Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs
I am a Junior in high school and am wondering which college would be the best for an aspiring start up entrepreneur. Also is a computer science or business degree recommended?
Computer science. Hands down.
am wondering which college would be the best for an aspiring start up entrepreneur.
I think that Stanford is obviously the best choice, they push entrepreneurship pretty hard. But at the same time, I don't really think that it's the school, it's the student. And, Stanford is really expensive. If you get in to Stanford and can get funded, great. If you can't get funded, I'd really try and balance the really high costs, how much work it's going to require to get in to Stanford and how much competition you'll have while you're there, with the benefits that Stanford will give you.
You might be better off going to your local University of Foo state school, and working hard on your own to learn the types of technologies that you're going to use in your startup. Nothing can stop you from learning what you need to learn to start a business. The school I'm finishing up at-- University of Maryland--isn't a tech powerhouse. And, most of the CS education tends to have a slant towards Defense contracting, which means Java and Oracle (Ada for the advanced stuff. :) ). But, I've managed to squeeze out a decent education in web development since I've been there, I think.
Another key factor in school selection is to keep expenses low. You're going to have a hard time starting a business after college if you're $125k in debt to school, and $25k in debt to credit cards because you went to a school that you couldn't afford.
Your risk of failure is a lot lower if you have minimal expenses when you're done with college. If you can finish college with zero debt, your can take all the time you want to start a business as long as you have money for rent, ramen and bandwidth. I really think that people underestimate this aspect of being an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, it's in your best interest to run financially lean and mean: low cost, low debt.
Aside from the great CS education and networking, the location is really key. How many places in the world can a student attend entrepreneurial and hacking-type events every week (for free)? The local events may be too distracting (need to work!), but if I were a student again, I'd rather have the opportunities to pick & choose. Example: YC Startup School.
I fully realize that other schools can be great and also have students just as good or better than Stanford. [I loved my time at Univ of Virginia.] But if the question is "best" environment for an aspiring tech entrepreneur, I think it's got to be here.
Pay as little as possible. State universities, full-tuition scholarships, whatever. The debt is what will imprison you, and colleges aren't worth anything near what they cost.
If you focus on doing well in school, and you later find that you need better credentials than the U of X can provide, there's always the master's degree... the thrifty person's path to Ultimate Credential Power. The top engineering schools are easier to get into (because it's easier to distinguish yourself in college than in high school, where grades and SATs are all hyperinflated and everyone's admissions essays are ghostwritten) and much more affordable (sometimes even marginally profitable!) at the graduate level.
Remember that many private colleges give really generous financial aid if your parents are not wealthy. Stanford is free if you make under $100K; Amherst has abolished all loans in financial aid, so it's free for those making under about $40-50K and quite reasonably priced (often less than a state uni) for those making under $100K.
My actual tuition at Amherst was only slightly more than the sticker price at UMass; my sister's at Rice was less. Now, granted it's not really a fair comparison, since I would've gotten a full-ride at UMass Amherst (and UMass Lowell offered to pay me to attend). But I'd look long and hard at the scholarship options available before discounting a top college based on price.
Can you reformulate that to use three 'R's?
"food, a flat, fiber"?
"home, hamburgers, hosting"?
MIT is great but the attitudes and environment are quite different. The campus is in a much more urban environment. Rather than the upbeat attitude at Stanford, MIT is more of a tough-love kind of school. "You might think you are smart, but really you suck and are lazy" is how motivation works at MIT. At Stanford it is more like "yo, we're all super smart. let's be rad and play ultimate frisbee later." I think it has something to do with the wildly different climates.
This is very qualitative, but from my experience MIT is probably a better place to go if you want to do a form of engineering that requires crazy smarts that isn't computer science. Like hardcore electrical engineering, or bioengineering or material science or designing atomic weapons. Stanford is better for straight-up computer stuff.
If you can get into one of those two schools you are a step ahead of the game. They are the only two schools in the USA that are worth their super inflated tuitions. Otherwise I'd just go to the best school you can get into that costs the least amount of money.
When I was college shopping, I was choosing between a liberal arts school and a top-tier engineering school. I visited the engineering school and realized that while they had an amazing computer science program, the social outlook was rather drab. Only 20% girls, in the middle of nowhere, the people that I talked to didn't really seem to like it, but all assured me "that it was really a great college."
Then I visited the liberal arts school. That was definitely the right choice. As it were, I had some great professors that really took an interest in my research and my life. I learned a lot about literature and philosophy and psychology and history and hung out with folks that weren't just gear heads. My world grew wider, not just deeper.
Now, many years later I realize that after the first two years or so of CS I knew enough to be able to understand and find hard problems. But if I'd not been forced to take that massive block of core classes, I might have never realized that psychology is really interesting, that there are a lot of parallels between the way that architechts and programmers think or that you can meet a lot of cute girls if you hang out in the music department.
So, why is that important?
Well, when I was submitting my proposal for my senior research, I was stressed out because it didn't fit neatly into a specific department. It was on the line between CS, physics and biology. My advisor said something that's stuck with me to this day:
"The interesting problems of the coming decades of computer science lie at the intersection between computer science and other fields."
Getting a solid grasp on computer science in my opinion is critically important, but it's also pretty ubiquitous. (Though, sadly, it's pretty universally mediocre. A lot depends on your personal uptake.) What seems a lot more important to me is finding a place where you can cross-pollinate with other disciplines, meet a lot of different and interesting people and, well, enjoy yourself. The skills required for that seem to escape nerds much more often than the ability to sling code, and are essential in business interactions. A lot of people get caught up in getting into the dozen hardest to get into schools, but most colleges will have more people smarter than you than's names you can remember, and it's not that hard to find them.
One thing I do agree on is that starting something requires more than just coding skills - your ability to socialize, to motivate other people, and to get along with others is critically important. However, I would recommend teaching yourself how to socialize and getting academic schooling on code rather than the other way around.
If you're choosing your college based on where you can build a startup, you should look at 3 things:
1) Smart, motivated people. I would say Stanford, Harvard, MIT have taken most of them. Startups are rarely 1 person endeavors, and having a lot of candidates for a partner really helps.
2) Skills. This is why any top-tier university is good, because the skill-sets there are abundant. Plenty of smart people are looking for the next frontier, and you can give it to them.
3) Community. Most people don't get serious about entrepreneurship until they meet an entrepreneur. Make sure you have some sort of VC connection in your school, or a business program in entrepreneurship and a lively entrepreneur community. Also take entrepreneurial classes if you can, and try to connect with the community as fast as possible.
I go to CMU (Carnegie Mellon), and while it has, to some extent, all of the 3 points above, I do sometimes regret not going somewhere better. The difference in the caliber of people and the quantity and quality of the entrepreneurs here is quite apparent. CMU has a lot of old VCs that don't really know the web, and the entrepreneur community here is mostly older people doing older stuff (but still fascinating startups). One thing I'm very satisfied with is the professors here teaching entrepreneurship, as they have their own companies and provide a LOT of advice and motivation (they just are limited in how much help they can give if you're doing a web startup). I would say its a tier or 2 below the top three.
There seems to be a good correlation between the VC money in a certain area and how startup-friendly the colleges nearby are. Its best if you just follow that.
also - business vs CS - do CS.
The business school here at CMU produces the worst slackers-that-look-good-in-suits that I've ever seen. It does wonders to your presentation skills but kills your ability to do any serious work whatsoever.
I'll go ahead and put out a few things that I still think might be true about the top schools before I jump into my objections.
The alumni network seems to be good. This does seem to be important. I can't really qualify how much better it is than other places since I didn't go to a well known school, but it does seem to be big, and well, often rich. (Though, strength of the alumni network doesn't seem really to be a linear function of prestige. There are a lot of places out there with freakishly strong alumni networks that aren't that hard to get into. Looking at the school's endowment might be a good place to suss this out.) Location, as others have pointed out, can make a big difference too. And while I don't at all believe that going to Harvard or Stanford is a reliable indicator of intelligence, I suspect that it is a pretty good indicator of people who are able to set hard to reach goals and get them done. The last bit is brand recognition. Harvard and Stanford and similar have that and I suspect "BS in Computer Science from Harvard" sounds better on a VC pitch than, "moderately intelligent charismatic insomniac workaholic with delusions of grandeur", even though the latter would probably be closer to The Right Stuff.
There are smart and motivated people at every decent college. And pretty much everywhere they're in the minority. It's enticing to think when you're at College A that if you'd just gone to College B that it'd be better.
One of the funny statistics from where I went to college was that, at the time that I went there, we had the highest percentage of students that went on to receive PhDs of any college in the country. I say funny because, well, I'm sure you've never heard of where I went to college (now, apparently, according to US News, the 116th ranked liberal arts college). So, a few years after college I had friends were TA-ing at Berkeley, Cornell, MIT and they all said pretty much the same thing -- that the students were almost frustratingly similar to us. It's easy to forget that for every Larry Page there are thousands of Stanford grads that are working at boring jobs just like everybody else.
Community and skills seem about the same. I'm not saying that people aren't better at more prestigious schools. I'm pretty sure they are. But my feeling is that the top 1% where I went are probably about on par with the top 10% from Harvard. And that was still several dozen people and I reckon I knew most of them. In the house I was living in senior year, I was the only one of the five of us that wasn't a national merit scholar. But I'm not sure that matters very much.
My next door neighbor and I are both from Southeast Texas. This is quite a coincidence, because, you see, I live in east Berlin. His startup (smartertours.com) has really taken off in the last year. I'm probably smarter than him, but he's a charismatic insomniac workaholic with delusions of grandeur. Dude's a machine.
Ryan went to University of Texas I think. My other ex-pat friend here, Jeff, runs the cafe down the street where Ryan and I often see each other at lunch. He went to some unknown bible college. Jeff's also managed to do pretty well for himself since he managed to pick a trendy street just before it got trendy. He's also worked his ass off.
Now, I'm not an entrepreneur yet. I couldn't legally start a business here until I got my permanent residence a few weeks ago. But I've done pretty well for myself as a hacker. When I look back at my brilliant college roommates, and compare them to me, Ryan or Jeff, my old roommies were definitely a smarter bunch with a more impressive collection of degrees. They've all got normal jobs now. But Ryan and Jeff seem to have what it takes.
I'm not saying that an aspiring student shouldn't go to Harvard or Stanford. I couldn't have gotten in, personally, but I'm sure they're great places to hit the ground running. I'm just saying don't get hung up on it.
One thing about CMU's business school that I respect is that they do offer hard, technical classes in some areas that overlap with industrial engineering. You can learn supply chain management at CMU's business school; you can't learn supply chain management at Pitt's business school.
One point glaringly stuck out in the Duke presentation though. Even in your freshman year at Duke, you as a student can pitch the school with an idea, and they'll consider providing project funding and resources. None of the other schools suggested they would do this.
Duke is obviously taking the entrepeneurial pulse right now, and consider promoting and cultivating entrepeneurship as a selling point for their school.
As far as a degree, whichever you enjoy the most. Don't focus on the product; rather, HOW you reach it.
Back on topic, empirically, I know many people involved in startups with _some_ connection to Stanford, probably more so than any other single school. I know many people from UC Santa Cruz, too. Both may be because these are the two nearest good universities near Silicon Valley.
Not so many from San Jose State University. Maybe stay away from that one.
Understand that your raw intellectual prowess is a depreciating asset. I'd guess that I peaked in programming ability at about 19, and 18-20 seems a pretty common age range based on famous programmers. I'm certainly not as productive a programmer as I was at my first professional job at 19, and my 35 year old coworkers have said that there's no way they can keep up with what I do now at 26.
You continue gaining experience for a while after that, so it's not like you're over the hill at 20. The mid/late 20s seems to be the "sweet spot" where you still have decent technical prowess and yet enough experience to avoid blind alleys. But if you fritter away your early 20s, you lose the benefits of high ability and don't have the experience to show for it. You're starting behind and have to play catch-up to more youthful and more energetic competitors, which is possible but can be kinda discouraging.
OTOH, trying out a variety of things gives you a lot of perspective on what you do or don't want to pursue. I was certain I wanted to be a physics major and then a theoretical physicist when I entered college. I flirted briefly with majoring in philosophy or sociology when it turned out physics was much harder than I bargained for. I tried out fiction writing and found I wasn't any good at it. I made all-state violin in high school, but again realized that I didn't have the passion for it needed to be a professional.
The one downside of having all those options open is that I never finished anything. There was always some other avenue that looked more attractive. It was only in my senior year, when I was practically flunking out of physics and had a bunch of hobbies that weren't all that useful, that I decided I was gonna close off all the other avenues and focus on computers. And it was only then that I started actually producing stuff that was useful.
So, I'll agree with the parent post that it's important to grow creatively, socially, and intellectually in college. But understand that there are doors that going to Stanford/Harvard/MIT opens, and those doors tend to slam shut afterwards. It's possible to prop them back open, but it takes a lot more effort, because you're working against people's expectations. Similarly, there're doors that open from focusing deeply on one field, and it's much harder to achieve mastery in a subject than it seems in high school.
I remember thinking in high school "I've got 70 years left in my life, that's plenty of time to accomplish everything." But you don't - you've got maybe 10-15 years (between the ages of 20 and 35) to really make a mark on the world, and then the rest is for raising kids, writing books, passing on your wisdom, and generally enjoying the fruits of those 10-15 years.
(I do reserve the right to change my mind in 10 years and say "Pish-posh. Life's not over at 35 - keep an open mind and you can keep doing cool stuff until the day you die." But this is how it looks from the mid-20s.)
It's also upside down compared to other fields like medicine and writing. In medicine, you make your "mark on the world" after you go through significant training, which ends around 30 or later.
As far as making it entrepreneurially:
1) If it depends purely on intelligence or hacking ability, PlentyOfFish.com and other success stories wouldn't have made it. Even if it's somewhat true, consider that the decrease of your ability with age should be less than the interpersonal variability of ability. (50 yo Einstein > 20 yo Homer Simpson)
2) If it depends on luck, don't worry about age.
3) If it depends on connections, you get more with age.
4) If it depends on others' perception of your youth.... you may be in trouble.
Also - I doubt few people would dispute that succeeding with a tech business requires the ability to concentrate intensely for long periods of time. (Something I'm obviously failing at, having been back to news.YC 3 times so far today.) Certainly many young people lack that, but for a given person, it seems likely that they're better able to do that at 20 or 25 before things like family, business connections, or reputation intercedes.
It definitely is upside down compared to medicine or writing, but that's because computer programming is nearly in unique among human fields in being subject to lots of chaotic effects. Almost every other body of knowledge is additive, but in software, small changes to requirements at the base layer can have ripple effects that invalid your whole system's design. That's why the software industry seems to undergo major tectonic shifts every 10 years or so, each of which creates lots of opportunities for young entrepreneurs who haven't learned the now-obsolete ways of "how things are done".
When I was a kid, the hot new field was microcomputers, the programming language was assembly (no wait...Pascal. no wait...C), and the largest platform was Windows. When I was a teenager, the hot new field was the web, the hot programming languages were Perl and PHP and Java, and the largest platform was Netscape. Now that I'm in my twenties, the hot new field is rich Internet applications, the hot programming languages are Flash, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby, and the largest market is Internet Explorer. I can almost guarantee that the hot field, language, and platform will be different in 10 years, and all the technical skills I've learned so far will be obsolete.
Edit: On reflection, it's not really software as a whole that's chaotic so much as the leading edge of software, i.e. the edge where you can still have a viable startup. If you're making a desktop app, the tools and skillsets are only slightly different from making a desktop app in 1995. If you're making a webapp that's just a sequence of forms, the tools from 1998 will work fine. But those are mostly solved problems: either there's an off-the-shelf solution that's already been built, or you can hire one of an army of consultants that knows how to build one. The leading edge, by definition, involves tackling problems that haven't been solved before, and so there's no advantage to experience in solving them.
Writing prose can be similar in intensity to writing code. John Scalzi, a recent sci-fi award winner, wrote a book for writers called "You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffeeshop." Many writers block out pure concentration time. Nonetheless, I'll concede that long stretches of time are more available to the young, unless they are out partying :)
I wonder how many big successes depend on bleeding edge software? For every Google, there are plenty more like MySpace, Ebay, Amazon, and Facebook.
I usually live off specialized applications, where you build software that focuses on a particular need for a niche population. Knowing the domain (say radiotherapy or creative writing) is really useful because of insights into how you can fashion new tools using advancing technology (e.g., faster 3D graphics or a better web framework). So while I agree that creating totally innovative approaches might be easier for the young, I think experience helps in creating domain-specific software.
My main point, though, is even if you believe you have a limited shelf-life, you might consider it's your shelf-life in only one of many possible avenues to make your mark.
A lot of mentions of Stanford here but how many of you actually went to school there? I swear to god somedays I think most of you are just card-carrying cargo-cultists.
But, it seems pretty clear that out of all the schools, the single best one for an entrepreneur is Stanford, as long as grades and money aren't an issue. Of course, a motivated student can do well wherever he or she goes but Stanford is the one to reach for, if you have a 1500 (2250 now?) on your SATS.
I am curious what actually happens in a Babson entrepreneurship degree. Anyone go there?
I think the vast majority of Stanford students, or other elite students anywhere, are admitted because they put their schoolwork first. Sinking lots of time into any extracurricular, including entrepeneurship, is a sacrifice a lot of students aren't used to making and would have trained themselves to not make in high school, and in fact, such a sacrifice could have royally screwed them out of getting in in the first place, and almost certainly would have if they had gone to a very competitive high school.
Seriously, FUCK STANFORD and don't worry about it. Just find a good school that's not too much pressure to get into.
That said, "everyone else" still has some excellent options. MIT, Harvard,... yeah, all good options. But don't rule out the big public research universities. Berkeley and Illinois grads (among many others) have produced a lot of great startups - great by almost any measure (except that damn university to the south ;) )
For undergrad, getting a business degree is pretty irrelevant to start ups. Get a technical degree, such as CS. Learn about start ups by evaluating different opportunities, reading case studies and books like "founders at work."
You can test out ideas in your free time during the semester and winter break. It is important to get relevant internships during the summer.
"Being in your own business is working 80 hours a week so that you can avoid working 40 hours a week for someone else." (c) Ramona Arnett
The Hinman program provides mentors, classes, living/learning environments, conference rooms, and other facilities to help potential entrepreneurs. Additionally, they bring in a steady stream of successful entrepreneurs to speak, network, and help you on your way.
Add that to its close proximity to Washington D.C., good tuition, and highly ranked engineering/business departments, and you have a fairly good entrepreneurship package.
Computer Science.
Good luck.
On a side note, my alma mater, the University of Southern California, accepts roughly 25% of students as a whole, and a slightly lower percentage of computer science students (though I can't find specific numbers).
I can't speak to knowing a large volume of entrepreneurs at USC, but I do know a few. The school itself has been making an impressive dedication to increasing entrepreneurship, however, especially in the Viterbi school of engineering. Mark Stevens, of Sequoia, recently funded a center for technology commercialization designed to help students build businesses out of research projects, and there are several student groups devoted to similar pursuits.
Los Angeles is also not the valley, but it turns out that it is a decent alternative, I would say at least as much so as any other major city in the U.S.
I'm not saying you should go to USC necessarily, but I enjoyed myself while I was there. One thing is certain, though, it is very different from Stanford.
That may be true for Ph.D. students, but not for undergraduates. Undergraduate applications are reviewed without regards to major. You'll have an equal chance of getting in whether you express interest in CS or English. The Stanford admissions website confirms this. [1]
The Ph.D. program may have acceptance rates approaching 1%, although I don't really think it's that low. Also, the master's program accepts a significantly higher percentage of applicants than the doctoral program.
[1] "All applicants apply to Stanford through the Office of Undergraduate Admission, not to a particular school or department within the University, and Stanford does not give preference to any major." http://admission.stanford.edu/applying/1_8_faqs.html
On a side note, I have some doubt that the admissions process is truly blind to your stated major of interest. These schools do have a desire to maintain balance between their programs.
But it's a mistake to think that these places have a monopoly on ideas or are stepping stones to great things in this business. A lot of Ivy Plus types get admitted to Harvard or Stanford on the basis of strong standardized test scores, which are not a good indicator of creativity. I know of a late '90s Harvard College CS grad who hasn't done anything remarkable with software development or Web technologies. An MIT grad I briefly worked with had some interesting insights, but many of her ideas came from other people.
It's also important to recognize that someone with skills and a great idea can develop very special technologies no matter where they are studying CS -- or even if they are not formally studying anything. Shaun Fanning didn't come up with Napster at Harvard, he developed it at his dorm room at Northeastern. Jaron Lanier (the guy who coined the term "virtual reality" and developed many early applications) was a student researcher at New Mexico State University before heading off to the Valley.
Bottom line: Seek out those schools with great faculty and programs that interest you, but remembver that success depends on the ideas bouncing around your head, not the name of the university on your resume.
Yes, people can develop no matter where they study. I don't see anyone arguing that other places are the entrepreneurial equivalent of raising babies without light. The post's question was "best" place for a given aspiring tech entrepreneur.
Location is key because "great faculty and programs" aren't just within the university. They include the guest angel investor speaking at a seminar, the Ruby hackers-entrepreneurs at the local gathering, the founders presenting at one of the many local showcases. They include events like YC Startup School, which I would probably not attend if I went to school in Virginia.
Bottom line: Go to the place most conducive to your entrepreneurial aspirations that you can attend without troubling debt. Then make the most of your choice.
EE training also forces you into a mode of thought that focuses on concrete implementation rather than making what people want.
Turing taught us that any machine implemented in digital logic can be implemented with a basic microprocessor. Knowledge of transistor transfer functions and Nyquist plots are useless in a startup context these days.
Comp Sci or bust.
b) Stanford and UIUC tend to be more entrepreneurial than other CS colleges (I find Carnegie Mellon/MIT tend to lean towards academia), but I'd say it's more important to go where you'll be happy...visit everywhere and find a place that won't drive you insane, since nothing kills the startup spirit faster than being forced to work day-in and day-out on things you don't enjoy.
That being said, I love Carnegie Mellon :-P
College is all about the people. Find the one with the people you like the best and respect the most. You'll figure out the rest while you are there.
I would normally never recommend this to anyone who cared about their future, but if you truly are an "aspiring start up entrepreneur", then you already know this is the right answer. In your case, college is an unnecessary detour.
"but tackling true CS subjects individually is not something a lot of people can truly do"
Unless they have jobs.
Please don't kid yourself into thinking that CS in college is anything other than the warm-up act for the real thing. It's strictly optional.
why not both?
anywhere close to the valley, boston/cambridge, austin, seattle, nyc.
That being said, Harvard is probably a pretty good place to be.
This not to say some schools aren't better than others, but when people do great things it's usually because of who they are rather than where they went to college.
I agree with the gist of your point, though. The school you attend is considerably more important for grad school.
But in overall you're right. Don't treat college as your pass to success, however it could be your backup, just in case if you're not that smart as you think. ;)
To the original question: Stanford, by a very wide margin.