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Comment by scottfits | Hacker News Reader

One thing I agree with and one I disagree with:

- 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.

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"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 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.

> Increasingly I feel like the next generation of startups is more capital intensive and requires more time commitment from deeply technical talent.

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.

It’s not obvious to me that a “nobody wants this” megaproject by a decades old multinational forced to succeed by government mandate wasting over a decade debating national workshare is a great example of a “startup in aerospace”.

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’s not obvious to me that a “nobody wants this” megaproject by a decades old multinational forced to succeed by government mandate wasting over a decade debating national workshare is a great example of a “startup in aerospace”.

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 have no idea how you could think a startup is comparable to a project that ended up costing 25 billion dollars to devolop and involved something like 15k engineers. It's began development in 1988 and the first flight wasn't until 2005.

I want to ask you, what do you think a startup is?

I'm a little confused by what you mean with your question? I was trying to ask what features of an engineering discipline OP was pointing towards with his comparison. I wasn't intending to describe what the next generation of startups might look like!

Much of yc advice is correct. But much of it is also dated as you're noticing

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