Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes

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"It’s like getting a degree at Berkeley. Okay. It’s not Stanford. You can a complicated story about how you had to do it because your parents had a big mortgage or something. But it’s a hard negative signal to get past."

I agree that YCombinator is head and shoulders above its competitors but is Stanford really considered that much better than Berkeley? Honest question.

I read it as a joke just playing to the audience (ongoing good-natured rivalry, etc).

It's like when someone really likes reddit. Okay, it's not HN. They can tell a complicated story about how they like cats and populist rage politics, but it's a hard negative signal to get past.

> It's like when someone really likes reddit. Okay, it's not HN. They can tell a complicated story about how they like cats and populist rage politics, but it's a hard negative signal to get past.

I see the parallel but your signalling system is rather poor if it penalizes someone for liking reddit.

I agree that it is sort of good-natured rivalry, but it sort of isn't. I went to Berkeley and know that it is true.

You're probably right ... it was likely a good-natured joke. However, I see the elite school bias happen a lot in tech. When you're a young person trying to get that first job, etc., it really stabs you in the heart. The idea of signaling is reasonable but taking it to the extreme is just plain stupid. Peter jokes about the poor family with a big mortgage ... that isn't a sob story ... a lot of people have that or worse. My folks immigrated to the west with very little. I went to the best school (not Stanford) I could afford and tried to make the best of it. And I know for sure that I'm not the only one like that. All I ask is that we don't take these things as innocent jokes. It is just another form of discrimination ... we should point that out every time we see it.

That quote was the highlight of the class :) He's not only playing the audience-- In an earlier class (class 3 or so), Peter Thiel justified his views on Stanford vs. Berkeley based on their track record with creating successful companies. Maybe someone can find the exact quote, but he said that between the two, vast majority of successful companies start at Stanford and that he's only aware of 1 or 2 that started out at Berkeley.

Yet Craigslist is filled with "idea guy" ads touting Stanford pedigrees much (much!) more often than Cal.

I think those are the B-school people...but point taken

With the (rather large) caveat, of course, that the academic caliber of a school isn't dictated by the number of entrepreneurs it produces.

Successful startups is not the best signal to judge overall quality of academic institution. Stanford became synonymous with dot com era due to successes like Google and Yahoo. However, Berkeley (along with MIT) was epicenter of open source movement in sixties and seventies. Things like BSD, Sendmail etc. started on Cal's campus.

I've heard one joke on Cal's campus - "Stanford creates companies, Cal creates industries".

> I've heard one joke on Cal's campus - "Stanford creates companies, Cal creates industries".

The Stanford equivalent is "Stanford produces CEOs, Berkeley produces VP-Engr".

Which one would trade places with the other?

I believe in terms of entrepreneurial culture on campus, Stanford is slightly ahead of Cal. However, I don't think there is a difference in academic quality. Lot of Stanford CS professors are Berkeley alums and vice versa for Cal.

Stanford definitely has leg up in terms of Startups. Especially the dot com era. At Cal we don't have equivalent of Google or Yahoo. However, Startups are just one dimension of innovation in technology. Berkeley can easily boast some of the groundbreaking research (not just engineering but overall sciences) during last 100 years.

Disclosure: UC Berkeley Alum here.

Joke aside, Paul Graham found no correlation between college attended and startup success.

http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

The whole Stanford vs. Berkeley... Honestly, if you make anything more of it than the joke it's intended to be, you're wasting time. To be fair, he did joke earlier this quarter about how Stanford is outscoring Berkeley in terms of the value of companies started at each school every year. However, those are jokes. I'm a Stanford student, but I think Berkeley has made incredible contributions outside the field of making-VCs-rich. Fundamental science, counter-culture, and engineering (including tech). I'm sure Thiel thinks so too.

Paul Graham: "$50m companies innovate. Mine did. We basically invented the web app. We were doing complex stuff in LISP when everyone else was doing CGI scripts. And, quite frankly, $50m is no small thing. "

Of course, no one uses CGI now. It's all complex stuff done in LISP. Innovation is amazing, isn't it?

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt

That's more advanced stuff than most web apps or frameworks do today. If viaweb had been done now instead of 15 years ago, they probably would have spun off lots of open source projects.

Doubtful. Yahoo rewrote Viaweb in C or C++, didn't they?

There's a reason why so many programmers still use CGI scripts. And why they depend on a host of scripting languages that rely on external libraries written by others. Perhaps it's because they just don't grasp what Paul Graham is describing. They can't comprehend languages like Lisp or Forth or developing incrementally from an interpreter prompt. And they don't need to. "Web 2.0" is an easy sell, no matter how crappy the "web apps" are, no matter what library-dependent, inflexible language they are written in. "Market forces" inhibit the few folks who do understand Lisp and Forth from spending more serious time with those languages.

The web browser as a UI. Brilliant. Programmers and end-users (a group to which programmers themselves belong) are getting smarter every day.

Anyway, you're right. It is definitely more advanced. Let's keep that in mind as we're looking at what's coming down the pipe hence forward and marvelling at what some will portray as "innovation".

You can find notes essays of all of Peter Thiel's startup classes here - http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup

Anyone interested in the actual slides?

Yes please

Yes please! Also could you tell us about the assignments and exams?

Definitely interested.

Very much so! Would also love to see what the exams are like.

One of the more interesting asides here is PGs idea that our society is starting to reflect a power-law distribution. Not sure what he was thinking about specifically, but it certainly seems to be true in terms of wealth these days.

How does a society deal with that for the long-term?

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