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How Universities Should Prepare Founders
- bmitc 2mo ago[flagged]
- jmalicki 2mo agoWhat is the point of a university if it not to provide education that could benefit wide areas of the human experience?
- bmitc 2mo agoThat's not what he is arguing, though, is it?
- jmalicki 2mo agoIs founding a company not a thing some humans experience?
- watwut 2mo agoHe 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.
- jmalicki 2mo agoIt 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?
- bmitc 2mo agoYou mentioned, emphasis mine: > benefit wide areas of the human experience So no, I don't think founding companies has much to do with the wide human experience. It's actually a pretty rare thing. And I argue that most startup founders are not concerned with the human experience and are just focused on what the exit looks like.
- jmalicki 2mo agoSo a university should never teach a class unless at least 95% of its students would benefit from it? Yes, the one thing doesn't necessarily benefit everyone, but a university offers wide choices of interests.
- madrox 2mo agoEver heard of an MBA?
- metaphor 2mo agoSimilar 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.
- bmitc 2mo agoHe states: > 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.
- dang 2mo ago> What do universities have to do with startup founders? Gross. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jrflowers 2mo ago[dead]
- bmitc 2mo agoWhile 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.
- dang 2mo agoI'm not concerned with "groupies", but with the quality standard on HN, which the GP post was obviously below.
- bmitc 2mo agoI edited the comment to contain only the question and not commentary.
- dang 2mo agoI appreciate the edit, but now that I read the edited comment, I think I was responding mostly to the "Gross." bit.
- clipsy 2mo agoThe "Gross." remark (Edit: now removed) at the end was unnecessary, but the bulk of the comment seems like a pretty legitimate question to me. It's telling that I see far worse HN comments on a daily basis that don't warrant a finger-wagging condemnation from you.
- volandovengo 2mo agoIsn't it amazing that Paul Graham hasn't updated his CSS in 20 years? Paul - spend a few tokens to give me a text size I can read?
- debo_ 2mo ago[flagged]
- pradeeproark 2mo ago[flagged]
- dang 2mo agoPlease follow the site guidelines. They ask you not to post like this here, regardless of who or what you dislike. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ericd 2mo agocmd-+ or ctrl-+, hit as many times as you need.
- bizstrategy10 2mo ago[dead]
- ffounders 2mo ago[dead]
- madrox 2mo agoMy 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/ 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- rurich2747 2mo agoThe 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
- rurich2747 2mo agoTake 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
- GMoromisato 2mo ago> 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.
- keithnz 2mo agoseems like you understood the general purpose of the equation... no need to over analyze it. Roughly does all the work it needs to.
- GMoromisato 2mo agoSure, but it's like someone saying, "I could care less" or "I literally died". I understand the meaning, but it's still ugly. And, of course, I should say that this is just how it struck me. Other people may not care and that's fine too.
- srveale 2mo agoThe 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.
- shermantanktop 2mo agoIs it too late to get zuck back to whatever he was doing before his current activities?
- defrost 2mo agoSimul gradiuntur fractae spes ? * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428589 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo
- bruce511 2mo agoPaul 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jspann 2mo ago(Disclosure: I'm getting a PhD in CS now) > 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.
- yieldcrv 2mo ago> 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
- asa123 2mo agothe 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
- yieldcrv 2mo agocan 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
- dayyan 2mo agoIsn't it amazing how posts about Paul, who has rejected Trump, are so civil compared to other Silicon Valley movers who embrace him?
- 01284a7e 2mo agoMy university prepared me to be a founder by making me so unemployable that starting a business was my best option.
- altmanaltman 2mo agoComputer Science at School of Hard Knocks?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ipnon 2mo agoI 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.
- raphman 2mo agoWhy do you think that? Does your view include colleges worldwide or is your comment about a specific country?
- raegis 2mo agoCollege 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.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoThe 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- pilingual 2mo agoMark 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." [0] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/6/10/mark-e-zuckerberg-06-the-whiz/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/6/10/mark-e-zuckerbe...
- fyredge 2mo agoI 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.
- kensai 2mo agoAlthough in principle I agree, cultivating founders could be an added mission.
- Fomite 2mo agoWhy, in particular, above any other aspect of society?
- freetinker 2mo agoExactly. 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.)
- vehemenz 2mo agoThat’s compatible with the thesis though. Read past the headline. He says good founders learn actual stuff at college and get good at something, without any ambition to make it profitable initially.
- fyredge 2mo agoIt'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.
- BobbyTables2 2mo agoI hate the term “founder”. 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.
- Insimwytim 2mo agoWhat's worse is when it is used as a job title, a role, which people are hired for! Sounds like a complete nonsense, yet here we are.
- BobbyTables2 2mo agoAt least the title “founder engineer” on a job requisition provides a nice immediate red flag… No need to guess!
- Fomite 2mo agoHonestly, I think we would do well to dispose of both "founder" and "startup". We had words for this. "Small business" and "Small business owner".
- watwut 2mo agoThey 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.
- dgudkov 2mo ago> 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.
- kensai 2mo agothe most pragmatic approach indeed!
- alephnerd 2mo agoThis 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.
- jimnotgym 2mo agoYes, but in this scenario Paul Graham doesn't get any of your equity, so that clearly won't make any sense to him.
- sdh 2mo agoEarly 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!
- jimnotgym 2mo agoAnd look how often he mentions the rich kid schools. Let's get more rich kids into startups
- scottfits 2mo agoOne thing I agree with and one I disagree with: - 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.
- jchonphoenix 2mo agoMuch of yc advice is correct. But much of it is also dated as you're noticing
- nxobject 2mo ago> 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.
- ErigmolCt 2mo agoYou 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
- elictronic 2mo agoI 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?
- bix6 2mo agoI 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?
- watwut 2mo ago> 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.
- palmotea 2mo ago> 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.
- tescreal 2mo agoIt's frustrating that this could be read as entirely sincere in this 2026, year of our plague.
- Twey 2mo agoThe libertarian take is surely exactly this, with the elitism either stripped out or pushed into the background (depending on your political bent): rather than employees and employers everyone should be a founder of their one-person company that raises money to do things that align with the interests of other individual founder-investors. Mind you, I'm not totally sure how this differs from employer/employee relationships in practice except I suppose that each side has less contractual protection from the other.
- Swankivo 2mo agoAgreed. 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.
- dofm 2mo ago> 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. I think PG is very out of touch.
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- Swankivo 2mo agoFair point. I don't know the cost of higher education in the US or the UK well. In Korea tuition itself is much cheaper, scholarships cover a much wider range of students, and the interest on student loans is noticeably lower. That may be why there is a bit more room to breathe. That said, I agree that to survive in the Korean job market you also need concrete skills. I just think that for those skills to be learned deeply and then developed further, you need the ability to question and to doubt.
- golly_ned 2mo ago> 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.
- georgemcbay 2mo agoAlso, 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.
- DiscourseFan 2mo agoYeah 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.
- koe123 2mo ago> 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?
- peppevignanello 2mo agoNot that your Spanish friend's opinion on what Spain needs is enough to exemplify what Spaniards (or Europeans) as a whole want and think.
- retired 2mo agoWhere 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.
- ang_cire 2mo agoAs 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!
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- ErigmolCt 2mo agoThe 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...
- newbie578 2mo agoPG 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.. Don’t meet your heroes I guess…
- onion2k 2mo agoI'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. (Hint: Everyone does this.)
- wisty 2mo ago> 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. Were you persuaded of this by rational arguments?
- onion2k 2mo agoSomeone said I should examine what I believe, and I did. Also experience taught me that presenting a rational argument never works.
- heikkilevanto 2mo ago99% 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.
- FinnLobsien 2mo agoI 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.
- ktallett 2mo agoWe 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.)
- FinnLobsien 2mo ago
- AIorNot 2mo agoNowhere 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
- camillomiller 2mo agoThat is not what universities are for. Just another biased take by someone with a massive survival bias
- Ekaros 2mo agoClear 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...
- abu-matterize 2mo agomostly agree, universities should also encourage a throw away prototypes, students should start building instead of thinking/speaking about building.
- rvz 2mo ago> students should start building instead of thinking/speaking about building. 100%. This is great timeless advice. Just build now instead of waiting or asking someone else or thinking about building.
- MrJobbo 2mo agoHow about no.
- 4ndrewl 2mo agoClickbait title, but it boils down to "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."
- jimnotgym 2mo agoI just wondered, what is YCs success rate vs other business or career options? I think universities should focus on academic studies, not as a pipeline to YC.
- IronyMan1 2mo ago[dead]
- locknitpicker 2mo ago> 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.
- palmotea 2mo ago> 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.
- codemog 2mo agoThis. If people became redundant due to AGI this article would be about best preparing the population to be Soylent Green.
- ziofill 2mo ago> Academic studies and knowledge are literally a worthless waste of time Not everything is about money
- embedding-shape 2mo agoCompared 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?
- jedberg 2mo agoThere 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.
- realysy 2mo ago> 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.
- bryanhogan 2mo agoI 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. I wrote a blog post about it: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/what-is-coco https://bryanhogan.com/blog/what-is-coco Their website (in German): https://coco.study/ https://coco.study/ The university's page on it (in German): https://www.th-koeln.de/studium/code--context-bachelor_62103.php https://www.th-koeln.de/studium/code--context-bachelor_62103...
- blindseeker 2mo agoHi 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!
- bryanhogan 2mo agoYes, I would love to talk! Please send me a message: bryan @ bryanhogan dot com
- Animats 2mo agoThis 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. [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Winter%202027&batch=Fall%202026 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Winter%202027&ba...
- contubernio 2mo agoInstrumental education is less effective at producing innovation and utility than is basic education. Forgetting this is (and has been) destructive to universities.
- jdkdkfngn 2mo ago[dead]
- tcfhgj 2mo agoA University isn't a institution to serve the economic system
- bob1029 2mo ago> 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.
- capibara13 2mo agoThis 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.
- dofm 2mo agoThis 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.
- mettamage 2mo ago> And if possible for way, way, way less money. 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
- dofm 2mo agoThere's also the Open University in the UK — an extraordinary institution. AFAIK it's also accredited in the USA. (I have been thinking about an OU degree for a second act)
- qm2crossing 2mo agothe OU now costs the same as cambridge!
- jillesvangurp 2mo agoIt'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.
- mnmnmn 2mo ago[dead]
- mettamage 2mo ago> 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?
- milhan00 2mo ago[dead]
- karol 2mo agoIt's not in universities interest to prepare ideal startup founders. They are not supposed to be preparatory schools.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- odyssey7 2mo agoOn 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.
- ozereray1 2mo agoBuilding 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.
- hndqbrg2uk 2mo agoBeen thinking about this for years
- DragonStrength 2mo agoThe 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.
- Tbarlow 2mo ago[flagged]
- podgorniy 2mo agoSomething is missing in this text. I feel like key ingredient or two are completely left unarticulated.
- baxuz 2mo agoThe fuck is a founder
- krautburglar 2mo agoI'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.
- wewewedxfgdf 2mo agoFounders thinking of applying to YC ...... 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- mmmgge3 2mo agoNow all the future founders lack are rich parents to lend them a small loan of a million dollars.
- tescreal 2mo agoI 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- dfklamp 2mo agoIf 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.
- bluegatty 2mo agoUniversities should not give a thought to it in the academic sense - just side programs.
- bluegatty 2mo agoPG is surprisingly ignorant of economics, finance and how normal businesses operate at scale, and has this weird bigotry against it. 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.
- hnihm78ttk 2mo ago[dead]
- neomantra 2mo agoI 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.
- fantasizr 2mo agoElizabeth Holmes, SBF, Do Kwon, Phoebe Gates (anyone else?) all needed a Stanford freshman ethics seminar.
- jihadjihad 2mo agoCaroline Ellison, Sunny Balwani
- ValentineC 2mo agoKarun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634690
- alistairSH 2mo agoI 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.
- nradov 2mo agoYounger founders coming out of college are somewhat insulated from health insurance concerns. Many of them can remain as a dependant on a parent's employer sponsored group plan until age 26. Others are eligible for Medicaid due to relatively low cash income. Once a startup reaches the Series A funding stage, the larger VC funds have existing arrangements with commercial health insurers to offer group coverage. I do agree that we need healthcare coverage reform but don't expect a lot of political pressure from that particular group.
- CompoundEyes 2mo agoSome 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.
- diego_moita 2mo agoRich people love to do this. 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".
- micromacrofoot 2mo agoI think we're entering Goodhart's Law here: A measure stops being a good tool once it becomes the main target.
- cushychicken 2mo agoWhat about the status quo is broken? 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.
- jeffreyrogers 2mo agoThere's a trend in top MBA programs called entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA) where you raise money to buy a business that you acquire through a mixture of debt and equity. Basically lets MBAs skip the building phase of building a small business and go right into operating it. I run a small business on the side, and although I did a ton of preparatory reading and learning not much of it was useful in retrospect. Most of it you learn by doing and it's not that hard to learn. The top three things that were useful to me to learn were sales, basic accounting and how to read financial statements, and what metrics to track/manage with. You can learn the basics for all of those in less than a month. My advice is just start. You are probably wrong about what the market wants unless you are selling a product or service that you know there is already demand for. Figure out what it is you're offering and try selling it to people. If they want it you figure out how to make it better, if they don't you try something else. Edit: I had wanted to start a business for a long time. I thought I needed some tricky new idea to be successful. That's really hard to come up with since most new ideas are bad or are too hard to sell/explain to people. In my case it was also a form of procrastination since I had to wait for the right idea. Things got easier when I just picked an existing problem/industry and decided to do that with my own proprietary software to make it easier for me. I know a guy making a couple million a year from owning multiple tanning salons. There's a lot of opportunity out there that doesn't require any special insight.
- Alkhov 2mo ago[flagged]
- sparcpile 2mo agoThe Vorta and the Jem'Hadar worship founders less than Paul Graham does.
- lenerdenator 2mo agoMy 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.
- ngvrnd 2mo ago"prepare founders" ... lol. founders prepare themselves.
- elomnusk 2mo agoUniversities 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?
- PaulHoule 2mo agoI like 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.
- oliculipolicula 2mo agoTbh I'd rather see paganist cells take on those mantles, not universities. For one, they are unlikely to be co-opted by rationalist Empires run by navel-gazing non-enbies waving a sceptre of _secret-non-secrets_ (perhaps better unpacked as "these friends of ours don't look/sound like they know better but as it turns out they do") High priestesses (in general) seem to have other means of allocating secrets/resources; that'd be where the fork shall start I wager https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02377-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02377-9
- jschveibinz 2mo agoI 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.
- vatsachak 2mo agoAs 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... And the list goes on
- n4r9 2mo ago> 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 already do something like this? 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.
- tokai 2mo agoPG 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.
- extinctsion 2mo ago[dead]
- clickety_clack 2mo agoWhatever about specifically founding tech companies to generate a pipeline for SF VCs, universities should be in the business of preparing people to live their lives with agency. You don’t need to raise VC money to live your life, but if you become an accountant, a mechanical engineer, or an artist, you should also have the skills you need to go and set up a business to do that work wherever you decide to go.
- hedora 2mo agoI have been thinking alot about which jobs are obsoleted by AI. I think VC’s are probably at the top of the list next to software developers. The old VC bargain is trading ten engineers for a year or so for controlling interest in the company. The goal is to get some sort of signs of life for investors at the end of the runway. Early phase can just be AI on the engineering side. Sure, you need a driven software engineer founder to guide the AI, but if the goal is move fast and break stuff, then build a demo, that’s about all you need. Figure that’s a few hundred thousand for seed. Now, for series A, you could sell controlling interest, or slice off a small release that produces a ~ $1M ARR, then use that to hire a few folks, and bootstrap. Are there any co-op style incubators encouraging this? I just described a lonely (but capital efficient) path.
- rafterydj 2mo agoThis I think is a medium-term path/window only. Eventually the low hanging fruit of "whatever we can do a small release quickly to get $1M ARR" will be relatively picked clean. Sort of like how the App Store boom had things like flashlight apps make a large number of sales, when realistically it made the most sense for it to be a first-party application. With AI tooling, I think things like "quickly generated dashboard" will fall under this category, which is unfortunate because the only way to tell a well-thought UI from a poorly thought out one is by using it a lot. I suspect we are going to see a wave (already seeing really) of people launching small companies with barely functional products, which will burn user trust (low bar for software already). For startups, this means the AI-code gold rush may ebb and most users will flock to larger corporate products that "just work". In this way, it follows the VC's with the most money to burn will be able to stay competitive after a few years of drought. What I'm really interested in that this time they'll need to compete not just with each other, but with other institutions (assuming the software engineer's market rate stabilizes). It's not the 1990's anymore, every business and government knows how valuable software is (even if they don't have experience making it). How will they adapt the lower barrier to entry allowed by AI tools? On the one hand, sad day for the rest and vest crowd, as well as founders. On the other hand, wouldn't it be interesting to see university or government managed Linux distros?
- tech_ken 2mo agoI think there's a very interesting history to be written/read about the emergence of the persona of 'founder'. I'm seeing it all over the place these days (alt. 'entrepeneur' or 'changemaker', the second of which really grates on me). It feels (to me) very much like 'small business owner' or 'the kids' or something: an idea or prototype of a person who is to be managed and possibly even produced by society. Not saying this in a critical way, I think every era has it's various typologies of 'person in society', but this one seems kind of unique in some interesting ways; very much a product of the last ~50 years of US history. edit: I'll say that in my personal opinion the critical thing a founder needs is a strong internal locus of control. I feel that this is also an important product of a liberal arts education, so I see some natural alignment. I worry about the degree to which the 'total university' strips 18-22 year olds of important rites of development: learning to feed for yourself, find housing, meet friends organically (as opposed to because you share a dorm), etc. I could see a more pared down, "education-mostly" school in a large city being an interesting avenue for new models of university.
- nixonaddiction 2mo agocan vc money just fund basic research? im slowly getting confused on what founding a company even is. i am in grad school right now. a lot of funding and opportunities come from guys who are like "we need you to innovate we need you to act like a startup." its honestly kinda annoying. i just want to do basic research. i dont want to sell anything. i just want to build things. but the way this article frames it- is founding a company just getting funding for a research project? but using different words? could i just pull up with a list of my research interests, convince people its a sellable product, and score funding? obviously id need to deal with financial overhead myself (a pain) but hypothetically. lets say i complete my degree, maybe spend a year or three in industry networking and better understanding the problem space. then pitch myself to vcs with hope of funding whatever topics im interested and have my company function like a research group except instead of publishing papers we build products? like no profit no big deal, i never intended to profit. which, is this not what openai is doing? unethical to lie about my intents (i want to do research not start a company) but i feel the end goal (more funding for research) could be worth it.
- sillysaurusx 2mo ago> im slowly getting confused on what founding a company even is. > i dont want to sell anything. i just want to build things. These are incompatible. If you start a company, whether you're CTO or CEO, you'll need to sell things. Both founders have to focus on the product, since it's being sold to people. And people refuse what they don't like. Which means your most valuable feedback mechanism comes from trying to sell something and then doing something different in response, until people buy it. > could i just pull up with a list of my research interests, convince people its a sellable product, and score funding? You can, but your company will eventually die because you won't be able to raise more money. VCs want signs that a company is growing. So if you raise money and then ask for more without strong sales, they won't give you more. > then pitch myself to vcs with hope of funding whatever topics im interested and have my company function like a research group except instead of publishing papers we build products? like no profit no big deal, i never intended to profit. which, is this not what openai is doing? That's not what OpenAI is doing. They're so focused on selling that they were even willing to sacrifice some of their research culture just to get everyone on the same page of "we have to make money, otherwise research can't happen." Sam explained to everyone that money comes from sales, not research, and money is a requirement for research. Thus they had to focus on selling.
- 4d4m 2mo agoUniversities should not prepare founders. They should expel them. Generally schools are a poor place for creating curious individuals, and the longer a potential founder is in one, the lesser chance they'll take that big swing for the fences toward a novel or greenfield product. If not attitude it's the time commitment - founders should be spending 50%+ of their time with their first customers and refining/pivoting, which interferes with going to (outdated) classes.
- sinab 2mo agoWhy should universities prepare founders to start companies? The essay assumes that premise.
- roncesvalles 2mo ago>Startups succeed or fail based on how much customers like the product. It's always been that simple yet founders these days tend to believe success is predicated on all the things but the product. "Build it and they will come" is mostly true. No amount of sales, marketing and growth hacking can save a product that simply isn't very good. This article is refreshing because it's not saying "the way to train startup founders is by teaching them business" like a lot of universities believe. You need to be willing and able to build.
- jeffreyrogers 2mo agoI guess one thing universities have to decide is how important having founders is to them. PG talks about how Harvard has more founders than Yale and Princeton, but I don't really see that as a good or bad thing for any of those schools. There probably aren't infinite good ideas that can be successful at any one time. If you encourage more people to become founders then they aren't going to go into other places where their skills might be better suited. YC's founders also skew heavily towards a certain type of person and business. The returns of VC in biotech for example are much lower than the returns in B2C and B2B software. It's just a harder, more capital intensive, and more uncertain industry. Over optimizing for the YC archetype means you get less of the people who succeed in other areas. Also, although PG disdains finance and management, many large problems are better addressed through people with skills in these areas IMO, since often the returns are not sufficient to attract VC interest but the financial and human resources that need to be coordinated to address them are substantially beyond the ability of a small, undercapitalized group.
- strangattractor 2mo agoThere are so many VC's and so much money today the demand for "Founders" is high. One way to increase supply is to manufacture what you need - much like Korean K-Pop bands. Band members start in a Bootcamp. They learn to dance and get a vocal coach. As their fan base grows they start to disrupt and displace older bands that are aging out. The industry as a whole does well but individual band may or may not. Do they produce new and innovative music? - meh. Let's face it - a "Founder" with the right fan base can get valuations over a trillion:)
- jeffreyrogers 2mo agoI do think it is kind of funny when VCs talk about how they can tell who will be a successful founder. They are picking the people who get to call themselves founders so it is close to tautological that who they think will be successful matches who ends up succeeding. You don't get to see the counterfactual world where the non-funded people get given money and then you see what personality distribution the successes from that group have. The problem probably is worse now since there are fewer IPOs and more companies exit in private transactions where it's not clear how much economic value was actually created vs how much is just what the investors agree the business is worth.
- PennRobotics 2mo agoI am in a startup with three other full-time engineers and a strong intern team. We all have advanced degrees, but more education and better ideas wouldn't help us at this point. So much of our time is spent on non-engineering tasks: quote requests, documentation, marketing, hosting visitors, packaging, CUSTOMS, coffee machine cleaning, assembling office furniture, ordering components, labeling components, asking vendors for part modifications, customer support. It's difficult finding the perfect office manager, so we do everything. I also took an entrepreneurship sequence in grad school. In agreement with PG, we were taught not to hand off large chunks of the business to the MBAs. In contrast with PG: we learned that between team, funding, and product, product is least important while team is most important. If that wasn't true, why would large companies "acqui-hire"? (In fairness, PG didn't say product is the most important thing at a startup, just that it's "hard", and this is true.) These few courses were also the first taste most students (esp. non-graduates) had of calling subject matter experts and potential customers, meeting real investors for a mock pitch, the various mechanisms/strategies finance professionals use to separate a founder from their profits and/or build an efficient revenue machine, determining actual pre-realized product demand so you can haggle for bulk discounts from suppliers, setting appropriate product margins. These are the tasks I find I'm often doing in between PCB layout and product assembly, so I'm quite glad I took an entrepreneurial curriculum in school rather than a few more ergonomics or RF courses.
- 438e63 2mo ago[dead]
- antonvs 2mo agoPity universities couldn’t do a better job of preparing Paul Graham for being a human. Instead, universities like Harvard apparently do a fantastic job of preparing people to bloviate self-servingly, endlessly, and with a total lack of anything resembling introspection. Basically, this is an “essay” (read: blog vomit) about how universities can do a better job of providing Paul Graham with the raw material he and people like him need to fund their lifestyle. > We're like grad school. Sure, Paul. That’s not a self-serving nonsensical statement at all.
- BuyLowSellLow 2mo agoShould universities prepare founders? Not sarcasm. I genuinely wonder what happened to self discovery, apprenticeship, learning, and building mastery before a product, and a product before a company.
- mips_avatar 2mo agoI spent multiple hours every week in various risk management meetings one semester for our drone building student team. There was no risk management done, they just made it clear they would try and expell and sue us if we tested our drone.
- 0xis 2mo agoAs if sharp creators are keen on becoming profit-minded if not the very opposite