How Universities Should Prepare Founders
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it
Funny enough, this is why I think a PhD is undervalued by many. You spend years focused on a single area, sometimes pivoting topics, and getting hands on experience with operating solo on the outskirts of a particular field.
The overall point of the degree is you learn how to learn. The nice part is you have the padded walls of university equipment, funding, and time; So failure isn't terminal, just an opportunity to figure out what didn't work.
There's a few reasons how and why this message got distorted and lost in modern academia (honestly it would be a great subject for a book). It's no mistake that better known programs and programs with ties to a stream of successful startups are also the ones where there's a culture of builders and makers.
But all of that discovery work, the financial planning, what their actual objectives were, having to dig into why someone wanted to buy a house, etc. proved to be some of the most invaluable and transferable skills I've learned (that, and SQL ;). A lot of that part of the course was learning how to ask questions, and learning how to follow-up to get past the superficial and often incorrect initial answers.
To your point I feel like there's these kind of meta skills that are transferable to many domains, but are sadly lacking these days from a lot of education that is hyper-focused on very role-specific qualifications. The ones that immediately come to mind:
- Learning how to learn (i.e., how to understand yourself, and improve)
- How to ask good questions (similar to above, but about others)
- And something I need a better label for because I just clumsily call it "sales", but in the Daniel Pink "To Sell is Human" style. Something like being able to structure a coherent and compelling narrative to other people. Clearly I fall short on this one.
no, the opportunity cost is too great for this field, for people that saw the light in just undergrad or wound up building software for other people without an undergrad CS degree
but yes I realize that any conversation with academics is going to be skewed from the market, I think its worth representing nonetheless since academics often interpret their privilege of choice as a nobler cause because they made that choice at all
YC's founders also skew heavily towards a certain type of person and business. The returns of VC in biotech for example are much lower than the returns in B2C and B2B software. It's just a harder, more capital intensive, and more uncertain industry. Over optimizing for the YC archetype means you get less of the people who succeed in other areas.
Also, although PG disdains finance and management, many large problems are better addressed through people with skills in these areas IMO, since often the returns are not sufficient to attract VC interest but the financial and human resources that need to be coordinated to address them are substantially beyond the ability of a small, undercapitalized group.
Yes, exactly. I do not think you need to try so hard to get more founders. Most small businesses fail. And even most venture-backed startups fail. You are already throwing a ton of eggs at the wall, which is mostly a waste of eggs. Even one of YC's largest successes (DoorDash) is nothing but a middle man of fast food enabled by mobile technology, which it did nothing to invent.
Harvard has also offered non-traditional open-entry bachelor degrees for over a century and whose endowment became the precursor for WGBH and therefore PBS, and those of us from other schools don't treat them any different. The only other ivies with large dedicated non-trad programs are Columbia (Asimov was a product of that) and Penn.
Yale, Dartmouth, and to a lesser extent Princeton is blue blood af.
I find this view from pg very narrow minded, and borderline ignorant. He is shaping his essay as in the role of higher education and academia is only to produce startup founders. Which is not, it is a way of a state investing into a labor force that is needed. As long as there are large corporate multinationals, there will be a need for finance, economics and yes, even management. Are a lot of that studies fugazi? Sure they are, but so are a lot of startups.
If everyone coming out of academia would be startup-like, corporations and other businesses simply wouldnt have the workforce for their machinery, and then some big shoot CEO would write blogs how Universities Should Prepare White Collars.
And indeed, reading period produced two trillion dollar companies, but this is statistical anomaly. You could just as well argue, that it keps economy afloat by educating up-coming workforce, but thats harder to prove.
Rich parents/families are the actual founders, via their children. Harvard is because mostly rich can study there (and drop out at will).
YC seems to be serving its function perfectly well, if you think of it's function as: "start many venture funded SaaS businesses, with the goal of a small number achieving Unicorn or bigger exits".
Stanford, Harvard, and other elite schools seem to be filling YC's applicant pipeline really handily with smart undergraduates. In a sense, YC is kind of like biz school for startup founders.
The path I see unaddressed: what's the development track for an SMB founder?
YC has the startup/tech company development track pretty well on lock. Traditional MBA programs have the "bigco advancement" track sewn up. How do I learn how to start a small business?
I'd love to eventually start an EE / embedded business on the scale of 5-10 people, ideally selling a niche product to other technical businesses. I have no idea where to start here.
I run a small business on the side, and although I did a ton of preparatory reading and learning not much of it was useful in retrospect. Most of it you learn by doing and it's not that hard to learn. The top three things that were useful to me to learn were sales, basic accounting and how to read financial statements, and what metrics to track/manage with. You can learn the basics for all of those in less than a month.
My advice is just start. You are probably wrong about what the market wants unless you are selling a product or service that you know there is already demand for. Figure out what it is you're offering and try selling it to people. If they want it you figure out how to make it better, if they don't you try something else.
Edit: I had wanted to start a business for a long time. I thought I needed some tricky new idea to be successful. That's really hard to come up with since most new ideas are bad or are too hard to sell/explain to people. In my case it was also a form of procrastination since I had to wait for the right idea. Things got easier when I just picked an existing problem/industry and decided to do that with my own proprietary software to make it easier for me. I know a guy making a couple million a year from owning multiple tanning salons. There's a lot of opportunity out there that doesn't require any special insight.
Its like now, when every SaaS company scrambles a way to put AI into their product, just because they think they need to.
edit: I'll say that in my personal opinion the critical thing a founder needs is a strong internal locus of control. I feel that this is also an important product of a liberal arts education, so I see some natural alignment. I worry about the degree to which the 'total university' strips 18-22 year olds of important rites of development: learning to feed for yourself, find housing, meet friends organically (as opposed to because you share a dorm), etc. I could see a more pared down, "education-mostly" school in a large city being an interesting avenue for new models of university.
> we get them next. We're like grad school.
Really, my bs meter started going off when I saw this kind of posturing, a company positioning itself as a sort of grad school. Then again, grad schools and universities impress me less with each passing year as they transform themselves to be more like companies. And also, thank you to yc for offering a forum where I feel comfortable enough to post a contrary opinion. That’s better than can be said for some universities these days.
Maybe I don’t disagree after all—or maybe if I do disagree with that point, maybe it’s just not that important to defend the unique role of universities these days as the universities themselves are just continuing to forfeit that on their own.
im slowly getting confused on what founding a company even is. i am in grad school right now. a lot of funding and opportunities come from guys who are like "we need you to innovate we need you to act like a startup." its honestly kinda annoying. i just want to do basic research. i dont want to sell anything. i just want to build things. but the way this article frames it- is founding a company just getting funding for a research project? but using different words? could i just pull up with a list of my research interests, convince people its a sellable product, and score funding? obviously id need to deal with financial overhead myself (a pain) but hypothetically. lets say i complete my degree, maybe spend a year or three in industry networking and better understanding the problem space. then pitch myself to vcs with hope of funding whatever topics im interested and have my company function like a research group except instead of publishing papers we build products? like no profit no big deal, i never intended to profit. which, is this not what openai is doing?
unethical to lie about my intents (i want to do research not start a company) but i feel the end goal (more funding for research) could be worth it.
As a result, in a sense, founding a company can be getting funding for a research project.
A good example is nuclear fusion. There’s no nuclear fusion company, or research institute for that matter, that’s within even 50 years of having a commercially viable end product. There’s no strong evidence that that’s even possible. In other words, the entire field is still very much in the research phase, with no clear path to a commercial outcome.
Yet there are something like 50 - 80 funded nuclear fusion companies, collectively funded to the tune of at least about $14 billion. They’re all essentially doing research, which includes building prototypes and testing.
Of course, in order to get that funding, most of these companies have announced milestone dates of various kinds, including dates by which they’ll have a saleable product. All of those dates are ridiculously optimistic, and any investor who’s done due diligence should know that.
Which leads one to wonder what these investors are thinking. Some of them are explicitly indulging in moonshots: funding something desirable that may not work. They’re essentially funding research, and they know it. There are several other categories though, including people that are hedging - betting on a possible payoff. There are also presumably some people who actually believe the target dates (who also presumably have not done good due diligence.)
Is what these fusion companies are doing unethical? A case can be made that it is, particularly when it comes to that last category of investor I mentioned. On the other hand, in an environment where basic research is discouraged, “life will find a way,” and you get these weird distortions of what a funded company is.
> could i just pull up with a list of my research interests, convince people its a sellable product, and score funding?
If you can pull off the middle part about convincing people, the answer is definitely yes. That’s ultimately what the situation you described is about.
I think those VCs are acting quite unethically. If they want to fund basic research, they should just start a foundation that issues grants for basic research.
How could anyone know that? I’m guessing the same could have been said about what LLMs can do today, 20 years ago. If you’d asked scientists in 1925 how close the world was to a nuclear bomb, almost zero would have any idea what you were talking about (in the sense of how to go about building one.)
Predicting innovation is inaccurate enough to be silly. Investors are betting that someone figures it out on a shorter time horizon.
But to answer your question:
> How could anyone know that?
By studying the basic physics and engineering involved. The same way we know we aren't going to be doing interstellar travel in the next 50 years.
> I’m guessing the same could have been said about what LLMs can do today, 20 years ago.
It's not comparable. LLMs didn't require dealing with a plasma ten times hotter than the core of the Sun, without the benefit of the Sun's gravitational pressure and density. Commercially viable nuclear fusion power is so far beyond the capabilities of current, and possibly even future, engineering that it's not even funny.
A better comparison would be if there were a bunch of interstellar travel startups, giving dates for when they plan to reach Proxima Centauri. Why don't those exist? Because nobody would believe them, for the kinds of reasons I've already mentioned. But with fusion power, we could theoretically do that here on Earth, leading gullible investors to say, "So you're saying there's a chance!"
> Predicting innovation is inaccurate enough to be silly.
Innovation is what happens after the basic research has pointed the way. We're not at that stage with fusion power.
> Investors are betting that someone figures it out on a shorter time horizon.
Investors who haven't done good due diligence, or who foolishly trusted founders, are betting that.
A couple of references:
"Fusion power unlikely to become competitive" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-026-02022-9 : "Policymakers should not rely on, or fund, fusion power as a core pillar of future clean energy systems unless designs with different characteristics are developed."
"Notes on the Recent Hype about Imminence of Commercial Fusion Energy" - https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/notes-recent-... : "I think it’s fair to say that the scientific and technological problems that must be solved on the road to a practical fusion reactor—beyond energy breakeven in sustained operation—are not much easier than the breakeven problem itself, which is still unsolved after 70 years of costly international effort."
"Fusion reactors: Not what they’re cracked up to be" - https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-the...
> i dont want to sell anything. i just want to build things.
These are incompatible. If you start a company, whether you're CTO or CEO, you'll need to sell things. Both founders have to focus on the product, since it's being sold to people. And people refuse what they don't like. Which means your most valuable feedback mechanism comes from trying to sell something and then doing something different in response, until people buy it.
> could i just pull up with a list of my research interests, convince people its a sellable product, and score funding?
You can, but your company will eventually die because you won't be able to raise more money. VCs want signs that a company is growing. So if you raise money and then ask for more without strong sales, they won't give you more.
> then pitch myself to vcs with hope of funding whatever topics im interested and have my company function like a research group except instead of publishing papers we build products? like no profit no big deal, i never intended to profit. which, is this not what openai is doing?
That's not what OpenAI is doing. They're so focused on selling that they were even willing to sacrifice some of their research culture just to get everyone on the same page of "we have to make money, otherwise research can't happen." Sam explained to everyone that money comes from sales, not research, and money is a requirement for research. Thus they had to focus on selling.
what i mean is less the goal being making money, more the goal being getting money to fund research. theres no way to avoid "selling" in life. (alas.) what i would be selling would be my research topic to venture capitalists, instead of a product to people. (obviously making some mentions of "well um this could be a sellable product one day" and like, a halfassed marketing campaign in order to better sell my idea to vcs.)
company failing isnt incompatible with the goal of doing research. if i can get a few years of funding by at least putting up the illusion of a sellable product it could be worth it. maybe i'd even get lucky and end up with an actual product that makes money. but uh, comfort in failure. the process of learning over the promise of success.
sorry i sound so evil and scammy rn ahhhhh promise im not trying to be on forbes 30 under 30. just considering vc funding as an alternate route to academia with regard to getting funding for research. (i will need to dance for dollars either way. but vc funding is seeming like it has less uh, annoying interpersonal academic hoops to jump through.) but id need a few years working under people and gaining experience before i would try at this lol.
"Well um this could be a sellable product one day" is not likely to go over well as a sales pitch. VCs review hundreds or thousands of business ideas. If your idea is "if we do enough basic research it might turn into something," they're likely to say "come back when you have a business plan."
To reuse the nuclear fusion example I gave in another comment, those companies didn't go to investors saying "we need more money for basic fusion research." Instead, they typically presented a business plan with a very clear end goal - commercially viable fusion reactors - along with a development plan with milestone dates by which certain critical stages would be completed, ending up with a projected date for bringing a commercial fusion reactor online.
But then they went away and started doing the research, because for sure nothing is going to happen without that.
If all this makes you think "ok so writing a business plan is like writing a grant proposal with extra steps," just keep in mind that you'd be going into a relationship with misaligned goals - investors are going to want to hold you to account, see progress towards the goals you've defined, etc.
Part of the reason you're hearing so much about this approach is because the investors are trying to make money, and they need fresh blood who's going to do the hard work of making it for them. In most cases they're not going to sit around letting you do research in peace.
It combined coding, design and entrepreneurship. I felt like the idea behind this major was being able to go from idea / problem to finished product sold by a company.
The three main fields are very related:
- Coding: How to actually code and build the solution.
- Design: How to identify problems and design solutions around them. So it's actually multiple different fields of design, e.g. including product design and UX and UI design.
- Entrepreneurship: How to actually build and sustain a company around that.
There were many opportunities to work on your own projects. Increasingly so actually by intention (2 weeks to 8 weeks in later semesters). It's also close to many entrepreneurship programs for potential funding for ideas, but also networking and guidance.
I wrote a blog post about it: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/what-is-coco
Their website (in German): https://coco.study/
The university's page on it (in German): https://www.th-koeln.de/studium/code--context-bachelor_62103...
- I've always thought it was silly my university had an Entrepreneurship major. Starting a company is probably much better achieved by studying something technical or going deep into a problem space and seeing a problem there, not a generic "entrepreneurship" curriculum.
- I think startups starting as side projects was more of an artifact of the early YC days where startups could just be simple software that some engineers built on nights and weekends. Increasingly I feel like the next generation of startups is more capital intensive and requires more time commitment from deeply technical talent. Not in 100% of cases obviously.
I think this is beyond bad.
The #1 thing anyone could ever to do study entrepreneurship is to do 'case studies'.
Liteally just learning/observing how they work - the nature of founding, structure, power relationships, what debt and equity are for.
Learning 'how a VC firm' operates, and indeed how other kinds of investment bankers work is golden.
HBS is almost a glorified 2 years of basic concepts + 'a lot of case studies'.
Learning how IBM, Standard Oil, Apple and a host of companies you've never heard of operate is deeply enlightening.
The 'Naive By Design' approach by the YC people is almost toxic.
There is definitely some insight in it - that 'seasoned executives' are probably worse at starting small companies in many ways, but, understanding why that is is really important. It has a lot to do with risk, the kinds of things CEO's of established companies are good at etc..
It's as absurd as saying 'Don't Learn Nursing By Studying Nursing - Just Do Music and Engineering'.
Doing 'projects' however, is a wonderful idea.
Would that be more like other engineering fields? An interesting comparison would be aerospace, for example – it took 15 years to build the first A380, and tens of thousands of indispensable technical niches.
There’s tons of startups making cool fused harnesses and phased arrays and trying to get every permutation of diesel and electric and hydrogen engines certified. Drones and rc aircraft spawn many “built in a dorm room” prototypes for people who don’t value their eyebrows
It looks like I wrote that in a confusing way! My intention was to ask about what features of the engineering discipline was motivating OP's comparison. Maybe a better series of comparisons would have been...
- the 747 – program conception in '63, delivery in '69; – the A350 - first sales in '05, delivery in '13;
which I think captures the slow pace, and large dependency chain, of any significant program beyond a revision.
I want to ask you, what do you think a startup is?
I'd argue that both of these would be highly beneficial for all kinds of students, founders and non-founders alike.
Starting a startup could be generalized for all students to having a dream or goal, taking ownership of it, and making it happen. A startup is just one possible path, pg is probably too specific here, I would agree.
Having more free time to work on my own projects is probably the freedom I missed most at university. I think learning to choose what to work on and making something happen would benefit future workers, teachers, doctors, and engineers just as much as entrepreneurs.
It's a trade-off in terms of time and other resources, since parts of the existing curriculum would have to fade away. But I think it's a good starting point for change and a good direction to move in.
And "building things" isn't enough. Many projects have zero commercial potential.
I don't think PG is wrong, but I also don't think he's right. I think if universities wanted to do something with startup culture they could filter the more motivated and talented students into incubators of their own - not through some kind of overly academic post-grad degree, but literally a startup school where the university provides resources, subsistence, and access to funding, in return for a share of project equity. The "teaching" would be more about finding customers and handling finances and less about managerial MBA nonsense.
The big win for students would be "You don't have to worry about food, rent, or basic running costs."
Post-grad research overlaps with this, but is more fundamental. The emphasis here would be more on projects with immediate income potential, not on technology that could be commercialised in the future, possibly.
The problem is academic culture is very different to startup culture, so the startup school would need a much looser relationship to its parent than a typical academic department.
First he doesn't say universities should prepare founders - his advice is to those universities that do want to do that.
Second, his advice is basically to skip BS business education and make students good professionals, well-rounded intellectuals, not afraid of starting a business. Anyone would benefit from such education, not only prospective founders
As a university professor, I've seen that all universities want to do everything.
By which I mean, they employ all sorts of people who are pushing a huge range of agendas. You can't meaningfully speak about "what universities want", because various factions tend to expect free rein to pursue their goals, and there is no mechanism to get everyone pushing in the same direction.
I felt my most valuable formative experience for being a startup worker was the summer I was back from college and the supermarket I worked at in high school felt they owed me a job even though they weren't really hiring.
I was assigned 50% as a bagger in the front end and 50% a pinch hitter attached to the store manager who did whatever random things we needed whether it was deep clean the floor, paint a metal strip around the building, learn to work the meat slicer to sub for somebody in the deli, sub for people in the bakery, etc.
That made me into somebody who did whatever need to be done, but people who haven't had that kind of experience get really hung up on job titles and think "I'm a data scientist, I don't need to do that."
Yes, that is pretty much VC enterprenour philosophy in nutshell. It is value system that value only one small group only. And if that small group has to put in effort into learning in school or doing something other then building unicorns, that is a great unfairness.
It's time we all admit the VCs are the best people, and we're just worthless in comparison. Anyone with any value at all is an investor or a founder. No one else matters.
That's why neo-reactionary ideology is so profound: it would put those best people in charge, and clear all the useless garbage out of their way.
Mind you, I'm not totally sure how this differs from employer/employee relationships in practice except I suppose that each side has less contractual protection from the other.
Has anyone ever plotted the lifespan of YC companies from each cohort?
Most of them end up dead…
YMMV you do have to have a different less nihilistic mindset but it really is a bit of a Neo in the Matrix moment because it lets you see through a bit of the corporate veneer to see the complex mess of personal and group foibles that run our major corporations.
In the end it also ends up making you a 10x more effective worker if that’s where you end up even if just to protect your mental health by being able to explain what’s going on.
No doubt there are learnings worth a lifetime, and changes that alter careers. You hope, the sense of superiority the experience seems to breed is not merely a coping mechanism, but an exercise in positive self-image [0]
Mostly an extremely online problem, not a real world one. More so the nature of the medium in fact.
Evidenced by how you edited out the “dead” in front of VC funded when you were quoting me. You read the tone you want to read.
But just to caveat, its not YC or VC funding that is critical.
It’s the act of building something and trying to sell it that is.
wait till you see what happens to a lot of forbes 30 under 30
Just like mostly everything he writes about.
You don’t need to raise VC money to live your life, but if you become an accountant, a mechanical engineer, or an artist, you should also have the skills you need to go and set up a business to do that work wherever you decide to go.
The AI area is different, in that it's still hard to make things work. There are lots of things to be done, but they're not the quick demos and launches YC used to like.
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Winter%202027&ba...
"For Zuckerberg, the school’s major selling point was its Latin program. The current computer science concentrator originally intended to study classics at Harvard."[0]
There's a book called Founders at Work by one J. Livingston. I'd suggest replacing Zuckerberg with an incredible founder who was interviewed in that book, Steve Perlman.
Livingston: Were you an engineering major ?
Perlman: No, I have a liberal arts background. My engineering background is as a hobbyist. ... I designed a software-based modem when I was in college and I got an F for it because the professor said it would never work. But I got it working at my first company. I sent him an email later on and said, "This email is being sent to you on the modem that I designed at Columbia."
I went to university in Korea and I'm on my third startup. I watched startup clubs, government grant programs, and university-run programs all operate with the stated goal of encouraging entrepreneurship. The means became the end: the optimal strategy turned into presenting whatever scores well with the review panel. People took the money and technically started companies, but without underlying curiosity they couldn't carry it for long.
Teaching people how to build things, and the experience of actually making something from nothing, is special. But I also saw students who had no idea such possibilities existed, unknown unknowns, get gripped by the idea that they had to make something, and end up building only software, and within software, only dating apps.
This is a rather oversimplified, old-fashioned take on the purpose of university.
University in the 21st century is surely a straightforward high-stakes gamble, particularly in the UK and the USA: can I risk taking three or four years away from the job market, and go into life-changing, multi-decade debt, in order to gain qualifications that give me access to higher-than-minimum-wage jobs that I can get no other way, and will there still be enough of the kind of jobs mentioned in the prospectus at the end of it?
It is something that in most cases you can't afford to do and you also can't afford not to do.
I think PG is very out of touch.
In Korea tuition itself is much cheaper, scholarships cover a much wider range of students, and the interest on student loans is noticeably lower. That may be why there is a bit more room to breathe.
That said, I agree that to survive in the Korean job market you also need concrete skills. I just think that for those skills to be learned deeply and then developed further, you need the ability to question and to doubt.
It’s interesting to see how the Americans have a different view on this.
The most important lessons for students include: realistic expectations, a new vocabulary, and a real-world understanding of the complexities of building a startup.
I've worked at other universities where startups are treated more like sports to get interest and social media attention: competitions, events, socializing, etc. Those are nice things, but they are superficial in my opinion.
My advice for students would be to find opportunities to get in the trenches and experience the challenges and hardships faced by founders--those are the most important lessons.
I do wonder if entreprenuership would be higher if we gave students more gap years, because I find it rare that someone who has not been in the world knows they want to start their own business. Tech is an exception because it's more of a lifestyle and culture than other STEM-based business.
Glossing over the fact that ambitious undergrads are more likely to be ambitious about grad school rather than starting a company, and reducing their course work is a hindrance if anything.
The goal of a physics degree is not to prepare you to start a business. Don't disadvantage your future physicists on the off chance one of could be the next zuck.
I mean, if you want the university to churn out plumbers then by all means do plumber things.
I'm somewhat less sure that optimizing for founders turns out better, or even more, founders. Ultimately probably 1% or less of people start a business (of any form, much less venture capital financed.)
You can't give people time and expect them to "create". Creators create not because it's convenient, they create in spite of it being inconvenient. They find the time regardless. (And universities already have scads of free time.)
95% of startups will fail. That statistic does not cause a founder to retreat. And that perseverance when the odds are poor is exactly why some succeed.
I also took an entrepreneurship sequence in grad school. In agreement with PG, we were taught not to hand off large chunks of the business to the MBAs. In contrast with PG: we learned that between team, funding, and product, product is least important while team is most important. If that wasn't true, why would large companies "acqui-hire"? (In fairness, PG didn't say product is the most important thing at a startup, just that it's "hard", and this is true.)
These few courses were also the first taste most students (esp. non-graduates) had of calling subject matter experts and potential customers, meeting real investors for a mock pitch, the various mechanisms/strategies finance professionals use to separate a founder from their profits and/or build an efficient revenue machine, determining actual pre-realized product demand so you can haggle for bulk discounts from suppliers, setting appropriate product margins. These are the tasks I find I'm often doing in between PCB layout and product assembly, so I'm quite glad I took an entrepreneurial curriculum in school rather than a few more ergonomics or RF courses.
Being able to build things isn't important. You need to build things that make the customer happy. Building the wrong things really well is the most typical failure mode I see in technology leadership. It doesn't matter how "good" something is if the customer doesn't give a shit about it.
The simplest suggestion I can make to noob founders is to do part of the product or technology ugly on purpose. Give yourself permission to not be perfect. You may find a similar practice in warehouses and on construction sites. Whenever a new piece of equipment arrives, the manager or foreman will take out a blade and put a nice big scratch on the machine while the team observes. Dethroning the shiny new things as quickly a possible should be the goal. You don't want a bunch of weird ideological gods jerking your chain around all day. The customer is already quite the handful.
Source needed
Also if he talks about 90% of all students not being founders then I want data on all 90% before I accept this argument as it seems hastily thought out
I do agree with the general ideas in his essay but these kind of comments that I cite make it seem a bit… too self-interested?
Notice there is no mention of ethics, philosophy, or human connection, except maybe Zuck being a psych major. Do we really want the future of education to be an incubator pipeline?
That said I wholehearted agree with the second half of this paragraph: "In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects."
For the first part, I suspect that money, and the safety net it provides, is a bigger impediment to entrepreneurship than its collegiate advocacy. It's hard to start a company or join a fledgling one when you are staring at an immense debt.
I do agree that we need healthcare coverage reform but don't expect a lot of political pressure from that particular group.
Yes, they accept some number of gifted people from underprivileged backgrounds, but these people are not the ones defining the school's culture. For most people, success at Harvard is to become a politician or to get very rich (or both).
An old HN comment captured this perfectly, it’s my favorite analogy of entrepreneurship [1]
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect
at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a
startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on
their own projects.
For one, they are unlikely to be co-opted by rationalist Empires run by navel-gazing non-enbies waving a sceptre of _secret-non-secrets_ (perhaps better unpacked as "these friends of ours don't look/sound like they know better but as it turns out they do")
High priestesses (in general) seem to have other means of allocating secrets/resources; that'd be where the fork shall start I wager
I think universities should focus on academic studies, not as a pipeline to YC.
No, they should focus on providing investors the resources they want to get richer. Investors are the only people who matter in the world.
Academic studies and knowledge are literally a worthless waste of time, compared to the investments of investors.
How could it be satire? If you don't believe that investors' investments are the most important good-thing in the world, you must be an anti-capitalist in favor of Soviet-style central planning, and we all know how that turned out. There is no alternative.
Not everything is about money
I agree. If someone wishes to study business or even management, let them take a specialized degree or elective courses. There is no wisdom in removing focus from a specialized degree.
That's not applicable to teachers who may often times be doing what they need to do to matter to you (because that's what they genuinely want for themselves).
The top universities have been successfull for over 900 years in focusing on having the best teaching and research. Do we really think that will go away, rich people will stop wanting their kids to have the best education?
But I agree universities can be more open to some of their students pursuing a research career in companies rather than in universities and that they have an important role to play in the transition from one to the other.
Here in Berlin there are local discussions about the lack of engagement of local universities with the startup world here vs. the relative success with which that is done in e.g. Munich and other German cities which have a longer tradition of university spinoffs as startups. There are big differences between universities in Germany. There are also a few private universities in Berlin that are more successful. For example, my office is in a building that hosts the Code university and they definitely have a track record of churning out successful startups that get invested straight out of their program. But the big public universities seem a bit more hands off. I've heard local investors complain that they have more contact with universities elsewhere in Germany than the local ones. They are calling this out as a thing that needs fixing.
It's always been that simple yet founders these days tend to believe success is predicated on all the things but the product. "Build it and they will come" is mostly true. No amount of sales, marketing and growth hacking can save a product that simply isn't very good.
This article is refreshing because it's not saying "the way to train startup founders is by teaching them business" like a lot of universities believe. You need to be willing and able to build.
Definitly true. Recently I've written a piece of software that I need myself, and I released it as a product but the response is not good. If this were my main startup product, I believe I would be broken. That is, I did not find the right product to build, I think it is need by people, but it is actually not.
Also, after a product in need is built, you should promote to make it known by people who need it.
Any newborn baby should be thoroughly bathed and, after giving him a rest from his first impressions, severely whipped and told: “Don’t write! Don’t write! Don’t be a writer!” If, in spite of this punishment, the baby will show writing tendencies, a caress should be tried. If a caress doesn’t help, give up on the baby – he is as good as lost1. The writing itch is incurable.
The path of the writer from start to finish is paved with thorns, nails and nettle, and therefore any sensible person must remove himself from writing by any means ... (eventually gets to actual advice)
I mean, this is good advice, but keep a little bit in mind who is talking, right?
This is the case in Europe and the entire economy is a flaming pile of garbage.
It’s like saying most people will never be professional athletes so we should discourage sports.
Or most people live in their home country, so we should discourage young people from taking backpacking trips.
Now I'm not of the view people shouldn't try to change the world but why should that be fixated on a business, why not a community effort, why not research, why not charity based, they all provide you with a range of skills. We have got a saturation of those starting businesses in every industry (especially mine which is quantum computing) and most have a poor idea or a repetitive idea or an idea that so unthought out it can't go anywhere.
(I will say less should go backpacking. Travelling on the whole now has become a distraction from life instead of a discovery. You are better taking that year or 6 months and spending it on something you love to do. That will show you who you are more than visiting some of the poorest nations on earth.)
What I think is important (and why I think entrepreneurship is directionally good) is open-ended exploration and taking initiative to pursue one's own projects. I don't care about the specific direction, but about the idea of proactively trying to shape reality by following one's interests.
I think what you're describing with backpacking is true for most. If the point is to check off a list of Instagram picture spots, then it's more of an exercise in consumerism. If it's to deeply engage with other cultures, languages, and people, that's different.
I guess it's similar with entrepreneurship. If the point is to inhabit the founder personality archetype you see on social media, that's different than to be genuinely solving interesting problems.
Then they would pitch in front of investors with both. Sometimes the ideas got funded and the kids would actually keep working on them.
Forgetting this is (and has been) destructive to universities.
This idea that "very large company" -> "productive economy" needs to die.
One of the two biggest employers in the US is one who treats their employees so poorly that they have to pee in bottles and continue working after a colleague has died and been left on the floor? If that’s the kind of jobs large companies “provide”, it’s not worth it. We’d much better off with several small companies that give people the flexibility to escape draconian working conditions.
https://nypost.com/2026/04/15/business/amazon-warehouse-empl...
https://futurism.com/future-society/amazon-accused-hiding-de...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...
https://www.ips-dc.org/report-americas-20-largest-low-wage-e...
Rhetorical question.
I am economically naive, but I also have never understood this argument. I asked a Spanish friend what Spain needed, he said “more big companies”. Is it because a big company provides you something closer to a monopoly, and can do so internationally?
i see it as: large companies are proof that much trade and consumption has occurred.
And practically, they are not good for democracy or even economy as such.
what are the companies you are thinking about?
Bunch of smaller companies would have to form some sort of long term cartel and sync those egos to achieve anything close to one major company.
Last thing this world needs is another fuckup trillionaire with massive childhood/mental issues and ego bigger than Everest who thinks he knows where humanity should go (to serve their wishes and needs). Or just milk mankind of anything good remaining like zuckenberg is doing.
I don't need to name further, we can all imagine our own elons on that place
Working on something other than what I’m “should to be doing”…because an adjacent or completely unrelated thread HAD to be pulled…and then a period of “off task” deadline be damned irrational monomania…it’s bliss and always turns out well. I’ve learned to trust this.
And the list goes on
Not sarcasm.
I genuinely wonder what happened to self discovery, apprenticeship, learning, and building mastery before a product, and a product before a company.
Take any advice about "what YC is looking for" with a very large grain of salt.
Many people do the assessments, and I'm far from convinced that they are all working to assess according to exactly what PG or Garry or Michael or anyone else say are the criteria.
There's TONS of advice written and video on what YC is looking for and no evidence that all that advise is scientifically followed.
If YC is a bunch of normal humans then the assessors are just deciding however they think right.
So you will be disappointed (as I was) if you research and tune your application to "exactly what PG is looking for" and you're rejected.
In articles like this I think PG is just saying "if I was doing YC application assessments, as I did 15 years ago, then this is what I would be looking for", not "this is what todays YC assessors are definitely looking for". Big difference.
If not attitude it's the time commitment - founders should be spending 50%+ of their time with their first customers and refining/pivoting, which interferes with going to (outdated) classes.
Universities were initially built to further the knowledge of specific fields, for the sake of its own advancement, producing philosophers, artists and scientists.
In other words, universities are for people to learn for the sake of learning, not to earn a wage. New institutions should be built to cultivate founders and entrepreneurs. Career development centers, maker spaces, co-working spaces, these are the places to build the entrepreneurial spirit.
He says good founders learn actual stuff at college and get good at something, without any ambition to make it profitable initially.
A startup is not a technical project, it's an organisational endeavour. They don't live or die by the product alone, but by the market demand, organisational robustness and a little bit of luck.
I still agree with you though in that it is not necessarily the universities responsibility to cultivate founders.
(I hope PG isn’t outsourcing his thinking to some agentic workflow.)
Universities should teach people that they can change the world if they want to, and that they don't have to be passive about accepting what's happening. One way to do that is to be a founder.
Tech founders pretty much always need more than a desire to earn a wage to succeed. Having a genuine belief that something that doesn't exist should exist is the drive to build. If you're in it for the money gets a job with an existing tech company, or a bank, or a hedge fund, is an wildly better idea.
YC is an exclusive club (no offense folks, it is very much a club), and there's only so many venture bucks to go around. Before we produce more 'founders', it would be very beneficial to examine how they're to secure the very necessary funding. Not everybody has access to a personal reserve of capital for many many reasons.
Brand new industries don’t have depth, and may not even have high difficulty and so starting a SAAS business or Social Media startup 2008-2014 was easy from a technical point of view
The difficult in it being a ‘startup’ was more about business execution than building execution. And luck of course. Hence Harvard students applying to become founders
Now the craftsmanship involved in building novel solutions in complex domains that are not new requires deep knowledge.
Hence PHDs and Postdocs, which are projects, but projects that rely on existing knowledge.
Paul thinking of founders being a replacement for grad school is a result of his experience building startups in low complexity novel industries with large financial upside.
That’s not what a nation needs to move itself forward. It is what VCs need to generate alpha, and so you’ll see exploration in novel low complexity industries with large financial upside, and not hard science - so Harvard grads make sense.
This idea that ‘builders’ are ‘builders’ misses the need for craftsmanship and apprenticeship
They lead because of a devotion to depth of expertise - not becoming a billionaire
So again, if you want sustainable hugely profitable 0-1 companies you better hope for a monopoly business, and why lobbyiny government to protect your rents is a faster alternative to PHDs, Postgrads, and long term industrial policy
100%. This is great timeless advice.
Just build now instead of waiting or asking someone else or thinking about building.
Don't many universities already do something like this? Pretty sure we had projects where you could either select a project template or propose your own.
> Until you've seen some founders in real life, you tend to think that starting startups is something done by other people. Seeing them pops that bubble.
I've met a few founders and find that they have a totally different personality to me. Extremely self-assured, decisive, much more focused on the high-level than the low. Often from wealthy or privileged backgrounds where taking risks is... well, less risky.
I literally said, "we're all adults here," and I was corrected. The new batch of Cal grads are children, they said -- which is an indictment of all US graduates and not just Cal for some reason. Or maybe the startup funders are just like the ancient Greek writers who complained kids today don't want to work.
This is in theory. In practice, a worse product with more money and louder marketing easily wins against a better product nobody knows about. I'm sure Paul perfectly understands it.
There are other idealizations I won't comment on, but the whole piece reads like an attempt to nurture an application pipeline for YC rather than the genuine writing I liked in earlier Paul's essays.
Here is an alternative point of view: get your degree and work for a few years. Then go back to university to learn business basics (finance, marketing, management). Start a company in your late 30s, when you know your subject area well and you have an idea how to steer finance/marketing (marketing is much harder that it might seem). Bootstrap or take as little investment as possible until you get PMF. Then scale up without giving away (much) equity.
It worked well for me. It can surely work well for others.
You will learn all of that on the job by the time you make it to Principal Engineer, Senior Sales Engineer, Staff Product Manager, or Enterprise AE in the American/Israeli/Indian and Chinese startup and BigTech scenes and especially in Enterprise SaaS, Cybersecurity, Hardware, AI/MLOps, Infra, and other high domain expertise but high revenue and exit potential heavy segments.
Also, a plurality of VCs in the segments I mentioned above tend to have learnt on the job and later switched to VC after successful exits and/or head-hunting.
If you do consider going back to school - only do a graduate research driven CS, EE, CE, or ECE degree program like Stanford, UIUC, CMU, GT (their online program is as good as on-campus with the right courses), UT Austin (their online program is as good as on-campus), and a handful of others.
I think VC’s are probably at the top of the list next to software developers.
The old VC bargain is trading ten engineers for a year or so for controlling interest in the company. The goal is to get some sort of signs of life for investors at the end of the runway.
Early phase can just be AI on the engineering side. Sure, you need a driven software engineer founder to guide the AI, but if the goal is move fast and break stuff, then build a demo, that’s about all you need. Figure that’s a few hundred thousand for seed.
Now, for series A, you could sell controlling interest, or slice off a small release that produces a ~ $1M ARR, then use that to hire a few folks, and bootstrap.
Are there any co-op style incubators encouraging this? I just described a lonely (but capital efficient) path.
With AI tooling, I think things like "quickly generated dashboard" will fall under this category, which is unfortunate because the only way to tell a well-thought UI from a poorly thought out one is by using it a lot. I suspect we are going to see a wave (already seeing really) of people launching small companies with barely functional products, which will burn user trust (low bar for software already).
For startups, this means the AI-code gold rush may ebb and most users will flock to larger corporate products that "just work". In this way, it follows the VC's with the most money to burn will be able to stay competitive after a few years of drought.
What I'm really interested in that this time they'll need to compete not just with each other, but with other institutions (assuming the software engineer's market rate stabilizes). It's not the 1990's anymore, every business and government knows how valuable software is (even if they don't have experience making it). How will they adapt the lower barrier to entry allowed by AI tools?
On the one hand, sad day for the rest and vest crowd, as well as founders. On the other hand, wouldn't it be interesting to see university or government managed Linux distros?
If you have some VC throwing hackathons in NorCal where they find people in their early/mid-20s, tell them they're the most brilliant people in the history of the human race, and promise them millions of dollars for their project if they drop out, there's going to be a lot of people with severe personality disorders coming out of that situation and there's nothing the university system can do about that.
AI will destroy YouTube, Facebook, Google Search, programming and all the business models that made Silicon Valley people filthy rich. People will finally leave the Internet. It will destroy Ycombinator. You are sawing off the branch that you are sitting on.
None of it is necessary or inevitable, but SV follows SciFi trash like it's Dianetics from L. Ron Hubbard.
Don’t meet your heroes I guess…
If pg is wrong about something it isn't because he isn't informed about what's right. It's because he's chosen to frame something in a way that aligns to what he believes.
(Hint: Everyone does this.)
Were you persuaded of this by rational arguments?
We should have known better than to put the nerds in charge -- too focused on their spreadsheets and making the big number go up, while completely ignoring the calamities they have wrought upon both the people and their environs.
They love to "teach" how everyone else in the world should help rich people get richer. And their favorite trick is to sell this solution to their own problems as a "win-win", a benefit for everyone.
It is the standard in the discourse of every oligarch and billionaire: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Ellison, Altman,... : "everyone will be happier if they make me more money".
I'm not fond of this kind of math metaphor. "roughly" is doing a lot of work here. He's saying that richer founders are more inspirational than poorer founders and younger founders are more inspirational than older founders. But when you put it that way, it's so obvious that maybe it's not worth saying. So he cast it as an equation:
inspiration = wealth / age-diff
But you can't take this equation literally. I mean, what if the founder is younger than the students? Do you get negative inspiration? What happens if you divide by 0? Is inspiration undefined in that case? Is a $2 billion net-worth 30-year-old really twice as inspirational as a $1 billion net-worth at the same age? Is Elon Musk 10 times more inspirational than Bill Gates?
This is excessive, and unjustified precision. Save equations for actual equations.
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of Paul Graham, and I only criticize because he is worth criticizing. Please don't block me.
And, of course, I should say that this is just how it struck me. Other people may not care and that's fine too.
Given the 20 years of twisted and evil greedy nature of most successful VC level startups and their founders, tech bros and VCs and the evil of MBA optimized Private Equity should we not instead teach young people to run away from startups and greed?
Paul Graham is selling a drug to society
That drug has infected the world.. we need to review what value all this disruption is providing anyone
Leaving this weird, rather Valley-specific, even YC-specific, navel-gazing definition of "founder" aside, universities should do what they promise to do for their students. And if possible for way, way, way less money.
He seems quite out of touch with the level of economic hardship involved in being a student; a huge number of students already work a couple of jobs and are navigating small businesses, especially here in the UK where he apparently now lives. They aren't going to have enough "free time" to play with a "project" even if a bit more is made available by loosening the curriculum.
If any change is necessary it should be that every university student has access to actual education and ongoing (post-graduation) support to start a real, not hypothetical business, rather than leaving them in this "ripe for YC picking" state where they have "done projects" but don't really have any awareness of business.
If students leave university immediately able to run their own businesses, understand how to bootstrap, be closer to self-funding etc., that leaves them in a stronger position than if they can show they have done stuff but need an external startup meat grinder to get them anywhere. Especially since the job market is being screwed the world over.
But YC doesn't want its people to be that independent. It wants them persuadable, overconfident and desperate to sign up to space camp.
So something was already brewing in me much earlier, and idk what advice to give, honestly not sure how a university can inject this into students. But I think the useful part of the advice is to get universities to stop packaging "entrepreneurship" courses as the path to actual entrepreneurship.
What percentage of students in those classes actually go on to become founders? Willing to bet the numbers aren't encouraging.
It's not their job to "inject" it but universities are going to have to grapple with the notion that if they want to keep admitting students, then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses.
So some truly functional support for self-employment, startups, small business working generally seems inevitable. If you're going to persuade students to step out of the job market for up to four years and take on vast debt to hand over then I think pastoral care includes providing the framework to teach them to fend for themselves when the jobs in the brochure don't turn up.
Concrete support, rather than "make yourself ready for something like YC".
(Beyond that I actually think prospectuses should be more closely regulated for what they can and cannot suggest is a likely employment outcome. Because at the moment, prospectuses are aimed at kids and are full of misleading content about how likely they are to get a job.)
That has always been the case, because the purpose of universities is not feeding the market with workers or founders, it's feeding society with educated people. Which is incidentally an excellent basis for both founder and worker roles.
Even if we were to accept the premise that universities exist to feed society with educated people, we should then question the value of the education students are getting, given the significant grade inflation over the last 20 or so years.
These days every job has hundreds of applicants. In the AI era, thousands.
I don't think you can claim that this ROI is not its purpose.
Empirically, student free time grew for much of the 20th century, and students spend much less time on school work than they used to. The decline is not explained by students spending more time on work outside of school; much of it has become leisure time.
https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00093 https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811011200908
Now perhaps there has been a sharp change in the years since those two studies (there certainly has been a sharp change in UK tuition costs), but the point is that our intuitions about how hard students must have to work these days are usually wrong.
Here is inflation since
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2022/04/inflat...
Please lets have some decency towards the struggles of students
> On average, students spent about 14 HPW preparing for class, 6 HPW working for pay, 12 HPW relaxing and socializing, 7 HPW participating in co-curricular activities and community service, 2 HPW caring for dependents, and 3 HPW commuting to campus. These activities accounted for a total weekly average of 45 HPW.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-018-9497-z
I've looked for other data and have not found anything to indicate the trend has reversed.
However, the standard deviations indicate that there is considerable variation in how students allocate their time to these activities.
That you went fishing for research to support your argument and this is the best you could find is telling.
Enough universities in Europe that do this. I am thinking of studying maths at the German distance university. I forgot the name. It would mean that I neef to speak good German. I might just do that too
(I have been thinking about an OU degree for a second act)
> The FernUniversität in Hagen is Germany’s only state distance-learning university, and its largest in terms of student numbers. Its flexible degree programs and continuing education options make higher education accessible to students in a variety of life situations. Its five faculties conduct a wide range of theoretical and applied research in their subject areas of Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Economics and Business Administration, and Law.
I believe some exams have to be taken non-remote: https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/english/study/distance-learning...
This “rethinking of education” you’re on about is already incredibly rigid from the start, and will not give young people the generalist skills to weather cycles of hype and economic downturns.
The new era does not seem to be startup or small business focused, that period already was - at around the time google and company started. Back then, startup actually meant small business starting up.
What is puzzling is why do you need to highjack academia, make it stop doing academic and turn it into incubator or business hub. VCs have enough money to create own business hubs. And they can even admit people who are not from most flashy universities there. There is no reason to take over academia and stop it from its original purpose.
I agree with this, but also people in this sort of situation aren't socially situated to become startup founders so probably not the target of this?
He has been like this for a while now. His last few essays are simply advertisement for a startup accelerator. Conveniently, he also owns one of them.
None of that is true today. And though its is possible to build another unicorn there is not a really good reason to do that any more.
Learning about taxes, business structures (CoOp's any one), HR (how not to get sued, how BAD hr means the IRS comes to get you), reading a cap table, reading a contract, accounting are all skills that a solid tech team needs to "build a business". Marketing, Customer acquisition, Customer retention, Customer Service are all places where most recent grads might not have the skills to "do the needful"
LLM's have compressed the early build out stage. The tech portion, getting from zero to one is now partly trivial. If you are going to build out a niche business that does 1-10 million ARR now is the time. Thats not a product at a scale the at PG and other VC's are really interested in, but it is possible to run a project that size with a very small multi-talented team. They need all those other non technical skills to make it happen.
What's a "startup"? For the most part, you're just building a small business. You deal with local bureaucracies, learn about accounting, hire first employees, struggle to find customers. People have been doing this for ages without VCs. And 99% of startups never progress past that stage.
The only thing that VC funding changes is that it lets you grow faster than justified. This can turn you into the next Google, but most often, it puts you on a completely unsustainable path where you only have two outs: writing the project off or offloading it to a FOMO buyer for more than it's worth. The VC ecosystem is exceedingly good at that second part.
It grossly blurs the distinction between those who put in personal blood, sweat, tears, and money into starting a business versus those who make a few slides so they can use other people’s money to hire others to do all the work and come up with all the ideas.
We had words for this. "Small business" and "Small business owner".
Startup is meant to become monopoly and does not have to have good economics before abusing monopoly power. Competition is for loosers. It is about disrupting, not about building.
Sounds like a complete nonsense, yet here we are.
The 'best thing' they could do is teach literally every students basic commerce, finance and econ.
Literally every student.
If you can understand the bond market - you can understand how the whole world works.
Behind every major conflict is finance.
The Napoleonic wars are about about finance and logistics, particularly issues in the treasury, international lending.
The doldrums of the 1970s were about monetary system.
Great Depression was about markets.
Roosevelts transformation of the US bureaucracy is is an operational and financial socialization of 30% of the US economy.
None of any of that happens until the Fed came into being.
PG reviles in illiteracy of these macro things like an anti-vaxxer.
If people understood these things, we'd have a different kind of democracy entirely.
"In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects."
Today, everyone is a founder. Founders of bubbles and bro culture. Herd-minds, chasing the Californian greed rush. Round 'em up, Angel Investors!
Please don't post unsubstantive comments or shallow dismissals to Hacker News. We're hoping for curious conversation here, not bilious.
It's telling that I see far worse HN comments on a daily basis that don't warrant a finger-wagging condemnation from you.
> benefit wide areas of the human experience
So no, I don't think founding companies has much to do with the wide human experience. It's actually a pretty rare thing. And I argue that most startup founders are not concerned with the human experience and are just focused on what the exit looks like.
It is favoring 1 group, not wide areas of the human experience.
> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it. And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance.
> Another thing that will tend to draw universities away from the optimal path is business schools, if they have them. Business schools were not designed to train founders. They were designed to train the managerial class of the large industrial companies that arose in the early 20th century; they're the West Points of industrial capitalism. That's why their official name is usually the School of Management. But while the skills they teach might be useful in running companies beyond a certain size, they're not the critical ingredient in founding them. And the skills that are are already taught by other departments. So to the extent business schools affect their parent university's strategy for preparing founders, it can only be by adding error.
> And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance.
But then he also states:
> Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to the ideal of liberal education than preparing them for almost any other kind of career.
This is pretty myopic and is obviously biased from someone embedded in the startup space, perhaps not surprising given how little value most startups provide. Not everything in life is a whiz-bang, fail fast, build-some-new-product-from-scratch startup. In fact, most things are not.
Pay attention to actual liberal arts universities. Their goal is on the long-term and not to satisfy some near-term need of startup founders making the next killer app or product. It can be argued that most startups build towards generating value only in the sense of monetary value, in that most startups' goal are purely about the exit. It really has little to do with building products. Most venture capitalists got their wealth from the dotcom bubble. Almost none of them know how to build actual products.
Paul - spend a few tokens to give me a text size I can read?
Basically, this is an “essay” (read: blog vomit) about how universities can do a better job of providing Paul Graham with the raw material he and people like him need to fund their lifestyle.
> We're like grad school.
Sure, Paul. That’s not a self-serving nonsensical statement at all.