, but without underlying curiosity they couldn't carry it for long.
Teaching people how to build things, and the experience of actually making something from nothing, is special. But I also saw students who had no idea such possibilities existed, unknown unknowns, get gripped by the idea that they had to make something, and end up building only software, and within software, only dating apps.
> Agreed. A university is a place for learning how to ask questions, and it runs on curiosity.
This is a rather oversimplified, old-fashioned take on the purpose of university.
University in the 21st century is surely a straightforward high-stakes gamble, particularly in the UK and the USA: can I risk taking three or four years away from the job market, and go into life-changing, multi-decade debt, in order to gain qualifications that give me access to higher-than-minimum-wage jobs that I can get no other way, and will there still be enough of the kind of jobs mentioned in the prospectus at the end of it?
It is something that in most cases you can't afford to do and you also can't afford not to do.
Mark Zuckerberg was good at programming, but he was a psychology major, not a CS major.
"For Zuckerberg, the school’s major selling point was its Latin program. The current computer science concentrator originally intended to study classics at Harvard."[0]
There's a book called Founders at Work by one J. Livingston. I'd suggest replacing Zuckerberg with an incredible founder who was interviewed in that book, Steve Perlman.
Livingston: Were you an engineering major ?
Perlman: No, I have a liberal arts background. My engineering background is as a hobbyist. ... I designed a software-based modem when I was in college and I got an F for it because the professor said it would never work. But I got it working at my first company. I sent him an email later on and said, "This email is being sent to you on the modem that I designed at Columbia."
Some of my best output has happened during life’s “reading periods”.
Working on something other than what I’m “should to be doing”…because an adjacent or completely unrelated thread HAD to be pulled…and then a period of “off task” deadline be damned irrational monomania…it’s bliss and always turns out well. I’ve learned to trust this.
> whereas the laziest students already learn so little that there's not much room for them to do worse
Source needed
Also if he talks about 90% of all students not being founders then I want data on all 90% before I accept this argument as it seems hastily thought out
I do agree with the general ideas in his essay but these kind of comments that I cite make it seem a bit… too self-interested?
> Startups succeed or fail based on how much customers like the product. Customers don't care what the founders studied in college. So founders are free to study whatever they want, as long as they get good at building things.
Being able to build things isn't important. You need to build things that make the customer happy. Building the wrong things really well is the most typical failure mode I see in technology leadership. It doesn't matter how "good" something is if the customer doesn't give a shit about it.
The simplest suggestion I can make to noob founders is to do part of the product or technology ugly on purpose. Give yourself permission to not be perfect. You may find a similar practice in warehouses and on construction sites. Whenever a new piece of equipment arrives, the manager or foreman will take out a blade and put a nice big scratch on the machine while the team observes. Dethroning the shiny new things as quickly a possible should be the goal. You don't want a bunch of weird ideological gods jerking your chain around all day. The customer is already quite the handful.
It's nice that Y Combinator cherry picks the best students from the ivy league universities. But of course universities need to serve all students and most universities aren't in Silicon Valley (ivy or otherwise). A lot of students might not be starting companies or they might do something entirely reasonable such as taking a traditional job as a doctor, a lawyer, or even as a teacher. And quite many of them flow into the regular job market or pivot to become artisanal bakers or whatever.
But I agree universities can be more open to some of their students pursuing a research career in companies rather than in universities and that they have an important role to play in the transition from one to the other.
Here in Berlin there are local discussions about the lack of engagement of local universities with the startup world here vs. the relative success with which that is done in e.g. Munich and other German cities which have a longer tradition of university spinoffs as startups. There are big differences between universities in Germany. There are also a few private universities in Berlin that are more successful. For example, my office is in a building that hosts the Code university and they definitely have a track record of churning out successful startups that get invested straight out of their program. But the big public universities seem a bit more hands off. I've heard local investors complain that they have more contact with universities elsewhere in Germany than the local ones. They are calling this out as a thing that needs fixing.
My alma mater, Cal Poly SLO, I think, already does a lot of this, and are working on getting better. They have the CIE, something I wish I had back in the day: https://cie.calpoly.edu/
I do wonder if entreprenuership would be higher if we gave students more gap years, because I find it rare that someone who has not been in the world knows they want to start their own business. Tech is an exception because it's more of a lifestyle and culture than other STEM-based business.
The article advocates lighter course load so ambitious undergrads can work on personal projects, some of which (preferably for the author) would be startup ideas.
Glossing over the fact that ambitious undergrads are more likely to be ambitious about grad school rather than starting a company, and reducing their course work is a hindrance if anything.
The goal of a physics degree is not to prepare you to start a business. Don't disadvantage your future physicists on the off chance one of could be the next zuck.
Paul does seem to be somewhat aware that his thesis is "optimize for founders at everyone else's expense".
I mean, if you want the university to churn out plumbers then by all means do plumber things.
I'm somewhat less sure that optimizing for founders turns out better, or even more, founders. Ultimately probably 1% or less of people start a business (of any form, much less venture capital financed.)
You can't give people time and expect them to "create". Creators create not because it's convenient, they create in spite of it being inconvenient. They find the time regardless. (And universities already have scads of free time.)
95% of startups will fail. That statistic does not cause a founder to retreat. And that perseverance when the odds are poor is exactly why some succeed.
> I assume this is satire. I hope it is, at least.
How could it be satire? If you don't believe that investors' investments are the most important good-thing in the world, you must be an anti-capitalist in favor of Soviet-style central planning, and we all know how that turned out. There is no alternative.
Compared to the investments of investors who invest, literally nothing is as important as VCs in the world, not even doctors! Like what would humans even be without money? Probably poor, and who wants to be poor?
> I think universities should focus on academic studies, not as a pipeline to YC.
I agree. If someone wishes to study business or even management, let them take a specialized degree or elective courses. There is no wisdom in removing focus from a specialized degree.
Universities are doing what they need to do to make money.
That's not applicable to teachers who may often times be doing what they need to do to matter to you (because that's what they genuinely want for themselves).
It's amazing really that this drive is there. Obviously a university needs some money, but...
The top universities have been successfull for over 900 years in focusing on having the best teaching and research. Do we really think that will go away, rich people will stop wanting their kids to have the best education?
> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it
Definitly true. Recently I've written a piece of software that I need myself, and I released it as a product but the response is not good. If this were my main startup product, I believe I would be broken. That is, I did not find the right product to build, I think it is need by people, but it is actually not.
Also, after a product in need is built, you should promote to make it known by people who need it.
There used to be a class at Berkeley that was cross listed between the CS department and the business school. When you were in the class, the CS kids and B-School kids were teamed up, and the B-School kids would write the business plan and product description, and the CS kids would make the prototype.
Then they would pitch in front of investors with both. Sometimes the ideas got funded and the kids would actually keep working on them.
Take any advice about "what YC is looking for" with a very large grain of salt.
Many people do the assessments, and I'm far from convinced that they are all working to assess according to exactly what PG or Garry or Michael or anyone else say are the criteria.
There's TONS of advice written and video on what YC is looking for and no evidence that all that advise is scientifically followed.
If YC is a bunch of normal humans then the assessors are just deciding however they think right.
So you will be disappointed (as I was) if you research and tune your application to "exactly what PG is looking for" and you're rejected.
In articles like this I think PG is just saying "if I was doing YC application assessments, as I did 15 years ago, then this is what I would be looking for", not "this is what todays YC assessors are definitely looking for". Big difference.
This is what I'm saying to my kids all the time: don't expect to work for a boss in the future, but count on starting something for yourself. I just don't see most companies hiring loads of people, when they can also summon some robots and agents.
Building a solid technical foundation before rushing into a startup is crucial. The best founders I know focused on solving deep infrastructure problems first rather than just chasing trends.
99% of university students will never start a company. 99% of those who do will close down without making any measurable difference to the world. I think the world would be better off if the universities actively discouraged the idea of starting companies. Those few who really burn for the idea might do it anyway, and might be more likely to succeed.
The idea is quite similar to Chekhov's "Rules for Aspiring Authors":
Any newborn baby should be thoroughly bathed and, after giving him a rest from his first impressions, severely whipped and told: “Don’t write! Don’t write! Don’t be a writer!” If, in spite of this punishment, the baby will show writing tendencies, a caress should be tried. If a caress doesn’t help, give up on the baby – he is as good as lost1. The writing itch is incurable.
The path of the writer from start to finish is paved with thorns, nails and nettle, and therefore any sensible person must remove himself from writing by any means ... (eventually gets to actual advice)
And those who really burn for it probably are not needing university anyway. The landscape of wildly successful people is filled with those who dropped out of high school or college.
I think that undermines a lot of benefits of entrepreneurship - the learning of many different skills, network, etc. and also just the adventure of starting a company.
It’s like saying most people will never be professional athletes so we should discourage sports.
Or most people live in their home country, so we should discourage young people from taking backpacking trips.
We seem to have become a culture where we unrealistically believe we have a solution. The big issue with many who label themselves as entrepreneurs is that often the problem doesn't exist. You end up networking with people who are less aware and also don't recognise that the problem doesn't exist and then motivate you even more. Then you have funders who rarely have expertise so they will believe you when you say it will change the world which basically all the time it won't.
Now I'm not of the view people shouldn't try to change the world but why should that be fixated on a business, why not a community effort, why not research, why not charity based, they all provide you with a range of skills. We have got a saturation of those starting businesses in every industry (especially mine which is quantum computing) and most have a poor idea or a repetitive idea or an idea that so unthought out it can't go anywhere.
(I will say less should go backpacking. Travelling on the whole now has become a distraction from life instead of a discovery. You are better taking that year or 6 months and spending it on something you love to do. That will show you who you are more than visiting some of the poorest nations on earth.)
I agree that a lot of entrepreneurship is misguided. And I totally agree that research, charity work, or other stuff can have many of the same benefits.
What I think is important (and why I think entrepreneurship is directionally good) is open-ended exploration and taking initiative to pursue one's own projects. I don't care about the specific direction, but about the idea of proactively trying to shape reality by following one's interests.
I think what you're describing with backpacking is true for most. If the point is to check off a list of Instagram picture spots, then it's more of an exercise in consumerism. If it's to deeply engage with other cultures, languages, and people, that's different.
I guess it's similar with entrepreneurship. If the point is to inhabit the founder personality archetype you see on social media, that's different than to be genuinely solving interesting problems.
I suspect there's a disconnect. I'm noting a lack of note about the real burden of finding capital to launch even a rather modest venture.
YC is an exclusive club (no offense folks, it is very much a club), and there's only so many venture bucks to go around. Before we produce more 'founders', it would be very beneficial to examine how they're to secure the very necessary funding. Not everybody has access to a personal reserve of capital for many many reasons.
> Merely eliminating [homework[ for a few weeks resulted in two trillion dollar companies. Imagine what the US GDP would be if reading period at Harvard were twice as long.
This idea that "very large company" -> "productive economy" needs to die.
Large companies provide people with jobs and fund many suppliers with their transactions/operations. Walmart and Amazon are the two biggest employers in the US.
And both of them rely on government welfare to keep their employees from starving so that they can pass more wealth on to shareholders. A study earlier this year (below) estimated that more than a million Walmart and Amazon employees nationwide depend on Medicaid.
> Walmart and Amazon are the two biggest employers in the US.
One of the two biggest employers in the US is one who treats their employees so poorly that they have to pee in bottles and continue working after a colleague has died and been left on the floor? If that’s the kind of jobs large companies “provide”, it’s not worth it. We’d much better off with several small companies that give people the flexibility to escape draconian working conditions.
It can be viewed that way or it can be viewed that large companies have destroyed smaller companies by utilising slave labour and grey area practices to get the market share and then they are the only employers left for many.
> This idea that "very large company" -> "productive economy" needs to die.
I am economically naive, but I also have never understood this argument. I asked a Spanish friend what Spain needed, he said “more big companies”. Is it because a big company provides you something closer to a monopoly, and can do so internationally?
Also, just logically considering hundreds of thousands of students have been part of Harvard reading periods over the years, and there are two unicorn events where reading period may have played some small part in the formation of a trillion dollar company, I'd imagine that if the reading period at Harvard were twice as long the US GDP would likely be approximately exactly the same as it is now.
Yeah but they'd have twice as many parties at Harvard in that time, and what if that means there are twice as many chances for a Business student at frat party to hook up with the daughter of a billionaire and then rope his technically competent friend into working on this "crazy idea" he had high off his ass? I say, why do we even need classes at Harvard, we just need a lot of frat guys and slutty daughters of billionaires and they can just hire people from MIT to work under them. The system works.
I see it as 'Large companies are proof that concentration of wealth and capital is occurring, and that unless something structural changes, it will continue to occur.'
Big companies like apple or meta screw their home countries (and most other countries, apart from tax havens) dramatically. Basically no taxes paid which is core to how state and everything is financed, have often enough power and huge egos to start meddling with running the state itself. They are utterly selfish entities run by highly functioning sociopaths with no concern about long term wellbeing of population. I could go on and on like this. Yes, some do give nice salaries but apart from faangs in SV its not the rule.
Bunch of smaller companies would have to form some sort of long term cartel and sync those egos to achieve anything close to one major company.
Last thing this world needs is another fuckup trillionaire with massive childhood/mental issues and ego bigger than Everest who thinks he knows where humanity should go (to serve their wishes and needs). Or just milk mankind of anything good remaining like zuckenberg is doing.
I don't need to name further, we can all imagine our own elons on that place
Where I live a university prepares you for an academic career. Business has no place at a university. If you want to learn a trade such as being a software developer or a plumber you go to a trade school.
It’s interesting to see how the Americans have a different view on this.
As an American, it's incredibly sad to watch literally every aspect of life be subsumed by Capitalism. No knowledge for knowledge's sake, you've got to generate PROFIT, or it's a waste of time!
PG is an out of touch idiot. Without is YC connection his idiotic ramblings would never find there way to the front page. Really lowers the quality of HN.
The context from working in a Valley startup funded by YC and run by one of their former executives is they are not seeing the talent they once did despite mining the same sources. There is little self reflection to consider the Silicon Valley offer has changed versus the talent itself.
I literally said, "we're all adults here," and I was corrected. The new batch of Cal grads are children, they said -- which is an indictment of all US graduates and not just Cal for some reason. Or maybe the startup funders are just like the ancient Greek writers who complained kids today don't want to work.
Universities need to get better at rounding out one-dimensional tech bros so they have some semblance of a conscience, ethical backbone or creativity. How many more slimy purveyors of disinformation bot farms do we need run by billionaires intent on killing the internet, "disruptive" businesses that break laws and destroy jobs until their ubiquity makes them de facto quasi-legal and yet more AI slop served to us in a subscription web app?
I disagree with the underlying assumption that it's the universities responsibility to cultivate founders.
Universities were initially built to further the knowledge of specific fields, for the sake of its own advancement, producing philosophers, artists and scientists.
In other words, universities are for people to learn for the sake of learning, not to earn a wage. New institutions should be built to cultivate founders and entrepreneurs. Career development centers, maker spaces, co-working spaces, these are the places to build the entrepreneurial spirit.
It's... not? He's describing how to cultivate founders in university. I'm saying that it's not what a university should be focused on.
A startup is not a technical project, it's an organisational endeavour. They don't live or die by the product alone, but by the market demand, organisational robustness and a little bit of luck.
The first universities were founded to educate priests, lawyers, and physicians. This can be seen in the way that universities standardized on 4 faculties: theology, law, medicine, and arts. What you are thinking of is the Humboldtian model of higher education which is a set of ideas that emerged in the 19th century and made research a central part of university's mission.
I still agree with you though in that it is not necessarily the universities responsibility to cultivate founders.
Exactly. Answer: How universities of yore have “prepared” founders thus far. The premise of PG’s otherwise insightful prose is on shaky ground - or at the very least - debatable.
(I hope PG isn’t outsourcing his thinking to some agentic workflow.)
In other words, universities are for people to learn for the sake of learning, not to earn a wage.
Universities should teach people that they can change the world if they want to, and that they don't have to be passive about accepting what's happening. One way to do that is to be a founder.
Tech founders pretty much always need more than a desire to earn a wage to succeed. Having a genuine belief that something that doesn't exist should exist is the drive to build. If you're in it for the money gets a job with an existing tech company, or a bank, or a hedge fund, is an wildly better idea.
Looking at where startup culture went and where tech billionaires stear the politics, I dont want them changing the world. They are literally bragging about building dystopia.
If YC is financing 500 vibe coding Electron apps it is not up to the universities to create a new pipeline with biochemistry founders.
AI will destroy YouTube, Facebook, Google Search, programming and all the business models that made Silicon Valley people filthy rich. People will finally leave the Internet. It will destroy Ycombinator. You are sawing off the branch that you are sitting on.
None of it is necessary or inevitable, but SV follows SciFi trash like it's Dianetics from L. Ron Hubbard.
PG has become pretentious and doesn’t allow people to disagree with him. Anyone following him on X can confirm that, where he chooses to reply to only certain replies with weaker arguments or just refuting the strong ones..
I'm not going to argue about pg's pretentiousness or lack of, but I will suggest that trying to change someone's mind by presenting them with rational arguments is never going to work to persuade them they're wrong. What someone posts on social media is a reflection of their identity; it's literally who they present themselves as to the world. A well-formed argument will be rationalized away whether it's right or wrong. The way to persuade someone to change their mind is to nudge them to think about what they're posting so they persuade themselves they're wrong. Target their beliefs, not their knowledge.
If pg is wrong about something it isn't because he isn't informed about what's right. It's because he's chosen to frame something in a way that aligns to what he believes.
> I will suggest that trying to change someone's mind by presenting them with rational arguments is never going to work to persuade them they're wrong.
> Startups succeed or fail based on how much customers like the product.
This is in theory. In practice, a worse product with more money and louder marketing easily wins against a better product nobody knows about. I'm sure Paul perfectly understands it.
There are other idealizations I won't comment on, but the whole piece reads like an attempt to nurture an application pipeline for YC rather than the genuine writing I liked in earlier Paul's essays.
Here is an alternative point of view: get your degree and work for a few years. Then go back to university to learn business basics (finance, marketing, management). Start a company in your late 30s, when you know your subject area well and you have an idea how to steer finance/marketing (marketing is much harder that it might seem). Bootstrap or take as little investment as possible until you get PMF. Then scale up without giving away (much) equity.
It worked well for me. It can surely work well for others.
This is a common approach (very close to the norm for the most successful startups and companies I have worked with in my career), but I strongly disagree with this: "go back to university to learn business basics (finance, marketing, management)".
You will learn all of that on the job by the time you make it to Principal Engineer, Senior Sales Engineer, Staff Product Manager, or Enterprise AE in the American/Israeli/Indian and Chinese startup and BigTech scenes and especially in Enterprise SaaS, Cybersecurity, Hardware, AI/MLOps, Infra, and other high domain expertise but high revenue and exit potential heavy segments.
Also, a plurality of VCs in the segments I mentioned above tend to have learnt on the job and later switched to VC after successful exits and/or head-hunting.
If you do consider going back to school - only do a graduate research driven CS, EE, CE, or ECE degree program like Stanford, UIUC, CMU, GT (their online program is as good as on-campus with the right courses), UT Austin (their online program is as good as on-campus), and a handful of others.
My brother in Christ, they don't finish their degrees.
If you have some VC throwing hackathons in NorCal where they find people in their early/mid-20s, tell them they're the most brilliant people in the history of the human race, and promise them millions of dollars for their project if they drop out, there's going to be a lot of people with severe personality disorders coming out of that situation and there's nothing the university system can do about that.
Clear answer when you ask from someone whose existence is build on finding enough marks. On both sides of their system. And I will say both the founders and the VC are marks in the system...
The thing that this misses is the value of craftsmanship and the time that it takes to develop that increases based on the difficulty of the domain AND how long that domain has existed.
Brand new industries don’t have depth, and may not even have high difficulty and so starting a SAAS business or Social Media startup 2008-2014 was easy from a technical point of view
The difficult in it being a ‘startup’ was more about business execution than building execution. And luck of course. Hence Harvard students applying to become founders
Now the craftsmanship involved in building novel solutions in complex domains that are not new requires deep knowledge.
Hence PHDs and Postdocs, which are projects, but projects that rely on existing knowledge.
Paul thinking of founders being a replacement for grad school is a result of his experience building startups in low complexity novel industries with large financial upside.
That’s not what a nation needs to move itself forward. It is what VCs need to generate alpha, and so you’ll see exploration in novel low complexity industries with large financial upside, and not hard science - so Harvard grads make sense.
This idea that ‘builders’ are ‘builders’ misses the need for craftsmanship and apprenticeship
Take solar or battery technology — that requires deep knowledge of materials and chemistry that you don’t get from an undergrad. And why ASML didn’t get built in the US. Or why TSMC exists in Taiwan
They lead because of a devotion to depth of expertise - not becoming a billionaire
So again, if you want sustainable hugely profitable 0-1 companies you better hope for a monopoly business, and why lobbyiny government to protect your rents is a faster alternative to PHDs, Postgrads, and long term industrial policy
> How inspiring founders are to students is a function roughly of how rich and famous they are divided by how much older they are than the students.
I'm not fond of this kind of math metaphor. "roughly" is doing a lot of work here. He's saying that richer founders are more inspirational than poorer founders and younger founders are more inspirational than older founders. But when you put it that way, it's so obvious that maybe it's not worth saying. So he cast it as an equation:
inspiration = wealth / age-diff
But you can't take this equation literally. I mean, what if the founder is younger than the students? Do you get negative inspiration? What happens if you divide by 0? Is inspiration undefined in that case? Is a $2 billion net-worth 30-year-old really twice as inspirational as a $1 billion net-worth at the same age? Is Elon Musk 10 times more inspirational than Bill Gates?
This is excessive, and unjustified precision. Save equations for actual equations.
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of Paul Graham, and I only criticize because he is worth criticizing. Please don't block me.
It grossly blurs the distinction between those who put in personal blood, sweat, tears, and money into starting a business versus those who make a few slides so they can use other people’s money to hire others to do all the work and come up with all the ideas.
They are not the same. Per VC culture, small business owner is a looser, tunning lifestyle business. They produce useful products in competitive markets and nurture relationship with customers.
Startup is meant to become monopoly and does not have to have good economics before abusing monopoly power. Competition is for loosers. It is about disrupting, not about building.
They love to "teach" how everyone else in the world should help rich people get richer. And their favorite trick is to sell this solution to their own problems as a "win-win", a benefit for everyone.
It is the standard in the discourse of every oligarch and billionaire: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Ellison, Altman,... : "everyone will be happier if they make me more money".
I'd prefer it if they did not prepare people to destroy civilization to further pad some decrepit boomer's already ample pension. It's not like you can take it with you Paul.
We should have known better than to put the nerds in charge -- too focused on their spreadsheets and making the big number go up, while completely ignoring the calamities they have wrought upon both the people and their environs.
"In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects."
Early internet founders were not CS majors. Most of them dropped out of college. They weren't seeking fortunes or careers. They were creatives, oddballs, outcasts, pirates!
Today, everyone is a founder. Founders of bubbles and bro culture. Herd-minds, chasing the Californian greed rush. Round 'em up, Angel Investors!
Nowhere in this essay is it mentioned why its good to start a startup..
Given the 20 years of twisted and evil greedy nature of most successful VC level startups and their founders, tech bros and VCs and the evil of MBA optimized Private Equity should we not instead teach young people to run away from startups and greed?
Paul Graham is selling a drug to society
That drug has infected the world.. we need to review what value all this disruption is providing anyone
While I agree the comment will rub the startup groupies the wrong way, I don't really think the question itself is unsubstantial, especially in comparison to the post, as the post does not address the question. And I elaborated in response to a comment to it.
It's telling of the fact that we don't see most, or even 10%, of what gets posted here. There's far too much to read.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
I don't expect you to read everything, but your choice of what to call out is still telling. If you truly think this is the sort of comment that needs direct intervention, I'd politely suggest you should set aside 2-3 hours per week to read comments on /new posts.
To be clear: I do not have the time or energy to back this up statistically, but my experience is that you are substantially more likely to choose to get involved in threads/comments that challenge startup culture than you are in threads/comments that embrace bigotry, conspiracy theories, and other genuinely appalling content.
Edit: To elaborate a bit and put a final touch on this before I call it a night, the problem isn't that I see you condemning comments like this; it's that I rarely-to-never see you condemning substantially worse comments. It seems to communicate a clear choice to allow repugnant behavior as long as it doesn't criticize startup culture/founder worship.
He argues for lowering experience of everyone except founders, so that founders dont have more free time and dont have to learn what university teaches.
It is favoring 1 group, not wide areas of the human experience.
It doesn't sound like he's arguing for something different than a lot of movements in education like Waldorf schools, the Nueva School, progressive liberal arts colleges, or how a lot of graduate schools work.
That school should be a support structure for self directed exploration rather than rigidity.
How is encouraging that unique to startup founders?
Similar in smell to political science degree --> career politician, I think pg nails it:
> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it. And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance.
> Another thing that will tend to draw universities away from the optimal path is business schools, if they have them. Business schools were not designed to train founders. They were designed to train the managerial class of the large industrial companies that arose in the early 20th century; they're the West Points of industrial capitalism. That's why their official name is usually the School of Management. But while the skills they teach might be useful in running companies beyond a certain size, they're not the critical ingredient in founding them. And the skills that are are already taught by other departments. So to the extent business schools affect their parent university's strategy for preparing founders, it can only be by adding error.
> And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance.
But then he also states:
> Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to the ideal of liberal education than preparing them for almost any other kind of career.
This is pretty myopic and is obviously biased from someone embedded in the startup space, perhaps not surprising given how little value most startups provide. Not everything in life is a whiz-bang, fail fast, build-some-new-product-from-scratch startup. In fact, most things are not.
Pay attention to actual liberal arts universities. Their goal is on the long-term and not to satisfy some near-term need of startup founders making the next killer app or product. It can be argued that most startups build towards generating value only in the sense of monetary value, in that most startups' goal are purely about the exit. It really has little to do with building products. Most venture capitalists got their wealth from the dotcom bubble. Almost none of them know how to build actual products.
Notice there is no mention of ethics, philosophy, or human connection, except maybe Zuck being a psych major. Do we really want the future of education to be an incubator pipeline?
That said I wholehearted agree with the second half of this paragraph: "In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects."
For the first part, I suspect that money, and the safety net it provides, is a bigger impediment to entrepreneurship than its collegiate advocacy. It's hard to start a company or join a fledgling one when you are staring at an immense debt.
Yes, they accept some number of gifted people from underprivileged backgrounds, but these people are not the ones defining the school's culture. For most people, success at Harvard is to become a politician or to get very rich (or both).
An old HN comment captured this perfectly, it’s my favorite analogy of entrepreneurship [1]
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076
Leaving this weird, rather Valley-specific, even YC-specific, navel-gazing definition of "founder" aside, universities should do what they promise to do for their students. And if possible for way, way, way less money.
He seems quite out of touch with the level of economic hardship involved in being a student; a huge number of students already work a couple of jobs and are navigating small businesses, especially here in the UK where he apparently now lives. They aren't going to have enough "free time" to play with a "project" even if a bit more is made available by loosening the curriculum.
If any change is necessary it should be that every university student has access to actual education and ongoing (post-graduation) support to start a real, not hypothetical business, rather than leaving them in this "ripe for YC picking" state where they have "done projects" but don't really have any awareness of business.
If students leave university immediately able to run their own businesses, understand how to bootstrap, be closer to self-funding etc., that leaves them in a stronger position than if they can show they have done stuff but need an external startup meat grinder to get them anywhere. Especially since the job market is being screwed the world over.
But YC doesn't want its people to be that independent. It wants them persuadable, overconfident and desperate to sign up to space camp.
He has been like this for a while now. His last few essays are simply advertisement for a startup accelerator. Conveniently, he also owns one of them.
None of that is true today. And though its is possible to build another unicorn there is not a really good reason to do that any more.
Learning about taxes, business structures (CoOp's any one), HR (how not to get sued, how BAD hr means the IRS comes to get you), reading a cap table, reading a contract, accounting are all skills that a solid tech team needs to "build a business". Marketing, Customer acquisition, Customer retention, Customer Service are all places where most recent grads might not have the skills to "do the needful"
LLM's have compressed the early build out stage. The tech portion, getting from zero to one is now partly trivial. If you are going to build out a niche business that does 1-10 million ARR now is the time. Thats not a product at a scale the at PG and other VC's are really interested in, but it is possible to run a project that size with a very small multi-talented team. They need all those other non technical skills to make it happen.
Empirically, student free time grew for much of the 20th century, and students spend much less time on school work than they used to. The decline is not explained by students spending more time on work outside of school; much of it has become leisure time.
https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00093 https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811011200908
Now perhaps there has been a sharp change in the years since those two studies (there certainly has been a sharp change in UK tuition costs), but the point is that our intuitions about how hard students must have to work these days are usually wrong.
Here is inflation since
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2022/04/inflat...
Please lets have some decency towards the struggles of students
So something was already brewing in me much earlier, and idk what advice to give, honestly not sure how a university can inject this into students. But I think the useful part of the advice is to get universities to stop packaging "entrepreneurship" courses as the path to actual entrepreneurship.
What percentage of students in those classes actually go on to become founders? Willing to bet the numbers aren't encouraging.
It's not their job to "inject" it but universities are going to have to grapple with the notion that if they want to keep admitting students, then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses.
So some truly functional support for self-employment, startups, small business working generally seems inevitable. If you're going to persuade students to step out of the job market for up to four years and take on vast debt to hand over then I think pastoral care includes providing the framework to teach them to fend for themselves when the jobs in the brochure don't turn up.
Concrete support, rather than "make yourself ready for something like YC".
(Beyond that I actually think prospectuses should be more closely regulated for what they can and cannot suggest is a likely employment outcome. Because at the moment, prospectuses are aimed at kids and are full of misleading content about how likely they are to get a job.)
That has always been the case, because the purpose of universities is not feeding the market with workers or founders, it's feeding society with educated people. Which is incidentally an excellent basis for both founder and worker roles.
These days every job has hundreds of applicants. In the AI era, thousands.
I don't think you can claim that this ROI is not its purpose.
Enough universities in Europe that do this. I am thinking of studying maths at the German distance university. I forgot the name. It would mean that I neef to speak good German. I might just do that too
> The FernUniversität in Hagen is Germany’s only state distance-learning university, and its largest in terms of student numbers. Its flexible degree programs and continuing education options make higher education accessible to students in a variety of life situations. Its five faculties conduct a wide range of theoretical and applied research in their subject areas of Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Economics and Business Administration, and Law.
I believe some exams have to be taken non-remote: https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/english/study/distance-learning...
(I have been thinking about an OU degree for a second act)
This “rethinking of education” you’re on about is already incredibly rigid from the start, and will not give young people the generalist skills to weather cycles of hype and economic downturns.
The new era does not seem to be startup or small business focused, that period already was - at around the time google and company started. Back then, startup actually meant small business starting up.
What is puzzling is why do you need to highjack academia, make it stop doing academic and turn it into incubator or business hub. VCs have enough money to create own business hubs. And they can even admit people who are not from most flashy universities there. There is no reason to take over academia and stop it from its original purpose.
I agree with this, but also people in this sort of situation aren't socially situated to become startup founders so probably not the target of this?
First he doesn't say universities should prepare founders - his advice is to those universities that do want to do that.
Second, his advice is basically to skip BS business education and make students good professionals, well-rounded intellectuals, not afraid of starting a business. Anyone would benefit from such education, not only prospective founders
I felt my most valuable formative experience for being a startup worker was the summer I was back from college and the supermarket I worked at in high school felt they owed me a job even though they weren't really hiring.
I was assigned 50% as a bagger in the front end and 50% a pinch hitter attached to the store manager who did whatever random things we needed whether it was deep clean the floor, paint a metal strip around the building, learn to work the meat slicer to sub for somebody in the deli, sub for people in the bakery, etc.
That made me into somebody who did whatever need to be done, but people who haven't had that kind of experience get really hung up on job titles and think "I'm a data scientist, I don't need to do that."
As a university professor, I've seen that all universities want to do everything.
By which I mean, they employ all sorts of people who are pushing a huge range of agendas. You can't meaningfully speak about "what universities want", because various factions tend to expect free rein to pursue their goals, and there is no mechanism to get everyone pushing in the same direction.
I'd argue that both of these would be highly beneficial for all kinds of students, founders and non-founders alike.
Starting a startup could be generalized for all students to having a dream or goal, taking ownership of it, and making it happen. A startup is just one possible path, pg is probably too specific here, I would agree.
Having more free time to work on my own projects is probably the freedom I missed most at university. I think learning to choose what to work on and making something happen would benefit future workers, teachers, doctors, and engineers just as much as entrepreneurs.
It's a trade-off in terms of time and other resources, since parts of the existing curriculum would have to fade away. But I think it's a good starting point for change and a good direction to move in.
And "building things" isn't enough. Many projects have zero commercial potential.
I don't think PG is wrong, but I also don't think he's right. I think if universities wanted to do something with startup culture they could filter the more motivated and talented students into incubators of their own - not through some kind of overly academic post-grad degree, but literally a startup school where the university provides resources, subsistence, and access to funding, in return for a share of project equity. The "teaching" would be more about finding customers and handling finances and less about managerial MBA nonsense.
The big win for students would be "You don't have to worry about food, rent, or basic running costs."
Post-grad research overlaps with this, but is more fundamental. The emphasis here would be more on projects with immediate income potential, not on technology that could be commercialised in the future, possibly.
The problem is academic culture is very different to startup culture, so the startup school would need a much looser relationship to its parent than a typical academic department.
Yes, that is pretty much VC enterprenour philosophy in nutshell. It is value system that value only one small group only. And if that small group has to put in effort into learning in school or doing something other then building unicorns, that is a great unfairness.
It's time we all admit the VCs are the best people, and we're just worthless in comparison. Anyone with any value at all is an investor or a founder. No one else matters.
That's why neo-reactionary ideology is so profound: it would put those best people in charge, and clear all the useless garbage out of their way.
Has anyone ever plotted the lifespan of YC companies from each cohort?
Most of them end up dead…
YMMV you do have to have a different less nihilistic mindset but it really is a bit of a Neo in the Matrix moment because it lets you see through a bit of the corporate veneer to see the complex mess of personal and group foibles that run our major corporations.
In the end it also ends up making you a 10x more effective worker if that’s where you end up even if just to protect your mental health by being able to explain what’s going on.
No doubt there are learnings worth a lifetime, and changes that alter careers. You hope, the sense of superiority the experience seems to breed is not merely a coping mechanism, but an exercise in positive self-image [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34053801
Mostly an extremely online problem, not a real world one. More so the nature of the medium in fact.
Evidenced by how you edited out the “dead” in front of VC funded when you were quoting me. You read the tone you want to read.
But just to caveat, its not YC or VC funding that is critical.
It’s the act of building something and trying to sell it that is.
wait till you see what happens to a lot of forbes 30 under 30
Just like mostly everything he writes about.
> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it
Funny enough, this is why I think a PhD is undervalued by many. You spend years focused on a single area, sometimes pivoting topics, and getting hands on experience with operating solo on the outskirts of a particular field.
The overall point of the degree is you learn how to learn. The nice part is you have the padded walls of university equipment, funding, and time; So failure isn't terminal, just an opportunity to figure out what didn't work.
There's a few reasons how and why this message got distorted and lost in modern academia (honestly it would be a great subject for a book). It's no mistake that better known programs and programs with ties to a stream of successful startups are also the ones where there's a culture of builders and makers.
But all of that discovery work, the financial planning, what their actual objectives were, having to dig into why someone wanted to buy a house, etc. proved to be some of the most invaluable and transferable skills I've learned (that, and SQL ;). A lot of that part of the course was learning how to ask questions, and learning how to follow-up to get past the superficial and often incorrect initial answers.
To your point I feel like there's these kind of meta skills that are transferable to many domains, but are sadly lacking these days from a lot of education that is hyper-focused on very role-specific qualifications. The ones that immediately come to mind:
- Learning how to learn (i.e., how to understand yourself, and improve)
- How to ask good questions (similar to above, but about others)
- And something I need a better label for because I just clumsily call it "sales", but in the Daniel Pink "To Sell is Human" style. Something like being able to structure a coherent and compelling narrative to other people. Clearly I fall short on this one.
A PhD is not about getting good at understanding something, let alone "unusually good". It's about being able to explore an uncharted area with little to no help, and write down your learnings so that those that come after you can build upon your work.
[1] My experience in ML in 2026.
No. What qualifies you as a researcher is being able to output work that is accepted by your peers. Hence the peer review process is critical. You fail to meet this bar if you publish something in blogspot or even arxiv for that matter.
You are trying too hard to come up with excuses. The paper review process is double-blind, and nothing prevents you from publishing the same work in multiple journals. If your goal is to do meaningful contributions to science then "power dynamics" are irrelevant.
You do need to develop a meaningful network in the field if your goal is to collaborate with other researchers, but that's basically what everyone needs to do in any professional field.
Like I get that the current social norms around "research" might not be there yet, but if they refuse to adapt, I just see that as a reason to defund "research" and start from scratch.
If you plan to go to industry, your incentives are somewhat misaligned with your PI. In that case you want to pursue multiple internships and getting networked with top companies in your field, and demonstrating practical output, well-released code, demonstrated downstream value for followup projects etc.
You're being needlessly dismissive of what "publishing papers" mean. Writing down what you learn is what papers are for, and the only papers that count for a PhD are those which are accepted by reference journals, which impose a relatively high bar on what content they accept.
So you still need to explore uncharted areas, and your main output is still writing down what you found for others to build upon. Those are the deliverables. For the person doing the PhD, the primary benefit is developing research skills, such as independente and self-reliance.
Nope. In fact they accept utter garbage most of the time. I can't count the numbers of times I've caught pure errors (literal logic errors, code errors, mathematical errors) even in highly respected journals. Journals have a high bar of entry because they've gated their communities, only allowing insiders to publish (ie tenured professors, people associated/employed with university labs or their colleagues). If you don't have an industry connection the odds of you self publishing in these journals is zero. And if you _do_ find a connection, say a professor whose willing to help you out, they'll demand to place their name on your paper (without actually contributing anything). This is how you get papers with 50 authors, because every politicker wanted a piece of the pie.
This is also why you see frontier AI labs self-publishing on their websites rather than in journals.
What they self-publish on their own websites should be regarded as marketing.
Unless you enrolled in a fraudulent, make-believe University of Phoenix style program, no. Any real PhD program only counts publications in a closed allowlist of reputable journals. Those journals are peer reviewed and enforce quality and relevance standards.
> I can't count the numbers of times I've caught pure errors (literal logic errors, code errors, mathematical errors) even in highly respected journals.
That's fine and all, specially if what you actually want to do is take a shot at humble bragging, but back in the subject papers are supposed to be snapshots of your understanding of a topic that can be used by others to inspire or advance their exploration. This means they are not infallible or free from criticism. In fact, it is rather ok brand to publish papers improving upon prior publications by correcting errors, improving methodologies, and even presenting contradictory evidence. That is what it means to be at the bleeding edge.
no, the opportunity cost is too great for this field, for people that saw the light in just undergrad or wound up building software for other people without an undergrad CS degree
but yes I realize that any conversation with academics is going to be skewed from the market, I think its worth representing nonetheless since academics often interpret their privilege of choice as a nobler cause because they made that choice at all
YC seems to be serving its function perfectly well, if you think of it's function as: "start many venture funded SaaS businesses, with the goal of a small number achieving Unicorn or bigger exits".
Stanford, Harvard, and other elite schools seem to be filling YC's applicant pipeline really handily with smart undergraduates. In a sense, YC is kind of like biz school for startup founders.
The path I see unaddressed: what's the development track for an SMB founder?
YC has the startup/tech company development track pretty well on lock. Traditional MBA programs have the "bigco advancement" track sewn up. How do I learn how to start a small business?
I'd love to eventually start an EE / embedded business on the scale of 5-10 people, ideally selling a niche product to other technical businesses. I have no idea where to start here.
The most important lessons for students include: realistic expectations, a new vocabulary, and a real-world understanding of the complexities of building a startup.
I've worked at other universities where startups are treated more like sports to get interest and social media attention: competitions, events, socializing, etc. Those are nice things, but they are superficial in my opinion.
My advice for students would be to find opportunities to get in the trenches and experience the challenges and hardships faced by founders--those are the most important lessons.
And the list goes on
> we get them next. We're like grad school.
Really, my bs meter started going off when I saw this kind of posturing, a company positioning itself as a sort of grad school. Then again, grad schools and universities impress me less with each passing year as they transform themselves to be more like companies. And also, thank you to yc for offering a forum where I feel comfortable enough to post a contrary opinion. That’s better than can be said for some universities these days.
Maybe I don’t disagree after all—or maybe if I do disagree with that point, maybe it’s just not that important to defend the unique role of universities these days as the universities themselves are just continuing to forfeit that on their own.
- I've always thought it was silly my university had an Entrepreneurship major. Starting a company is probably much better achieved by studying something technical or going deep into a problem space and seeing a problem there, not a generic "entrepreneurship" curriculum.
- I think startups starting as side projects was more of an artifact of the early YC days where startups could just be simple software that some engineers built on nights and weekends. Increasingly I feel like the next generation of startups is more capital intensive and requires more time commitment from deeply technical talent. Not in 100% of cases obviously.
I think this is beyond bad.
The #1 thing anyone could ever to do study entrepreneurship is to do 'case studies'.
Liteally just learning/observing how they work - the nature of founding, structure, power relationships, what debt and equity are for.
Learning 'how a VC firm' operates, and indeed how other kinds of investment bankers work is golden.
HBS is almost a glorified 2 years of basic concepts + 'a lot of case studies'.
Learning how IBM, Standard Oil, Apple and a host of companies you've never heard of operate is deeply enlightening.
The 'Naive By Design' approach by the YC people is almost toxic.
There is definitely some insight in it - that 'seasoned executives' are probably worse at starting small companies in many ways, but, understanding why that is is really important. It has a lot to do with risk, the kinds of things CEO's of established companies are good at etc..
It's as absurd as saying 'Don't Learn Nursing By Studying Nursing - Just Do Music and Engineering'.
Doing 'projects' however, is a wonderful idea.
Would that be more like other engineering fields? An interesting comparison would be aerospace, for example – it took 15 years to build the first A380, and tens of thousands of indispensable technical niches.
I want to ask you, what do you think a startup is?
There’s tons of startups making cool fused harnesses and phased arrays and trying to get every permutation of diesel and electric and hydrogen engines certified. Drones and rc aircraft spawn many “built in a dorm room” prototypes for people who don’t value their eyebrows
It combined coding, design and entrepreneurship. I felt like the idea behind this major was being able to go from idea / problem to finished product sold by a company.
The three main fields are very related:
- Coding: How to actually code and build the solution.
- Design: How to identify problems and design solutions around them. So it's actually multiple different fields of design, e.g. including product design and UX and UI design.
- Entrepreneurship: How to actually build and sustain a company around that.
There were many opportunities to work on your own projects. Increasingly so actually by intention (2 weeks to 8 weeks in later semesters). It's also close to many entrepreneurship programs for potential funding for ideas, but also networking and guidance.
I wrote a blog post about it: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/what-is-coco
Their website (in German): https://coco.study/
The university's page on it (in German): https://www.th-koeln.de/studium/code--context-bachelor_62103...
Don't many universities do something like this, to some degree? Pretty sure we had projects where you could either select a project template or propose your own.
> Until you've seen some founders in real life, you tend to think that starting startups is something done by other people. Seeing them pops that bubble.
I've met a few founders and find that they have a totally different personality to me. Extremely self-assured, decisive, much more focused on the high-level than the low. Often from wealthy or privileged backgrounds where taking risks is... well, less risky.
The AI area is different, in that it's still hard to make things work. There are lots of things to be done, but they're not the quick demos and launches YC used to like.
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Winter%202027&ba...
I went to university in Korea and I'm on my third startup. I watched startup clubs, government grant programs, and university-run programs all operate with the stated goal of encouraging entrepreneurship. The means became the end: the optimal strategy turned into presenting whatever scores well with the review panel. People took the money and technically started companies, but without underlying curiosity they couldn't carry it for long.
Teaching people how to build things, and the experience of actually making something from nothing, is special. But I also saw students who had no idea such possibilities existed, unknown unknowns, get gripped by the idea that they had to make something, and end up building only software, and within software, only dating apps.
This is a rather oversimplified, old-fashioned take on the purpose of university.
University in the 21st century is surely a straightforward high-stakes gamble, particularly in the UK and the USA: can I risk taking three or four years away from the job market, and go into life-changing, multi-decade debt, in order to gain qualifications that give me access to higher-than-minimum-wage jobs that I can get no other way, and will there still be enough of the kind of jobs mentioned in the prospectus at the end of it?
It is something that in most cases you can't afford to do and you also can't afford not to do.
I think PG is very out of touch.
"For Zuckerberg, the school’s major selling point was its Latin program. The current computer science concentrator originally intended to study classics at Harvard."[0]
There's a book called Founders at Work by one J. Livingston. I'd suggest replacing Zuckerberg with an incredible founder who was interviewed in that book, Steve Perlman.
[0] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/6/10/mark-e-zuckerbe...Working on something other than what I’m “should to be doing”…because an adjacent or completely unrelated thread HAD to be pulled…and then a period of “off task” deadline be damned irrational monomania…it’s bliss and always turns out well. I’ve learned to trust this.
Source needed
Also if he talks about 90% of all students not being founders then I want data on all 90% before I accept this argument as it seems hastily thought out
I do agree with the general ideas in his essay but these kind of comments that I cite make it seem a bit… too self-interested?
Being able to build things isn't important. You need to build things that make the customer happy. Building the wrong things really well is the most typical failure mode I see in technology leadership. It doesn't matter how "good" something is if the customer doesn't give a shit about it.
The simplest suggestion I can make to noob founders is to do part of the product or technology ugly on purpose. Give yourself permission to not be perfect. You may find a similar practice in warehouses and on construction sites. Whenever a new piece of equipment arrives, the manager or foreman will take out a blade and put a nice big scratch on the machine while the team observes. Dethroning the shiny new things as quickly a possible should be the goal. You don't want a bunch of weird ideological gods jerking your chain around all day. The customer is already quite the handful.
But I agree universities can be more open to some of their students pursuing a research career in companies rather than in universities and that they have an important role to play in the transition from one to the other.
Here in Berlin there are local discussions about the lack of engagement of local universities with the startup world here vs. the relative success with which that is done in e.g. Munich and other German cities which have a longer tradition of university spinoffs as startups. There are big differences between universities in Germany. There are also a few private universities in Berlin that are more successful. For example, my office is in a building that hosts the Code university and they definitely have a track record of churning out successful startups that get invested straight out of their program. But the big public universities seem a bit more hands off. I've heard local investors complain that they have more contact with universities elsewhere in Germany than the local ones. They are calling this out as a thing that needs fixing.
I do wonder if entreprenuership would be higher if we gave students more gap years, because I find it rare that someone who has not been in the world knows they want to start their own business. Tech is an exception because it's more of a lifestyle and culture than other STEM-based business.
Glossing over the fact that ambitious undergrads are more likely to be ambitious about grad school rather than starting a company, and reducing their course work is a hindrance if anything.
The goal of a physics degree is not to prepare you to start a business. Don't disadvantage your future physicists on the off chance one of could be the next zuck.
I mean, if you want the university to churn out plumbers then by all means do plumber things.
I'm somewhat less sure that optimizing for founders turns out better, or even more, founders. Ultimately probably 1% or less of people start a business (of any form, much less venture capital financed.)
You can't give people time and expect them to "create". Creators create not because it's convenient, they create in spite of it being inconvenient. They find the time regardless. (And universities already have scads of free time.)
95% of startups will fail. That statistic does not cause a founder to retreat. And that perseverance when the odds are poor is exactly why some succeed.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428589
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo
I think universities should focus on academic studies, not as a pipeline to YC.
No, they should focus on providing investors the resources they want to get richer. Investors are the only people who matter in the world.
Academic studies and knowledge are literally a worthless waste of time, compared to the investments of investors.
How could it be satire? If you don't believe that investors' investments are the most important good-thing in the world, you must be an anti-capitalist in favor of Soviet-style central planning, and we all know how that turned out. There is no alternative.
Not everything is about money
I agree. If someone wishes to study business or even management, let them take a specialized degree or elective courses. There is no wisdom in removing focus from a specialized degree.
That's not applicable to teachers who may often times be doing what they need to do to matter to you (because that's what they genuinely want for themselves).
The top universities have been successfull for over 900 years in focusing on having the best teaching and research. Do we really think that will go away, rich people will stop wanting their kids to have the best education?
Definitly true. Recently I've written a piece of software that I need myself, and I released it as a product but the response is not good. If this were my main startup product, I believe I would be broken. That is, I did not find the right product to build, I think it is need by people, but it is actually not.
Also, after a product in need is built, you should promote to make it known by people who need it.
Forgetting this is (and has been) destructive to universities.
Then they would pitch in front of investors with both. Sometimes the ideas got funded and the kids would actually keep working on them.
Take any advice about "what YC is looking for" with a very large grain of salt.
Many people do the assessments, and I'm far from convinced that they are all working to assess according to exactly what PG or Garry or Michael or anyone else say are the criteria.
There's TONS of advice written and video on what YC is looking for and no evidence that all that advise is scientifically followed.
If YC is a bunch of normal humans then the assessors are just deciding however they think right.
So you will be disappointed (as I was) if you research and tune your application to "exactly what PG is looking for" and you're rejected.
In articles like this I think PG is just saying "if I was doing YC application assessments, as I did 15 years ago, then this is what I would be looking for", not "this is what todays YC assessors are definitely looking for". Big difference.
Any newborn baby should be thoroughly bathed and, after giving him a rest from his first impressions, severely whipped and told: “Don’t write! Don’t write! Don’t be a writer!” If, in spite of this punishment, the baby will show writing tendencies, a caress should be tried. If a caress doesn’t help, give up on the baby – he is as good as lost1. The writing itch is incurable.
The path of the writer from start to finish is paved with thorns, nails and nettle, and therefore any sensible person must remove himself from writing by any means ... (eventually gets to actual advice)
https://nova-nevedoma.com/rules-for-aspiring-authors/
This is the case in Europe and the entire economy is a flaming pile of garbage.
I mean, this is good advice, but keep a little bit in mind who is talking, right?
It’s like saying most people will never be professional athletes so we should discourage sports.
Or most people live in their home country, so we should discourage young people from taking backpacking trips.
Now I'm not of the view people shouldn't try to change the world but why should that be fixated on a business, why not a community effort, why not research, why not charity based, they all provide you with a range of skills. We have got a saturation of those starting businesses in every industry (especially mine which is quantum computing) and most have a poor idea or a repetitive idea or an idea that so unthought out it can't go anywhere.
(I will say less should go backpacking. Travelling on the whole now has become a distraction from life instead of a discovery. You are better taking that year or 6 months and spending it on something you love to do. That will show you who you are more than visiting some of the poorest nations on earth.)
What I think is important (and why I think entrepreneurship is directionally good) is open-ended exploration and taking initiative to pursue one's own projects. I don't care about the specific direction, but about the idea of proactively trying to shape reality by following one's interests.
I think what you're describing with backpacking is true for most. If the point is to check off a list of Instagram picture spots, then it's more of an exercise in consumerism. If it's to deeply engage with other cultures, languages, and people, that's different.
I guess it's similar with entrepreneurship. If the point is to inhabit the founder personality archetype you see on social media, that's different than to be genuinely solving interesting problems.
YC is an exclusive club (no offense folks, it is very much a club), and there's only so many venture bucks to go around. Before we produce more 'founders', it would be very beneficial to examine how they're to secure the very necessary funding. Not everybody has access to a personal reserve of capital for many many reasons.
This idea that "very large company" -> "productive economy" needs to die.
https://www.ips-dc.org/report-americas-20-largest-low-wage-e...
One of the two biggest employers in the US is one who treats their employees so poorly that they have to pee in bottles and continue working after a colleague has died and been left on the floor? If that’s the kind of jobs large companies “provide”, it’s not worth it. We’d much better off with several small companies that give people the flexibility to escape draconian working conditions.
https://nypost.com/2026/04/15/business/amazon-warehouse-empl...
https://futurism.com/future-society/amazon-accused-hiding-de...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...
Rhetorical question.
I am economically naive, but I also have never understood this argument. I asked a Spanish friend what Spain needed, he said “more big companies”. Is it because a big company provides you something closer to a monopoly, and can do so internationally?
i see it as: large companies are proof that much trade and consumption has occurred.
And practically, they are not good for democracy or even economy as such.
Bunch of smaller companies would have to form some sort of long term cartel and sync those egos to achieve anything close to one major company.
Last thing this world needs is another fuckup trillionaire with massive childhood/mental issues and ego bigger than Everest who thinks he knows where humanity should go (to serve their wishes and needs). Or just milk mankind of anything good remaining like zuckenberg is doing.
I don't need to name further, we can all imagine our own elons on that place
It’s interesting to see how the Americans have a different view on this.
I literally said, "we're all adults here," and I was corrected. The new batch of Cal grads are children, they said -- which is an indictment of all US graduates and not just Cal for some reason. Or maybe the startup funders are just like the ancient Greek writers who complained kids today don't want to work.
Universities were initially built to further the knowledge of specific fields, for the sake of its own advancement, producing philosophers, artists and scientists.
In other words, universities are for people to learn for the sake of learning, not to earn a wage. New institutions should be built to cultivate founders and entrepreneurs. Career development centers, maker spaces, co-working spaces, these are the places to build the entrepreneurial spirit.
He says good founders learn actual stuff at college and get good at something, without any ambition to make it profitable initially.
A startup is not a technical project, it's an organisational endeavour. They don't live or die by the product alone, but by the market demand, organisational robustness and a little bit of luck.
I still agree with you though in that it is not necessarily the universities responsibility to cultivate founders.
(I hope PG isn’t outsourcing his thinking to some agentic workflow.)
Universities should teach people that they can change the world if they want to, and that they don't have to be passive about accepting what's happening. One way to do that is to be a founder.
Tech founders pretty much always need more than a desire to earn a wage to succeed. Having a genuine belief that something that doesn't exist should exist is the drive to build. If you're in it for the money gets a job with an existing tech company, or a bank, or a hedge fund, is an wildly better idea.
The 'best thing' they could do is teach literally every students basic commerce, finance and econ.
Literally every student.
If you can understand the bond market - you can understand how the whole world works.
Behind every major conflict is finance.
The Napoleonic wars are about about finance and logistics, particularly issues in the treasury, international lending.
The doldrums of the 1970s were about monetary system.
Great Depression was about markets.
Roosevelts transformation of the US bureaucracy is is an operational and financial socialization of 30% of the US economy.
None of any of that happens until the Fed came into being.
PG reviles in illiteracy of these macro things like an anti-vaxxer.
If people understood these things, we'd have a different kind of democracy entirely.
AI will destroy YouTube, Facebook, Google Search, programming and all the business models that made Silicon Valley people filthy rich. People will finally leave the Internet. It will destroy Ycombinator. You are sawing off the branch that you are sitting on.
None of it is necessary or inevitable, but SV follows SciFi trash like it's Dianetics from L. Ron Hubbard.
100%. This is great timeless advice.
Just build now instead of waiting or asking someone else or thinking about building.
Don’t meet your heroes I guess…
If pg is wrong about something it isn't because he isn't informed about what's right. It's because he's chosen to frame something in a way that aligns to what he believes.
(Hint: Everyone does this.)
Were you persuaded of this by rational arguments?
This is in theory. In practice, a worse product with more money and louder marketing easily wins against a better product nobody knows about. I'm sure Paul perfectly understands it.
There are other idealizations I won't comment on, but the whole piece reads like an attempt to nurture an application pipeline for YC rather than the genuine writing I liked in earlier Paul's essays.
Here is an alternative point of view: get your degree and work for a few years. Then go back to university to learn business basics (finance, marketing, management). Start a company in your late 30s, when you know your subject area well and you have an idea how to steer finance/marketing (marketing is much harder that it might seem). Bootstrap or take as little investment as possible until you get PMF. Then scale up without giving away (much) equity.
It worked well for me. It can surely work well for others.
You will learn all of that on the job by the time you make it to Principal Engineer, Senior Sales Engineer, Staff Product Manager, or Enterprise AE in the American/Israeli/Indian and Chinese startup and BigTech scenes and especially in Enterprise SaaS, Cybersecurity, Hardware, AI/MLOps, Infra, and other high domain expertise but high revenue and exit potential heavy segments.
Also, a plurality of VCs in the segments I mentioned above tend to have learnt on the job and later switched to VC after successful exits and/or head-hunting.
If you do consider going back to school - only do a graduate research driven CS, EE, CE, or ECE degree program like Stanford, UIUC, CMU, GT (their online program is as good as on-campus with the right courses), UT Austin (their online program is as good as on-campus), and a handful of others.
If you have some VC throwing hackathons in NorCal where they find people in their early/mid-20s, tell them they're the most brilliant people in the history of the human race, and promise them millions of dollars for their project if they drop out, there's going to be a lot of people with severe personality disorders coming out of that situation and there's nothing the university system can do about that.
Brand new industries don’t have depth, and may not even have high difficulty and so starting a SAAS business or Social Media startup 2008-2014 was easy from a technical point of view
The difficult in it being a ‘startup’ was more about business execution than building execution. And luck of course. Hence Harvard students applying to become founders
Now the craftsmanship involved in building novel solutions in complex domains that are not new requires deep knowledge.
Hence PHDs and Postdocs, which are projects, but projects that rely on existing knowledge.
Paul thinking of founders being a replacement for grad school is a result of his experience building startups in low complexity novel industries with large financial upside.
That’s not what a nation needs to move itself forward. It is what VCs need to generate alpha, and so you’ll see exploration in novel low complexity industries with large financial upside, and not hard science - so Harvard grads make sense.
This idea that ‘builders’ are ‘builders’ misses the need for craftsmanship and apprenticeship
They lead because of a devotion to depth of expertise - not becoming a billionaire
So again, if you want sustainable hugely profitable 0-1 companies you better hope for a monopoly business, and why lobbyiny government to protect your rents is a faster alternative to PHDs, Postgrads, and long term industrial policy
I'm not fond of this kind of math metaphor. "roughly" is doing a lot of work here. He's saying that richer founders are more inspirational than poorer founders and younger founders are more inspirational than older founders. But when you put it that way, it's so obvious that maybe it's not worth saying. So he cast it as an equation:
inspiration = wealth / age-diff
But you can't take this equation literally. I mean, what if the founder is younger than the students? Do you get negative inspiration? What happens if you divide by 0? Is inspiration undefined in that case? Is a $2 billion net-worth 30-year-old really twice as inspirational as a $1 billion net-worth at the same age? Is Elon Musk 10 times more inspirational than Bill Gates?
This is excessive, and unjustified precision. Save equations for actual equations.
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of Paul Graham, and I only criticize because he is worth criticizing. Please don't block me.
And, of course, I should say that this is just how it struck me. Other people may not care and that's fine too.
It grossly blurs the distinction between those who put in personal blood, sweat, tears, and money into starting a business versus those who make a few slides so they can use other people’s money to hire others to do all the work and come up with all the ideas.
We had words for this. "Small business" and "Small business owner".
Startup is meant to become monopoly and does not have to have good economics before abusing monopoly power. Competition is for loosers. It is about disrupting, not about building.
Sounds like a complete nonsense, yet here we are.
They love to "teach" how everyone else in the world should help rich people get richer. And their favorite trick is to sell this solution to their own problems as a "win-win", a benefit for everyone.
It is the standard in the discourse of every oligarch and billionaire: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Ellison, Altman,... : "everyone will be happier if they make me more money".
We should have known better than to put the nerds in charge -- too focused on their spreadsheets and making the big number go up, while completely ignoring the calamities they have wrought upon both the people and their environs.
"In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects."
Today, everyone is a founder. Founders of bubbles and bro culture. Herd-minds, chasing the Californian greed rush. Round 'em up, Angel Investors!
Given the 20 years of twisted and evil greedy nature of most successful VC level startups and their founders, tech bros and VCs and the evil of MBA optimized Private Equity should we not instead teach young people to run away from startups and greed?
Paul Graham is selling a drug to society
That drug has infected the world.. we need to review what value all this disruption is providing anyone
Please don't post unsubstantive comments or shallow dismissals to Hacker News. We're hoping for curious conversation here, not bilious.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's telling that I see far worse HN comments on a daily basis that don't warrant a finger-wagging condemnation from you.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
To be clear: I do not have the time or energy to back this up statistically, but my experience is that you are substantially more likely to choose to get involved in threads/comments that challenge startup culture than you are in threads/comments that embrace bigotry, conspiracy theories, and other genuinely appalling content.
Edit: To elaborate a bit and put a final touch on this before I call it a night, the problem isn't that I see you condemning comments like this; it's that I rarely-to-never see you condemning substantially worse comments. It seems to communicate a clear choice to allow repugnant behavior as long as it doesn't criticize startup culture/founder worship.
It is favoring 1 group, not wide areas of the human experience.
That school should be a support structure for self directed exploration rather than rigidity.
How is encouraging that unique to startup founders?
> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it. And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance.
> Another thing that will tend to draw universities away from the optimal path is business schools, if they have them. Business schools were not designed to train founders. They were designed to train the managerial class of the large industrial companies that arose in the early 20th century; they're the West Points of industrial capitalism. That's why their official name is usually the School of Management. But while the skills they teach might be useful in running companies beyond a certain size, they're not the critical ingredient in founding them. And the skills that are are already taught by other departments. So to the extent business schools affect their parent university's strategy for preparing founders, it can only be by adding error.
> And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance.
But then he also states:
> Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to the ideal of liberal education than preparing them for almost any other kind of career.
This is pretty myopic and is obviously biased from someone embedded in the startup space, perhaps not surprising given how little value most startups provide. Not everything in life is a whiz-bang, fail fast, build-some-new-product-from-scratch startup. In fact, most things are not.
Pay attention to actual liberal arts universities. Their goal is on the long-term and not to satisfy some near-term need of startup founders making the next killer app or product. It can be argued that most startups build towards generating value only in the sense of monetary value, in that most startups' goal are purely about the exit. It really has little to do with building products. Most venture capitalists got their wealth from the dotcom bubble. Almost none of them know how to build actual products.
Paul - spend a few tokens to give me a text size I can read?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html