6 ms·

YC: The new grad school

165 points by brezina 16y ago

yid 16y ago
Perhaps a new business school...certainly not all of grad education.
- brezina 16y ago
  I'll argue that the most important part of grad school is/was the people. And that is the element YC nailed for me. I also had to teach myself a bunch of technical stuff to get xobni off the ground. Unlike grad courses this stuff was practical by definition. For me YC and YC alums more closely fit the profile of an engineering grad program than a MBA program.
  - sbisker 16y ago
    I think equally as important (but not more important) as the people you're studying with, are the people who are advising you. After all, I was always told to pick a grad school by the quality of the advisors you'd get to work with, not by the school's overall reputation. A really good grad school advisor teaches you not just the theory, but the "practical side" of theory - introducing you to their peers, explaining how grants get written and funded, walking you through paper writing and otherwise showing you how the sausage of research is actually made. Of course, YC has plenty to offer in the advising department - that said, I think the distinction is worth noting. Why? Because I think there will be more quality advisors shaken out of the woodwork by YC-like programs - particularly in different cities where perfectly talented mentors have built their fortunes and families and have no desire to move from. Just like not everyone has to go to Harvard to become a great grad student, people won't have to go to YC to have great start-up mentoring. And that's a good thing; our economy needs more than one "startup grad school". I'm excited not just about YC, but about the trend YC has kicked off - the number of great people attracted to other YC-like programs across the country is going to skyrocket, sooner rather than later. This will help the economy grow overall - and help shield the tech industry when the bubble that is "expensive academic credentialing as job qualification" pops.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Are we talking about masters or PhD version of grad school? I could buy it for a masters-replacement. But an engineering PhD is supposed to be producing new basic technology, not learning existing technology, and ideally producing new technology that requires multi-year research to produce. That's also possible to do in a more innovation/research-focused startup (biotech does this all the time), but it's not particularly common in tech startups afaik, mostly because "multi-year research 'til product" is not what investors want to hear. Granted, the results are not always amazing in grad-school either, but quite a bit of basic research in PLs, systems, algorithms, etc. does come out of PhD theses. Could you really do something like Okasaki's "Purely Functional Data Structures" within the YC program? Graham himself is actually doing an outside-of-academia version of PLs research with Arc. But most of the YC companies don't seem to be embarking on Arc-type projects.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
kenjackson 16y ago
This is a pretty good characterization. In CS at least, YC is very similar. In both, most students don't pay to attend. In both, most students get some funding -- a small amount of pocket change to buy ramen. In both you'll work heads down in a way you've likely never done before, nor will do after. In both your output, will hopefully, have you set for life. In both you're surrounded by some of the best talent you'll likely see again doing the same thing you're doing. Just about the only major difference is coursework (HN is really isn't equivalent). Of course, I've probably made some big assumptions and missed things having never gone through YC, but my short take.
- yid 16y ago
  I really enjoy your rational comments when it comes to this whole higher education vs. dropout ("uncollege") debate, which seems to have engulfed HN lately. Thanks for being a voice of reason.
adamsmith 16y ago
* The practicum is launching your first product. * The Tuesday dinners are the weekly lectures. * The coursework is Hacker News. * Your fraternity brothers are the YC alums * And unlike contributions to your university’s general fund – when you invest in Y Combinator you get a return. Wow!
- shawnee_ 16y ago
  And $150K is your student loan (at least for the new enrollments) If it's not a gift and you haven't earned it, it's a loan.
  - justin 16y ago
    Convertible notes are a type of loan -- doesnt have anything to do with "earning it"
rivalis 16y ago
This is dubious; the whole "higher education vs. entrepreneurship" discourse is a false dichotomy. What has happened is that capitalism has degraded most peoples' perceptions of the goals of higher education: they think it is meant to give them skills for a job or something. Higher education is meant to transform the student's ability to think, such that they can contribute truly new knowledge to society. This often involves less than spectacular monetary compensation for long and painful hours. The tension between the job training mission imposed by a capitalist society and the more traditional humanist "transformational" mission has watered down the educational system. As someone who chose education for the sake of education with my eyes wide open and not expecting much in the way of dollars afterward, I applaud the decisions of entrepreneurs to recognize the mission confusion of colleges and simply leave. Institutions should be like UNIX programs: they should do one thing and do it well. I think that it would be in everyone's best interest to pull job training right out of colleges and use the YC model.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  The humanist tradition of education is rich kids hanging out with scholars. That's how universities got started: rich kids, hanging out in fashionable cities, paying scholars a small fee to attend private seminars. "Lecturers" were people paid to read a book aloud to a large group. And so on. The "capitalist" idea of education is actually a demotic idea of education: that the non rich kid can also attend the same scholars and get their money back some day. That model is well-entrenched because most kids attending are middle class. Rich kids can still get an education for its own sake, if they want it.
  - rivalis 16y ago
    You're conflating a few things here. This is certainly how higher education started, but in many places it has not remained that way. Some European democracies have made higher education radically affordable, such that citizens can learn to think critically and engage with the issues of living in a modern, information-dense culture. The capitalist function is at odds with this. Job training focused curricula teach practical skills to the detriment of timeless "enrichment" subjects. This damages the level of public discourse and is hostile to democracy (well-informed decisions on the part of voting public). It trains people to submit to a corporate environment, instead of enriching their inner life for decades to come. This is why things like YC are excellent: they teach the best of capitalism, ie, leadership, risk-taking, meritocracy. People should be free to determine how many dollars they want to attempt to accumulate relative to other goods. I completely agree that we need to get the price of Higher Ed. in the US under control. I also think that we need to be more up-front about what you can really get out of it: the "signalling function" of a degree (http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/honest_economics_05.html http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/honest_econom...) is fundamentally wrong-headed and doesn't do anyone much good: it leads middle-class kids who just want a decent credential to waste money on a college that is torn between vocational school and a transformational mission, and employers don't get much in the way of real information about a job applicant from it. Sorry to ramble. I'm just very glad to see this conversation begin to open up; attitudes towards and uses of college degrees are incredibly broken, and it seems like a massive "re-factoring" of the whole system (concerns include: civic sophistication, quality of life enrichment, entrepreneurial, vocational-centric) into smaller, more focused parts is what is needed. The serious acceptance of YC and other options like it is the first step along that path. Education is not one-size-fits-all, and we have been telling ourselves that about the "college" system for far too long.
umdred11 16y ago
Yeah, well, the University of Maryland hates you too. But, good article.
- brezina 16y ago
  haha - it wasn't all bad. Just nothing, i repeat nothing like my experience with YC.
edanm 16y ago
"And unlike contributions to your university’s general fund – when you invest in Y Combinator you get a return" Interesting concept. Why aren't there schools who teach a specific job, which don't take money, but instead take a percentage of salary from the students for some fixed time? That way they have incentive to be good teachers.
- phlux 16y ago
  Because Stanford can charge a huge tuition and still get incredible endowments from alumn.
  - sbisker 16y ago
    I wonder to what extent will programs like YC be funded by "donation" investments in the future? You only need a few Herokus to make enough successful founders for quite an "alumni" investment fund...and unlike my college alumni progam, few alumni would argue about "how their money is being spent". The only real problem I see in this is that it scales exponentially faster than PG is able to scale the number of companies he advises - but that might be solvable by, say, reducing the return of "donation" investments to make them more like pure "donations". Just like regular colleges, you can focus on alumni while still taking money and guidance from other interested organizations (like Sequoia) for the benefit of the participants.
- bpodgursky 16y ago
  That's what a student loan is. It's just not for a specific job.
davidwparker 16y ago
Very interesting. I'm curious as to how you would get into this grad school as a single founder? It was easy for me to get into grad school (I'm there now), but without a co-founder, I feel as though it would be very difficult to get into YCombinator, and I'll most likely meet my future co-founder here at grad school.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
k3dz 16y ago
in practicum, YC may be simliar to CS but in theory, i doubt it gets anywhere near the breadth or the depth of a CS grad school curriculum
delinquentme 16y ago
sidenote: went to penn state... lives in SF ... has Pitt's cathedral of learning as header??
edw519 16y ago
If YC is grad school, then Hacker News is on-line university. The links to good articles are the curriculum. The links to good references are the text books. The debates and discussions are the study groups. The "Ask HN" posts are the mentorships. The projects we push each other to do are independent studies. The community is my adult fraternity. I've been here 4 years - I oughta try to get my diploma. [Aside: Kinda ironic that your blog banner has a picture of my graduate school. The University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Business was in the 42 story Cathedral of Learning (the tall building on the right) where we took higher education quite literally.]
- brezina 16y ago
  Schenley Park is an amazing city park. Pitt & CMU kids are lucky to have it. I took that photo when I was visiting my grandfather at the Pitt medical center a few days before he died. This is actually a nice reminder that I was able to visit him that last time.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- jswinghammer 16y ago
  Have you started a company? I think that's your diploma.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- amix 16y ago
  If YC is a grad school, then doing a startup is a way to learn and graduate. Hanging around on HN should be viewed as entertainment. That's at least my experience (I have been on HN for the past 3.5+ years).
shriphani 16y ago
In the past grad students gave us : -> Relational databases -> Polynomial time deterministic algorithms for testing primality -> Shannon's masters thesis etc. etc. I still don't believe that Google itself could have produced so excellent a product outside an environment that a top graduate school offers. The concept of advancing the boundaries of the field is noble - the idea of making $$ out of it should hardly be the motivation IMO.
pgbovine 16y ago
apologies in advance for the self-post, but i wrote a somewhat-related article a few years ago about how the grad school research world can actually be similar to the start-up world, even though they seem like polar opposites at first glance: http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/research-and-startup.htm http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/research-and-startup.htm
- mitultiwari 16y ago
  thanks for sharing the link. nicely written article. apart from "formulating", "executing", and "selling" i would like to add two more steps in the beginning "survey" and "identify open problems". i would say in startup world also survey (competitive research) and "open problems" (novelty) are important.
pauldisneyiv 16y ago
From an outsider - I feel the parallels are closer to being punched into an elite Finals Club than a grad school. The alumni network is smaller and likely more powerful. Admittance into the club will carry more weight in future endeavors. A very small percentage of hopefuls are accepted. This isn't meant to be negative - I just feel it is a more apt comparison.
mindball 16y ago
I have to agree with you regarding the way everything is going. Grad school is a very common for everyone to have so being part of something like YC or TS is just another avenue to expand your education in exchange for a piece of equity.
MrMan 16y ago
aaahhhhh you guys are going collectively insane.
tybris 16y ago
Something, the new something unrelated.

165 points by brezina 16y ago

yid 16y ago

Perhaps a new business school...certainly not all of grad education.

brezina 16y ago
I'll argue that the most important part of grad school is/was the people. And that is the element YC nailed for me. I also had to teach myself a bunch of technical stuff to get xobni off the ground. Unlike grad courses this stuff was practical by definition. For me YC and YC alums more closely fit the profile of an engineering grad program than a MBA program.
- sbisker 16y ago
  I think equally as important (but not more important) as the people you're studying with, are the people who are advising you. After all, I was always told to pick a grad school by the quality of the advisors you'd get to work with, not by the school's overall reputation. A really good grad school advisor teaches you not just the theory, but the "practical side" of theory - introducing you to their peers, explaining how grants get written and funded, walking you through paper writing and otherwise showing you how the sausage of research is actually made. Of course, YC has plenty to offer in the advising department - that said, I think the distinction is worth noting. Why? Because I think there will be more quality advisors shaken out of the woodwork by YC-like programs - particularly in different cities where perfectly talented mentors have built their fortunes and families and have no desire to move from. Just like not everyone has to go to Harvard to become a great grad student, people won't have to go to YC to have great start-up mentoring. And that's a good thing; our economy needs more than one "startup grad school". I'm excited not just about YC, but about the trend YC has kicked off - the number of great people attracted to other YC-like programs across the country is going to skyrocket, sooner rather than later. This will help the economy grow overall - and help shield the tech industry when the bubble that is "expensive academic credentialing as job qualification" pops.
- _delirium 16y ago
  Are we talking about masters or PhD version of grad school? I could buy it for a masters-replacement. But an engineering PhD is supposed to be producing new basic technology, not learning existing technology, and ideally producing new technology that requires multi-year research to produce. That's also possible to do in a more innovation/research-focused startup (biotech does this all the time), but it's not particularly common in tech startups afaik, mostly because "multi-year research 'til product" is not what investors want to hear. Granted, the results are not always amazing in grad-school either, but quite a bit of basic research in PLs, systems, algorithms, etc. does come out of PhD theses. Could you really do something like Okasaki's "Purely Functional Data Structures" within the YC program? Graham himself is actually doing an outside-of-academia version of PLs research with Arc. But most of the YC companies don't seem to be embarking on Arc-type projects.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

kenjackson 16y ago

This is a pretty good characterization. In CS at least, YC is very similar. In both, most students don't pay to attend. In both, most students get some funding -- a small amount of pocket change to buy ramen. In both you'll work heads down in a way you've likely never done before, nor will do after. In both your output, will hopefully, have you set for life. In both you're surrounded by some of the best talent you'll likely see again doing the same thing you're doing. Just about the only major difference is coursework (HN is really isn't equivalent). Of course, I've probably made some big assumptions and missed things having never gone through YC, but my short take.

yid 16y ago
I really enjoy your rational comments when it comes to this whole higher education vs. dropout ("uncollege") debate, which seems to have engulfed HN lately. Thanks for being a voice of reason.

adamsmith 16y ago

* The practicum is launching your first product. * The Tuesday dinners are the weekly lectures. * The coursework is Hacker News. * Your fraternity brothers are the YC alums * And unlike contributions to your university’s general fund – when you invest in Y Combinator you get a return. Wow!

shawnee_ 16y ago
And $150K is your student loan (at least for the new enrollments) If it's not a gift and you haven't earned it, it's a loan.
- justin 16y ago
  Convertible notes are a type of loan -- doesnt have anything to do with "earning it"

rivalis 16y ago

This is dubious; the whole "higher education vs. entrepreneurship" discourse is a false dichotomy. What has happened is that capitalism has degraded most peoples' perceptions of the goals of higher education: they think it is meant to give them skills for a job or something. Higher education is meant to transform the student's ability to think, such that they can contribute truly new knowledge to society. This often involves less than spectacular monetary compensation for long and painful hours. The tension between the job training mission imposed by a capitalist society and the more traditional humanist "transformational" mission has watered down the educational system. As someone who chose education for the sake of education with my eyes wide open and not expecting much in the way of dollars afterward, I applaud the decisions of entrepreneurs to recognize the mission confusion of colleges and simply leave. Institutions should be like UNIX programs: they should do one thing and do it well. I think that it would be in everyone's best interest to pull job training right out of colleges and use the YC model.

jacques_chester 16y ago
The humanist tradition of education is rich kids hanging out with scholars. That's how universities got started: rich kids, hanging out in fashionable cities, paying scholars a small fee to attend private seminars. "Lecturers" were people paid to read a book aloud to a large group. And so on. The "capitalist" idea of education is actually a demotic idea of education: that the non rich kid can also attend the same scholars and get their money back some day. That model is well-entrenched because most kids attending are middle class. Rich kids can still get an education for its own sake, if they want it.
- rivalis 16y ago
  You're conflating a few things here. This is certainly how higher education started, but in many places it has not remained that way. Some European democracies have made higher education radically affordable, such that citizens can learn to think critically and engage with the issues of living in a modern, information-dense culture. The capitalist function is at odds with this. Job training focused curricula teach practical skills to the detriment of timeless "enrichment" subjects. This damages the level of public discourse and is hostile to democracy (well-informed decisions on the part of voting public). It trains people to submit to a corporate environment, instead of enriching their inner life for decades to come. This is why things like YC are excellent: they teach the best of capitalism, ie, leadership, risk-taking, meritocracy. People should be free to determine how many dollars they want to attempt to accumulate relative to other goods. I completely agree that we need to get the price of Higher Ed. in the US under control. I also think that we need to be more up-front about what you can really get out of it: the "signalling function" of a degree (http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/honest_economics_05.html http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/honest_econom...) is fundamentally wrong-headed and doesn't do anyone much good: it leads middle-class kids who just want a decent credential to waste money on a college that is torn between vocational school and a transformational mission, and employers don't get much in the way of real information about a job applicant from it. Sorry to ramble. I'm just very glad to see this conversation begin to open up; attitudes towards and uses of college degrees are incredibly broken, and it seems like a massive "re-factoring" of the whole system (concerns include: civic sophistication, quality of life enrichment, entrepreneurial, vocational-centric) into smaller, more focused parts is what is needed. The serious acceptance of YC and other options like it is the first step along that path. Education is not one-size-fits-all, and we have been telling ourselves that about the "college" system for far too long.

umdred11 16y ago

Yeah, well, the University of Maryland hates you too. But, good article.

brezina 16y ago
haha - it wasn't all bad. Just nothing, i repeat nothing like my experience with YC.

edanm 16y ago

"And unlike contributions to your university’s general fund – when you invest in Y Combinator you get a return" Interesting concept. Why aren't there schools who teach a specific job, which don't take money, but instead take a percentage of salary from the students for some fixed time? That way they have incentive to be good teachers.

phlux 16y ago
Because Stanford can charge a huge tuition and still get incredible endowments from alumn.
- sbisker 16y ago
  I wonder to what extent will programs like YC be funded by "donation" investments in the future? You only need a few Herokus to make enough successful founders for quite an "alumni" investment fund...and unlike my college alumni progam, few alumni would argue about "how their money is being spent". The only real problem I see in this is that it scales exponentially faster than PG is able to scale the number of companies he advises - but that might be solvable by, say, reducing the return of "donation" investments to make them more like pure "donations". Just like regular colleges, you can focus on alumni while still taking money and guidance from other interested organizations (like Sequoia) for the benefit of the participants.
bpodgursky 16y ago
That's what a student loan is. It's just not for a specific job.

davidwparker 16y ago

Very interesting. I'm curious as to how you would get into this grad school as a single founder? It was easy for me to get into grad school (I'm there now), but without a co-founder, I feel as though it would be very difficult to get into YCombinator, and I'll most likely meet my future co-founder here at grad school.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

k3dz 16y ago

in practicum, YC may be simliar to CS but in theory, i doubt it gets anywhere near the breadth or the depth of a CS grad school curriculum

delinquentme 16y ago

sidenote: went to penn state... lives in SF ... has Pitt's cathedral of learning as header??

edw519 16y ago

If YC is grad school, then Hacker News is on-line university. The links to good articles are the curriculum. The links to good references are the text books. The debates and discussions are the study groups. The "Ask HN" posts are the mentorships. The projects we push each other to do are independent studies. The community is my adult fraternity. I've been here 4 years - I oughta try to get my diploma. [Aside: Kinda ironic that your blog banner has a picture of my graduate school. The University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Business was in the 42 story Cathedral of Learning (the tall building on the right) where we took higher education quite literally.]

brezina 16y ago
Schenley Park is an amazing city park. Pitt & CMU kids are lucky to have it. I took that photo when I was visiting my grandfather at the Pitt medical center a few days before he died. This is actually a nice reminder that I was able to visit him that last time.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jswinghammer 16y ago
Have you started a company? I think that's your diploma.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
amix 16y ago
If YC is a grad school, then doing a startup is a way to learn and graduate. Hanging around on HN should be viewed as entertainment. That's at least my experience (I have been on HN for the past 3.5+ years).

shriphani 16y ago

In the past grad students gave us : -> Relational databases -> Polynomial time deterministic algorithms for testing primality -> Shannon's masters thesis etc. etc. I still don't believe that Google itself could have produced so excellent a product outside an environment that a top graduate school offers. The concept of advancing the boundaries of the field is noble - the idea of making $$ out of it should hardly be the motivation IMO.

pgbovine 16y ago

apologies in advance for the self-post, but i wrote a somewhat-related article a few years ago about how the grad school research world can actually be similar to the start-up world, even though they seem like polar opposites at first glance: http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/research-and-startup.htm http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/research-and-startup.htm

mitultiwari 16y ago
thanks for sharing the link. nicely written article. apart from "formulating", "executing", and "selling" i would like to add two more steps in the beginning "survey" and "identify open problems". i would say in startup world also survey (competitive research) and "open problems" (novelty) are important.

pauldisneyiv 16y ago

From an outsider - I feel the parallels are closer to being punched into an elite Finals Club than a grad school. The alumni network is smaller and likely more powerful. Admittance into the club will carry more weight in future endeavors. A very small percentage of hopefuls are accepted. This isn't meant to be negative - I just feel it is a more apt comparison.

mindball 16y ago

I have to agree with you regarding the way everything is going. Grad school is a very common for everyone to have so being part of something like YC or TS is just another avenue to expand your education in exchange for a piece of equity.

MrMan 16y ago

aaahhhhh you guys are going collectively insane.

tybris 16y ago

Something, the new something unrelated.