Ask HN: Are Startups similar to college admissions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are Startups similar to college admissions?

24 pointsbarnettx20 comments

I've just been rejected for undergrad at Stanford, the campus I hoped to accelerate my technopreneurship journey. I have been dealing with the rejection as an exercise of persistence because I recognise that I will have to face similar circumstances in startups with applying to incubators, pitching to investors, etc. Yet, I really hope startups aren't as much of a lottery game as admitting into top colleges are.

For those who have been through both the college and startup journey, could you share if you see any parallels between the two experiences. Does luck play an equally large factor?

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This may be an unpopular opinion, but here we go. It depends on how you define "startup". There are two common definitions, and people confuse them all the time and don't make clear what they are talking about. 1. A VC-backed company whose primary goal is exponential growth with a small chance of an outsized return. 2. A profitable business.

If your goal is to do the first, then luck will play a large role. That's why VCs have portfolios of companies. It's nearly impossible to make predictions about which startups succeed, but if one of their companies does, they win (note that they don't care if it's your company or not). As a result, VCs push their companies and founders towards making risky bets. Those bets involve a large amount of uncertainty and randomness. You either win big, or you lose.

If your goal is to build a profitable business not focused on exponential growth or VC-sized returns, then luck plays a smaller role. That's because you are not forced to make those large risky bets. You can take more calculated risks with slower growth while focusing on profitability. If you win, you are not going to win as big as in the first case, but your chance of winning in some way is higher. Of course, there is always uncertainty in life.

Note that I've focused on financial returns, which may not be what you (should) care about. For example, your chance to fail is high in the first case, but you since you are involved with more "successful" people you will likely learn and build a network along the way that can set up you for future success. You are more likely to "succeed" in the second case, but you may not build much of a network or stretch yourself. Similar arguments in the other direction can be made for mental health or stress levels.

I recommend reading "Fooled By Randomess" [1] on the topic of chance

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Marke...

great points

> If your goal is to build a profitable business not focused on exponential growth or VC-sized returns, then luck plays a smaller role.

a bit of background. I started Android development at 12 and published a few apps on the app stores. Tasted the fun of building one's own business and earning money by myself. I have always dreamed of building the next big thing.

I think now I'm slowly realising that building the next big thing is really difficult. It might not even be something I'm aiming for any more now that have better insights on the workings of exponential growth. The stress and luck involved reminded me of this college situation I'm in.

> I recommend reading "Fooled By Randomess"

gonna give this a read. thanks!

Thanks for the comment and the book recommendation, will read.

Luck matters a lot, as with anything in life. But the better you are, the less it matters.

If you are some super precocious young scientist who had already developed a novel drug, Stanford would be calling you.

If you show investors a killer product and early traction, it doesn’t really matter who you are, they will be knocking on your door.

Now obviously its not easy to do either one of those things. And most of us are somewhere underneath those very high bars, so luck does matter. Getting into a good undergrad, getting into YC. I won’t lie. In my experience, these things have helped me immensely. But optimizing for them is like studying for the test, not for actual learning.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, worrying about luck, Stanford, YC is all misguided effort. Start a business, succeed, fail, learn, start again. This is what will actually get you closer to your goal. This is what will get you good enough so that the whims of luck won’t make or break you.

Different kinds of luck, and a different kind of game.

Stanford is small, arbitrary luck in a single play game, where failure usually is not something you can learn from, because you will never apply to Stanford again.

One's startup journey is best thought of as an iterated game, where luck mostly around timing, and you can learn from failure and practice your timing.

In targeting an elite college you are in a lottery with 100s of others for each seat. Of those hundreds a few might actually not be "qualified" but generally there is nothing substantial to distinguish 99% of those who don't get in.

Being chosen or not is a particular kind of small luck- the sort of arbitrary circumstantial occurrance that is not under your control and is not something you can learn from. Not "getting in" is not failure, unless you think not meeting the demands of your ego is failure (it isn't).

In starting a business, the range of moves and outcomes, the game board, is SO MUCH LARGER and SO MUCH MORE REAL than anything involved in getting into even an elite college. Here you have other people's money and their livelihoods at stake, not just your own ego. Here success and failure are much more tangible and much more distinguishes between them. Execution is much, much more complicated.

Even among startups who execute well, most still fail because of timing. The ones that succeed also do so largely because of timing. This "luck" around timing is something you can learn.

Said another way- my daughters are used to scoring high 90%s in their academics. Every day I tell them the real world is where the people doing the best are scoring around 5-10%, and of those who do it best the ones who succeed get their 1 right out of 10/20 at just the right time.

First and foremost, don't worry about not getting into <insert elite college or university>. The admissions process is not fair, and in fact, it's unfair is well documented in a couple of court cases. (See Student's for Fair Admission court case docs [1] Your admissions decision is not a reflection of you as a person.

Next, I wouldn't really draw comparisons between success and failure in starts ups and academic institutions, as success in getting into a school is really arbitrary, where the start up success is not some limited resource decided by a panel of admissions officers. In my experience, as an employee of multiple start up projects and companies, start ups are as much of a lottery game, and I've seen unfair and unjust things happen to other people, and experience them myself.

On a personal note, you will deal with failure, and bad things will happen to you that make you feel bad. This is life. You can give up, or decide to keep pushing forward closer to your goals with minimal delay and resentment. There are a couple of useful philosophies for dealing with this, and I've found Stoicism very helpful for managing these situations. (See Marcus Aurelius's Mediations for a good intro [2]).

[1] https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/sffa-files-motion-for-... [2] http://seinfeld.co/library/meditations.pdf

> First and foremost, don't worry about not getting into <insert elite college or university>.

Potentially unpopular opinion - one thing I've noticed where you get in is a somewhat good indication of future success, whereas attending is far noisier. I know countless successful people who are included as examples of folks that "succeeded despite going to a non-competitive school" despite the fact that they got into significantly more competitive ones.

(Disclaimer - I didn't get into any elite schools..)

Yea, in general, to get into a competitive school, you already have a lot going for you: namely a stable enough home life, and supportive enough and enriching environment that you can dedicate yourself to applying your intelligence to creating a competitive application. It's kind of weird, the people that get into the schools are the ones that "need" them the least.

Conversely, there is some evidence that less privileged students have worse outcomes if they attend an elite school (compared to lower tier schools) in a substantial amount of cases where these students have not prepared to the same level as peers that have undergone a more competitive selection criteria.

I’m not convinced about the latter, but I am convinced that it’s difficult to get out of the hole you’re in if you can’t get into an elite school at 17/18. I’ve basically given up.

The university you go to is a factor in your entreprenurial journey. Stanford is likely the best outcome in the school factor you want to be a startup founder. But there are many other factors to optimize for beyond college.

The ultimate thing to optimize for is to build something people want.

The college you go to is just one factor feeding into that.

Don't let a poor outcome in one factor cause you to lose focus on the ultimate goal.

And here's a tip: go to another school in the Bay Area, find the hottest startup, and offer value to them until they let you intern there. 4 years of that (or even at a few startups) is worth more than anything you would have gotten from any school. And don't forget to read all the startup books.

Edit: I realized I didn't really answer your question so here goes: yes luck plays a huge factor, especially as you move from predicatable businesses such as commerical real estate to hypergrowth moonshots like Google and Facebook. But all startup founders face setbacks, and you've just witenssed your first highly visible setback. Don't let it rock your ship; instead use it to fuel your fire.

Luck is the determining factor to life. Except both startups and colleges use different types of luck. Startup luck is more similar to 'real life' luck. College admissions luck is much more controllable in a sense.

Pretty much everything you do should be just to put yourself in a position to be lucky. It's sort of like sports - there's no one guaranteed strategy to score goals, but you have to put yourself in a good position to be lucky.

A degree doesn't guarantee you a better career. It just puts you in a good position to be lucky - if an opportunity lands, it's likely going to the one with more education.

You be nice to people because it helps you get lucky. You be proactive because it helps you get lucky. You work really hard because the world respects hard workers, which helps you to get lucky.

Presence helps you get lucky. i.e. not being in the future or the past, or in some virtual world. Just being present, observing the world as it is, finding the irregularities that everyone is too busy to see.

Or heck, just smiling a lot, being optimistic, cheerful, energetic, fun to be around.

Basically there's a lot of these little things that help a lot in getting lucky. But this doesn't apply so much to college applications besides interviews.

If you consider the many non-optimal ways a puzzle piece fits into a puzzle, rejection might actually be a blessing in disguise. Stay inspired, it's Stanford's loss. In general, all you need to make connections is a smile and access to a good library.

Both are nice to have but ultimately irrelevant to your success in life. Means nothing in the long run. Just do you.

And work to get to a level of accomplishment where you don't need to worry about getting accepted / funded.

Successful graduate of an "elite" university. With a wife from a state school who kicked his ass financially before we got hitched... (just saying)

Eh, I come from a fairly elite university, I did a startup, and I think both of them have played huge parts in my current situation. They're the kind of thing that get me about double the average salary, or random emails from interesting people.

I wouldn't say it means nothing. It certainly does mean something. But it is one path of many.

Any adventure you embark on will involve some degree of luck. However, You not getting into Stanford isn't because you weren't lucky. It´s because you didn't have the connections, the money, the reputation, the scores, the will, the intellect or any of 100 different reasons. Don´t blame it all on luck just because that absolves you of the responsibility.

As someone who has exited multiple startups let me tell you first hand that startups are what you make them out to be. The success of a startup however, while there are some large factors that are outside of your control, is mostly a function of how hard working and smart you are. You need to make the right decisions and work hard for a long time toward a vision that you believe in. Meanwhile being a student requires you to be somewhat good at bullshitting and maintaining a body temperature somewhere in the 30s (and for the students out there, dont get butt-hurt by this comment, it´s literally true).

That said, you have to understand that startups are not for everyone. The best advice I can give you is to go out and work for a startup for a year or two and gain some experience. Additionally get close to the CEO and have him mentor you until you understand what it takes to run a company of that size. You might find that running the show isn't really for you, and there is no shame in that. Meanwhile, save all the cash you can because you will need every dollar once you eventually start your own thing if you decide to do so. It may take months or years until the money makes it in so you want to save up as much as possible and use those savings when the time is right.

> Does luck play an equally large factor?

There are some startups that only succeed due to luck, and some startups that only fail due to luck, but most startups aren't in either category.

For the most part if your startup idea requires something like Oprah endorsing it in order for you to succeed, then it's by definition a bad idea.

Paul Graham seems to think otherwise:

http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619

Luck is a factor. With knowledge, skill, preparation, learning from experimentation... you get better at pitching.

Luck is the #1 factor in anything. Persistence is probably #2.

Getting into Stanford is only a small degree of luck. It's only luck if you otherwise fit the profile and were passed over for more trivial reasons. It's really not a lottery.

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