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Comment by UK-AL | Hacker News Reader

Start ups used to be for scrappy guys, the people who dropped out or had a winding career path.

Now its become a popular option its turned into selection system like a Goldman sachs graduate recruitment program. Precisely because its those type of people running these things.

Fundamentally i'm not sure they have the same character as the previous entrepreneurs. Those guys specifically chose to take the risky untrodden path. That said something about their personality. That could be the piece that makes a successful entrepreneur.

Its not like that anymore, so the people choosing to do it are a different breed. They are more like people who go to work for investment banks now.

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Salesforce was started by an ex-Oracle executive, Jeff Bezos worked at an investment bank looking at internet businesses, Peter Thiel also had a successful investment banking career prior to Paypal.

(for that matter Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, Joshua Schacter of Delicious and Sal Khan of Khan academy are all ex-investment banking as well)

The scrappy drop-out risking all to start a startup narrative is cute, but only represents a small fraction of successful startups. Many startup founders had significant financial success before founding their startups.

Anecdotal but:

I know fair few guy running start ups, and some who got into YC. I can say they are not the type of people who aspire to working in IB's with perfect resumes from elite universities. One got fired a few times, because he could not cope with the lack autonomy, and ended up in arguments with senior management. His doing quite well now. I can say his attributes that made him fail there, made him a success in someway with his own co-founded startup.

I say this as someone who did go to an elite university.

The point is that startup founders don't fit into cookie cutter models.

Some have top-tier resumes, some are drop-outs, some have a huge amount of domain expertise in their field and some are complete newbies. Many are somewhere in between.

It's bad for the startup community to push "founder-stereotype" myths because it discourages people who don't fit the stereotype and that's bad for everyone.

I actually agree with this.

But as it gets more popular(and competitive) I think diversty of startup founders will be smaller. And something will be lost because of it.

If we're not careful every startup founder will be from an elite background, from an elite family. Undiscovered talent will never be discovered.

Accelerators are going with the safe options, rather than potentials.

Start ups were one of the few ways people not from elite background could achieve massive success.

Completely disagree. The founders your talking about will provail no matter what. creativity, passion, inspiration isn't about money. True entrepreneur ship is about exploiting the flaws in the system. System changes and they find new flaws.

Is there evidence to support that accelerators are pre-selecting based on elite backgrounds? It would be really interesting to see YC's % of founders from Ivy league + Stanford over time.

Look at the EF Alumni. They are mostly from elite universities.

The people running EF are also elite, investment banks and management consultants. Which is probably why they hire, who they hire.

This is not surprising given British history. Culturally there is an overhanging bias towards credentials and elitism, however I get the strong feeling (as an American Co-Founder living in London the past 2 years) that things are definitely moving in the right direction here. Whereas Silicon Valley with its general west-coast counter cultural history is much more accepting but probably moving in the wrong direction as "startups" are mainstreamed and investors are looking for some signal in the noise of all the wannabes.

As usual though, successful founders must find their own way, and if they are dependent on being given a shot by some gatekeeper they probably never had much chance to be a successful entrepreneur anyway.

http://www.londonlovesbusiness.com/entrepreneurs/young-entre...

Investment banking means a specific thing, not merely having worked in finance.

None of your examples were investment bankers.

Bezos and Khan worked at hedge funds. Thiel worked as a derivatives trader. Wales was a trader. Schacter was a quant trader.

Pincus was an investment banker.

Among people who work in investment banks "investment banking" has a specific meaning (i.e IBD) but in general usage it's meaning covers the wider capital markets.

For example see the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_banking

While it is true that "investment bank" means a bank that does investment banking, investment banker does not mean an employee of an investment bank. A trader at an investment bank is no more of an investment banker than a backend software developer at the same institution.

I think you misread the thread, the discussion was about the field of investment banking and not specifically about investment bankers.

At least we have one thing going for us. If you fail a Goldman Sachs interview, you don't get to work at Goldman Sachs. If YC or some other accelerator rejects you, you can still go and start your startup and succeed anyway. In fact YC specifically says that if you make acceptance a deciding factor in deciding whether to do a startup, you'll probably fail.

In the end, startups only succeed only if enough people like their product enough to pay for it. So what if there are now accelerators targeting "non-scrappy" guys?

Startup founding is not really an innate skill, it's about getting better at the plethora of different skills you need to found and lead a company.

What really makes a good startup founder is a prior startup founder. Ergo the more you pump into the system, the better the founders you eventually precipitate will be.

All founders are muppets at the start. The key to becoming good is doing it and then doing it again.

Why do young founders participate in these accelerators? Aside from the (arguably small) amount of money, I think that participation gives them the feeling of "permission" to actually create the business they want.

I wonder how many realize that they could build the same business just as well on their own (assuming proper willpower, and all.)

Being around other high quality founders. Having done YC I would say that that is by far the best takeaway from it and I think every other alum would say the same.

Good quality founders give you access to experience and perspective that you simply cannot find elsewhere and a value that no amount of blog reading can substitute.

An incubator is definitively only as good as the founders in it (which presents an obvious catch 22) and EF has managed to attract some incredibly high quality applicants.

The EF program is too young for a large number of those applicants to yet have become experienced founders per-se but in terms of quality of people and focus on engineering, EF is streets ahead of anything else I've seen in London.

FWIW it's also far, far harder to build a quality business solo than it is if you surround yourself with other people who are also doing well and pushing you to do better. You are as they say the average of your five closest friends.

Although not a quick read, the go-to analysis of this is "Entrepreneurs Are the New Labor" [^1].

On this theory, the balance of power has shifted to investors, who prefer founders from an institution. And perhaps a certain generation of young adults welcomes this sort of structure more than others might.

Which isn't to say that incubators don't have great value for many people. They do. But they're not the only way to go about starting many businesses, you're correct.

[^1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...

TL;DR? See http://www.slideshare.net/vgururao/usc-annenberg (slide 7 in particular)

On a related point, am I the only one who notices the language coming out of the Silicon Valley ecosystem (the war for talent, the need to identify star performers) and is reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's assessment of Enron's corporate culture (http://gladwell.com/the-talent-myth/)?

Are you saying that these accelerators are not increasing the founders' chance of success?

He is simply saying that nobody can stop you from starting a business.

A CS student graduating from Cambridge usually has numerous job offers for GBP 45k+ or USD 100k+, promising a safe, stable lifestyle. Going down the startup route with no team, no idea, and funding of only 10-20k to live and develop a business in London for an entire year is still massively risky.

Programs like EF are simply helping manage that risk, and increase the chances of success by providing the right mentorship, peers and support environment.

And of course, appetite for risk is not the only great quality in startup founders, so if you give the intelligent, capable people with smaller risk appetites who would have normally chosen the safer route, the opportunity to work on their own company, it isn't unfeasible to imagine they might succeed.

This. Right here. This. The worst part about it is that even organizations started by the "scrappy" guys are only running after the "ib" types. And the transition seemed very quick.

This article made me wretch because the last thing I want to see is a bunch of silver spoon idiots calling themselves entrepreneurs. I was in a fraternity, which has a high chance of attracting entitled heirs, and it was the dumbest choice I'd ever made. Very very few of them had a shred of originality, ingenuity, or fire...and lacking these traits kept them out of entrepreneurship.

But now...there's an organization that would look at these type of people (high grades, family connections that would count even though no one will admit it, pizaz appearance, etc) and fund them. Yeah this is no challenge to YC. I don't agree with all of their selection processes but at least they look for traction and authenticity.

There may be larger trends at work.

Firstly, there's supposed to be a democratization of entrepreneurship with individuals becoming more capable (due to tech) and not needing the resources of a large company.

Secondly, there may be a systemization of entrepreneurship, as we get better at it. Analogy: in the early days of manufacturing, defects rates were high and apparently random. But over time, observation and experiment, the causes were understood and controlled, resulting in extremely low defect rates (as low as you're willing to pay for, I believe). Can the same apply to startups? Of course not! But we certainly can get better at it. "Lean", imperfect though it is, is an example of this. And every time someone writes (or reads) a "lessons learned", there's an implicit assumption that there is something to learn... that it's not totally random.

Except I think entrepreneurs are the defects. Their the guys that make things work inspit of the system. For every rule there is an exception and an entrepreneur their to expliot it.

Just make the selection process really difficult. Those who want it will get it.

Everyone shits on bankers but the reason there's so many successful ex-bankers outside of banking is because they're goal oriented people who don't take no for an answer. Very similar to startup founders.

The types of risk are dramatically different in the old Silicon Valley vs. the new one.

In 1965-80, the "risk" was working for a low salary. But there really was a talent shortage relative to what society wanted to accomplish. If your startup failed, you could resume a technical career and come out for the better because of what you'd learned.

Also, rents were low, so the only "poverty" you were worried about was having to delay your Europe vacation while working on the startup. Making rent wasn't a life-altering concern.

In 2014, the numeric financial risk is lower (most startups come close to market salary) but the career risks are huge. We have a talent surplus and a bad startup can damage your resume/reputation enough to put you out of the game.

I don't know if I buy the resume-killer concept. Do you have some examples?

maybe it's because I'm a programmer and not a CEO, but it sure seems like at interviews people just skip the boring parts of my resume to talk about the charismatic companies I've worked at, disregarding the gaps.

I do know one company (Basho) that refuses to hire anyone who has ever had a negative experience at any job. As a result, they tend to hire young, inexperienced people.

> I do know one company (Basho) that refuses to hire anyone who has ever had a negative experience at any job

Can you elaborate? I'm curious; I may have dodged a bullet here.

there's a strain of management books called "Topgrading".

The gist is: you, the new founder, are grade A awesome, and you can have a successful company if you only hire other As. Unfortunately, Bs and Cs will show up, and lie about their work history! So you better scrutinize their resume line-by-line. The books teach intimidation tactics meant to flush out inconsistensies in self-reported work history. In reality, it becomes interrogation-style focus, trying to highlight "problems" of any kind.

That's not a rare attitude ("I never hire unlucky people"). I'd imagine that VCs are the same way.

Yes, you'll exclude good people if you cop that attitude, because good people often get unlucky. However, the people you get will be terrified (and manipulable). The purpose of back channel reference checking (or age discrimination) isn't to get good people. It's to scare the shit out of the people you have, so they do what you say without question.

> We have a talent surplus

What makes you say that?

The fact that people can be rejected for jobs over stupid reasons (too young, too old, too many prior jobs, too few prior jobs, not enough or wrong pedigree, too much pedigree) indicates a surplus.

In a real talent shortage, you don't need a PhD from Stanford to do interesting work. Where you're from doesn't matter, because there's so much demand for people to work on hard things.

There were plenty of smart state-school grads working on NASA programs with much more at stake than a fucking VC-funded web app. When demand for talent is high, that image stuff doesn't matter.

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