Vivek Wadha: "You learn little by writing code."

It seems to me to be rather disingenuous to state that the entirety of startups is writing code or that the code writing itself is to be the source of all of the learning. The major education in a startup is the fact that you are forced to, through whatever methods necessary (be it copious research, learning from somebody who knows better, randomly stumbling upon an answer, what have you) learn more or less everything relevant to the startup, from business skills to people skills to infrastructure to, yes, code itself.

Maybe this is insufficient as an alternative education (I'd really love to see some numbers for that but, then again, wouldn't we all?), but it's silly to bring it down to "writing code".

Yep, you learn little by "writing code", you learn a lot by developing an ass kicking product/service in a very constrained environment, working with great people and pushing yourself to the limit. It's about the people, the [human] experience not just the code.

You learn a lot by writing code, but what you learn is not the same things that you had learned if you went to school instead.