Even though this might sound to some like a description of what YC does, in fact we're reluctant to fund people who are still in school. There's no rush. Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better at 22.
But by the time your 22, maybe you got an internship at a cool company, and they're offering you 80k a year. Your getting used to a decent standard of living. Maybe you get recruited by Wall Street and the dangle 140k under your nose. You take the job, and get locked in with the "golden handcuffs". Now your comfortable, and you meet a cute girl, who wants a guy with a steady job, so you never start the company.
Maybe this guy was never really meant to be an entrepreneur; maybe he wanted that comfortable life all along. But when he was 19 he was ready to go.
> There's no rush. Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better at 22.
I think there is a better chance that he won't start the startup at 22, cause he got a high paying job, and doesn't want to downgrade from his standard of living.
In my opinion, people dropping out of school for YC shouldn't be doing it because they see an alternative opportunity - they should be doing it for a variety of other reasons. The mental calculation should not be "I could do a start up and make money now, or I could do 3 more years of school and make 140k/year comfortably." It should be along the lines of, "I know I'll succeed, and I can't wait to do it."
That made a lot of sense to me. No doubt we can override it but...this kind of predisposition does place restrictions that one may not otherwise account for.
Plus, what better time than NOW!
I say this as I study for midterms
But yeah, most of it IS probably driven by culture. That said, I'm sure there are some biological intricacies too. Something like x years after puberty your brain starts to want more of the same things - something that would definitely help in establishing a stable lifestyle and child rearing.
In my 20's I was completely certain that I would be successful without hard work as I was smart & talented. After a decade of that imagined success not materialising I am far hungrier, more determined and working harder now than I have ever been before.
Right now, I'm working my ass off to do a software craftsmanship apprenticeship. It has taken time to develop the maturity to be content to focus on what I need to do today and not worry about when, where, and how the hard work will pay off.
EDIT: I speak for the USA only.
He calls it one of the greatest mistakes of his life, though, so it sounds like mileage may vary.
With that said, I think some states have different rules in terms of what age you're allowed to drop out at. For example, Illinois requires students to be 17 years of age (and receive parental consent, of course) to drop out. At that point you're better off just finishing high school. even if you want to rapidly track into college.
I told people at the high school goodbye, left before the end of the day, and never went back to that fucking place.
That's how I did it. Your mileage may vary.
And before you ask, our admissions are close to 100%, and our academics are some of the best in the country.
Was pretty pissed off at my guidance counselor for not telling me!
Get off my lawn!
Seriously, though, from my late-30s-with-a-young-family perspective, if being 22 with a girlfriend and an internship is enough to stop you chasing your dreams, then they weren't really your dreams after all.
Henry Ford started his company at 40. Jeff Bezos, 30. Sam Walton, 44. Paul Galvin, 33. The Albrecht brothers were 41 and 39. TJ Watson, while not a founder, was 40 when he took over CTR and created IBM. Hewlett, 26. Packard, 27. Larry, Sergey were 25. Ellison, 33.
Thanks for pointing that out.
pg, May 2005: "The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?"
pg, now: "Someone who can start a successful startup at 19 can do it as well or better at 22."
It seems this logic can be extended to say people should wait even longer. Someone with a few years of experience at 26 should be able to do a better job of starting a company than someone at 22.
So I'm interpreting this as a major change in your thinking. It certainly isn't a crime to change your mind; I'm just curious about how and when it happened.
I don't think it's a likely scenario though since getting accepted to YC and running your own startup should be enough of a merit to get you employed somewhere.
However, out of all the people accepted into YC there has to be at least one example of a person who not only did worse by doing a startup early on, but actually hurt himself pretty badly in the process. Of course, this is pure speculation, and there might not be any such cases.
Basically my theory is that pg just doesn't think it is worth it to potentially have blood on his hands (indirect as it might be).
Of course there is more to college than just making an individual ready for a career in the real world but I think that college should evolve and find better ways to teach students than the current model.
It's about mindset. Make sure that your expectations are aligned with your long-term goals. If you spend 100% of your time on training yourself in cs, then expect to be very shocked by the social dynamics of your first job. Conversely, if you spend 60% of your time focusing on becoming more social, then expect to have more friends, connections, and to connect with an overall larger number of interesting people during your lifetime.
So make sure you think about the answer to "What are my long-term goals?" and allocate your time proportionally. I didn't. I'd trade you my 10 years of advanced C++/graphics knowledge/gamedev industry experience for the college opportunity you have right now. And I wouldn't spend it by burying myself in studies.
I think this is untrue simply because smart people who are good at their job are very likeable in general. Who doesn't like the smart productive guy? Conversely, who can stand the dumb guy on the team who never does any work? Of course there are exceptions, but my experience is that the social structure among nerds is largely a meritocracy. Just don't be mean to people.
If this hasn't been your experience, I think you had some misfortune by ending up in companies where politics dominate. There are both. Look at upper management - are they technically smart, or charismatic? Whichever one they are is likely what will have propagated throughout the company. Also watch out for mediocrity, that propagates too.
Of course, I'm referring to technical jobs, not business in general. If it were MBA, I'd agree with you.
EDIT: I don't know what I replied to this comment and not your main comment about socializing at school, but w/e
I think in practice if you're in the middle 80% of the productivity spectrum, how well you interact with other people matters more than your technical ability.
You're not always just interfacing with other nerds. And in a startup context, as a founder you'll spend as much time talking to MBA types as you will on technical details.
If you pursue an engineering degree, you are learning things that you can put to practical use, and if you don't learn some of those things in college, you will need to learn them elsewhere. Want to start a company to do machine learning? Natural language processing? Highly scalable parallel data processing? Networking can help you make that business successful, but it won't help you write that code.
Both skill sets are important.
For some, definitely. But if, for example, Jobs had the technical skills of Wozniak, he may have spent those critical hours hacking away at the machine instead of making smart business moves and we would have ultimately never heard of his name. The lack of strong technical skills was an asset for him.
My point is that there is nothing you can do to prepare for success. Getting your engineering degree might lead you to success, but it could just as easily steer you away from success. There is no magic formula you can follow.
At least it's worked for me. Been in SF for the last few days to have some meetings and coffees as It's hard to connect properly from London and it's been fairly good as i've spoken to lots of people in advance. People are willing to help with advice or connections, especially when you're early in your career.
If I'd been learning on my own, I doubt I would have seen the value in investing a hundred hours in a language I wouldn't ever use in industry. Same goes for a number of other courses, all with varying degrees of relevance.
College, for me, was learning how to learn, mostly that I could successfuly teach myself. It also provided some rigor in critical areas (I had a great data structures prof, for instance).
Oh, and I'm a dropout. :-)
Mine was a Large Cow College -- the U of MD -- whose CS department seemed to feed into the Washington, DC government and defense contractor businesses. When I relocated to Silicon Valley, all of my contacts were useless.
Well, there was the Arpanet; I'd been exchanging email with some Atari enthusiasts at Stanford for a while, and wound up going to dinner and users group meetings with them a few times.
But Silly Valley was (and probably still is) a terrible place for a geek to try to learn to be social. I'll probably do a blog post about that some day.
In any case, as you say, the goal of college is not to make one a better startup founder.
There's the issue. College is obviously still a great way for a lot of people who don't plan to start a startup to "accidentially" learn skills and do projects that could be useful for starting a startup. Both Zuckerberg and Gates come to mind.
However, what should young people who know in their heart/mind/gut that they want to become an entrepreneur do?
I would rather spend a couple of years networking, trying and failing on a small scale in business while learning as much as possible through books/other cheap or free material than spending $30000+ on something that possibly wouldn't get me any closer to the goal.
Zuck and Gates were successful dropouts because they went to college and learned that it wasn't what they expected. Too much courses to take that they didn't like, classes not going fast enough, social life not as good as other people said, not much meaning in going to classes (basically fill in x reason).
Silicon Valley is a truly special place and I think there is a lot of value in taking a year or two off of college and try working at a startup, traveling and/or pursuing whatever else seems cool and worthwhile. Then you can decide whether returning to college is the right thing for you...
Debt is not even the biggest concern. My biggest concern is the mentality to avoid failure at all costs. Since the world's reward system isn't structured to always reward effort, school (imo) teaches you to pass, not excel. And, as I understand, the passing grade for a startup is to excel. See the disconnect?
Except for that, college years seem to be the most formative years of one's life. I wouldn't be into startups if I didn't come do post-secondary. I wouldn't even know how to code if I didn't come here. Best experience of my life.
And regarding school, there is really no reason why not to go school when you are little older. In other words, we have this assumption in US that all schooling has to be finished by 24 or something like that.