Comment by rememberlenny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rememberlenny | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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