Colleges for Founders | Hacker News Reader

Colleges for Founders

pitchbook.com

25 pointssblank13 comments

For high school students looking at this list because they want to increase their chances at building a successful company, do not look at this list at face value.

Statistically, if you are already driven to build something, you are likely get more value out of being in a place that is going to maximize your learning potential, exposure to people who can help you mature character, and be recognized by alumni/upper classman/professors who can make a outsized impact in your learning journey.

I would take inspiration from this list and find the smallest, most well capitalized liberal arts school that has quality programs for you to take advantage of. The goal is to find places that have the qualities of the top schools, but where you will be the top 1% where you go, and will be able to maximize the opportunities for learning.

I recommend this even if you are interested in a hard science or computer science field. The benefit for a large majority to establish an educational foundation early on will provide the necessary methods of inquiry to apply breadth or depth based knowledge acquisition in the future.

Instead of seeking out a brand name environment, finding a place where you can mature quickly and confidently learn about yourself will be invaluable for far longer than the brand association to a name brand school.

What it’s worth, this is good advice for many fields. For example, in law school, I think one is better off being a rockstar at a lower rank school than a “good“ student at an excellent school.

Depends on the field I think. I've heard for some areas it's basically "get into a Top 10 school or don't bother going".

I wonder if those areas would be ripe for disruption by people thinking outside the box they've obviously put themselves in.

Without more details on the stack ranked list (exits, size of rounds, etc), this list is thematically about geo-based opportunities and alumni networks (i.e. where the money lives and gets distributed). Having a brand name university does help with opening doors and raising rounds, especially your first one. However, one can also acquire brand association by working at a FAANG company or going through a top startup accelerator like YC.

It also rewards gigantic undergrad focused schools by measuring the number of founders from the undergraduate classes.

For example, Waterloo is 36k undergrads vs CMU at 7,022. Yet they raised the same amount of capital and roughly have the same number of founders.

yeah you’re looking at this wrong. this isn’t about building a successful bootstrapped company or being self fulfilled or being competent. this is about raising money. connections (network) matter and where you go to school (even in remote first covid world) matters more than being “best” or even great at the technical skills, because that is where it is exceedingly easy to build that network. not to mention being around like minded people, which goes a very long way.

if you just want to be merely good at a thing and successful in terms of career, then yeah optimize for where you can be at the top of the class. if you want to be an entrepreneur optimize for network

I'd be curious how viable a strategy of "get in, network like crazy for a semester, get out" is if the plan is to do a startup from the get go. My guess is "just do the startup" is better but doing one semester might be a decent alternative (assuming you do get accepted). At least "got into Stanford, dropped out to work full time on this once I realized how great it is" seems like a decent signaling pitch to VCs. Shows commitment (dropped out of uni for this) and sends the boring old signals (got into Stanford).

I think that strategy dominates starting in or just after high school by a wide margin. Not the least of which is you might decide to stay, you can probably jump out with the right to return for some period of time, and the signaling effect is massive.

I'm guessing this has little to do with the content of the courses and more to do with the wealth and connections of the individuals surrounding said institutions.

What's someone to do who just went to a university or none at all?

Lesson one at MBA programmes around the world, education is signalling. Education from the "right" places doubly so.

Would be really interesting to get the student-count-to-founder ratio and grouping the counts by the amount of capital raised, headcount or any other metric that measures "success" in some way. Would help students deciding on where to study as well as VCs on which students not to filter out in their initial screening!

The methodology is flawed but the kernel of the idea is good - which universities provide the best platform for would-be founders?

Things like proximity to VCs, labs with a history of spin-offs, successful alumni angel networks, etc would all play a role.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com