I was filling out the Co-Founder matching service application and it has a required text area for education. The placeholder text examples? Standford MS in Comp Sci, NYU BS in Physics.
As a college dropout with "some college" but a 14+ year career in systems/software engineering roles, that was quite discouraging.
What I'm basically trying to tell everyone, and hoping to convince a few, is: don't listen to any of this, just do it.
Gates, Jobs, and Zuck all famously dropped out of college of course.
It's an interesting and tricky social dynamic matching within and between these somewhat distinct groups.
Zuck and Gates both dropped out of Harvard after founding their companies.
Sometimes I wish I went there instead of my Alma mater.
You could argue YC wants people that wouldn't be discouraged by that. I'd argue that due to survivorship bias that would be hard to quantify, and that YC is competing with others for the best ideas so they might just end up somewhere else.
To expand a bit; I wasn't actually discouraged.. I was more put-off and slightly offended. It did make me stop filling out the co-founder match in the moment, but I was always planning to swing back around on it.
There is a trend I notice where people just drop low effort argumentative responses. They aren't even fully realized counter arguments. I try not to engage when they are targeting me; it's better for a third party to shut them down. It's super bad on Reddit and unfortunately ruins r/dotnet .
Harvard, Reed, Harvard.
Any drop out from any of those has hurdled more than 98% of the general college corps. Or at least that would be a rational assumption by the VC cadre that is probably in the top 0.1% and an Ivy League grad.
Is the point that just having been accepted to those schools is a strong signal? I would concede that it could be, sure.
But a lot of people drop out of Ivy league schools and simply flame out. Many would consider dropping out of those schools after a few semesters as failure. And many companies still require degrees; a few semesters at Harvard won't cut it.
I guess my point is that college dropouts are also successful at creating startups. Two have started the two most valuable companies in the world.
These people dropped out to chase extremely lucrative business opportunities - that they created as a student, likely aided by structural/networking support inside that institution - due to timing risk.
One could argue they not only got into a highly prestigious institution, but they quickly leapfrogged everyone there. That's the opposite of flaming out.
I don't personally believe that -- I'm confident in my 23 years of experience. It's unlikely I'll apply this weekend, but I did find a cofounder through the YC dating app. Maybe next batch.
How about a native South African, born in SA?
Edit: I asked my informant and they said that YC has funded 6 South African founders since 2017, which I guess is how far that data goes back to. We agreed that it seems like there should be more!
I'll keep in mind, so won't make it for this intake.
Still on the fence on whether I need the rocket fuel or not, and my co-founder hasn't yet weighed in either (we're still in exploratory phase of some potential products, so not in 100% yet).
Everyone I met in our batch was very friendly, curious, and razor-sharp. Many people have credentialed backgrounds, many people do not.
I generally buy YC’s justification that many of the smartest people happen to go to Stanford/Ivy which is why they are over-represented.
I think you _can_ say that many smart people go to Stanford/Ivy.
There's no way this is even possible, let alone true.
This might be a hot take but if you're under the age of 25, it's likely that you know very few things total. And the things you do know, you're just not going to have a master level of understanding of in your 20s yet nor the drive to focus on it the way it needs, especially with other social pressures at play. What is extremely high in your 20s is your ambition - your loftiness of ideas and goals and your expectations of yourself - these can land you exceptional jobs, opportunities, and get you to a great starting point, but that's not the same as intelligence and ability.
For manual labor work, there's a definite peak - college age and the years just after. But for knowledge work, math, programming, business, politics, etc. being older is almost always an asset - you get better at things, you get smarter, your networks grow, you become an adult among the children and are far more aware of timing and can predict and speak on things with more accuracy. You simply know more.
Besides that, I don't think raw intelligence is selection criteria for a good founder anyway. It has a lot more to do with your particular situation - how well you're situated to pull it off, which can mean many things. In terms of personal qualities it probably has more to do with determination and obsession (work ethic) than intelligence, especially these days where information is so cheap and available.
I think there's different benefits at different ages, and agree on importance of determination and obsession. A good market is the only thing that might be more useful.
However, my usage of the following words deviate from yours:
* intelligence - raw intellect, having absolutely nothing to do with anything ever learned
* smarts - synonym for raw intellect, but often more on the 'crafty' side of raw intellect
* ability - short for 'capabilities', and is a merge of 'intelligence' and 'learned information'. Information is useless without intellect, and intellect is vastly reduced in capability without learned information. Ability is a metric for these two conjoined. 'Skilled' fits here too.
So from where I sit, you never get "smarter" as you age. You do however grow your abilities, you may become "wise", and skilled.
By the way, agree 100% with the context of what you're saying. And just passing on term usage from another geolocation.
I agree that the cofounder dating was intimidating, and even some of the people fit into that category. Far more didn't though, and I've found an exceptional cofounder through it, which is one of the most exciting things in a very long career.
(I'll get around to doing YC at some point)
Those were some fun times.