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Comment by montrose | Hacker News Reader

Occam's Razor suggests the reason "entrepreneurship programs" for engineers fail is not because engineers are too timid, but because all such programs fail.

The way to learn how to start a startup is by doing it. So the right way to teach "entrepreneurship," to the extent it can be taught, is something like Y Combinator, not a college class.

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I am in two minds over this. I skipped college after one year and went straight into an IT job as a sysadmin. Seven years later I started working for a startup and then proceeded to do startups ever since.

There would have been a bunch of things that would have been very valuable to learn in school to be a better entrepreneur, but I think I haven’t really seen programmes that take the right approach. Successful entrepreneurs don’t generally set out to be teachers. I don’t think I would enjoy it. Advising startups, maybe that would be better. Which brings us to something like YC.

I tend to agree. I think anyone who enrolls for a class in entrepreneurship has pretty much demonstrated that they don't have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Not that they're not capable or qualified. And indeed, they might be more capable and more qualified after taking the class. But entrepreneurs are the ones who just go out and do it, learn from experience. People who expect to learn from a class are kinda the opposite of that (and I say this as someone who took an entrepreneurship class as part of my MBA). Over-broad generalization, to be sure, but I think there's truth to it.

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