Like Zuck? Drew Houston? It's easy to rattle off a dozen names who wouldn't have started their company if they'd worked at a big company for 5 years.
The correct answer is "figure out what works for you." And stop being cynical. It's really crummy to see Sam Altman, one of the nicest and most genuine people, dumped on here just because nobody here knows him.
I know him. Or I did, once. He's not the type of person you describe. Just the opposite: what sets Sam apart is how much he believes in you. You generally don't find it elsewhere in the world. It's rare for your own parents to believe in you in the way Sam does. So why go to a big company where they definitely won't believe in you or let you forge your own opportunities? And yes, you're right, you can spend years climbing the modern equivalent of the corporate ladder in order to get people to believe in you and let you take a risk. But:
in my experience nothing opens doors for you like having solid experience at a well known and well respected company.
Empirically, you're wrong about that. There are now over a thousand YC alums who prove you don't need it.
Sam is saying, "If you want to do a startup, here's what works on average." Nothing more.
What does this mean? And why are you emphasizing it so much? Sam is an investor, he believes in people who he thinks will succeed. By definition, he's not going to believe in a very large set of people. But he will believe in people who seem promising... it really is very useless to point out that he 'believes' in people.
> Why go to a big company where they definitely won't believe in you or let you forge your own opportunities?
Because there's greater security in working for a big company, generally speaking, than starting a startup. Though as others have mentioned, the audience here were a self-selected group of MIT students... it's not as outrageous for Sam to have said what he has said there. I do have a problem with him abusing his platform when he starts generalizing this kind of advice (previously he's said it's better to start a startup than work for a company to a more general audience -- it's just a bad thing for him to say, but that's a topic for another day).
I'm sure Zuck is a smart guy who works hard, but he also happened to be in the right place at the right time. If he had started Facebook a year earlier or a year later, no-one would have heard of it, or him. You could be the next Zuck but you're more likely to get rich playing the lottery.
You generally don't find it elsewhere in the world
Every salesman, has a lot of charisma. So?
A dozen is not a lot. If you understand statistics. I'm not saying you are wrong but you don't have a convincing point.
Outliers. It's all well and good to strive to do the same, but it isn't going to happen for the vast majority of people. And how can you presume what they would've done after going to work?
>Empirically, you're wrong about that. There are now over a thousand YC alums who prove you don't need it.
The business world is much, much larger than those 1000 alum. They are a drop in the bucket.
Where is all your data on the failures?
I have no qualms with the incubator industry, but I think most people have it backwards: the best path for most people is getting work experience first. For a few driven people with good ideas, head to start up world.
Agree completely on Sam. Wanted to add though that assuming most people on HN have done a startup at one point and 90% of them have failed, then at this point a significant portion of the community may see themselves as having been burned by YC's advice. Or it may just be the fact that the majority of the community no longer grew up reading Slashdot, or at least no longer identifies with that set of values and beliefs. Or maybe the commenters just aren't representative of everyone else.
I'm not sure what's actually the case, but clearly ten years ago the idea that working for large corporation sucked was kind of the raison d'etre of the community, whereas judging by the comments that seems to no longer be the case. Similarly, one of the most upvoted submissions this weekend was a talk making fun of pg & lisp.
Regardless of what exactly is going on, it seems like there is a mismatch between YC's messaging and the community that has been revealing itself over the last several months.
As far as Zuckerberg, Drew Houston, and other big winners in the startup game, well, you might as well interview lottery winners for their secrets of success. No doubt these guys are very smart and hardworking, but so are the far more numerous legions of startups that fail.
Do you think that big companies really don't believe in their employees? Is there some "don't believe" switch that gets triggered after the head count gets above a certain level? How do you think big companies come up with new products or services, or improve existing ones?
Does this sound like a company that does not believe in its employees?
Like Instacart (Amazon), Parse (Google), or Zenter (Amazon & GoDaddy)?
Or going beyond YC, Twitter (Google), FourSquare (Google), Instagram (Google), Quora (Facebook), Asana (Facebook), Cloudera (Google, Yahoo, Facebook), YouTube (PayPal), Yelp (PayPal), Palantir (PayPal), SpaceX (PayPal), Tesla (PayPal), WhatsApp (Yahoo), StackOverflow (Microsoft), Android (Apple), EBay (Apple), NeXT (Apple), Nest (Apple), Amazon (D.E. Shaw), Oracle (Ampex), and Apple (Hewlett-Packard)?
Empirically, having a "brand name" on your resume isn't necessary to found a great company, but it helps a lot. The companies above comprise almost all of the modern tech industry. The ones missing are almost all founded by founders recently out of a brand-name college or grad school: Google (Stanford), Microsoft (Harvard), Facebook (Harvard), Viaweb/YC (Harvard), DropBox (MIT), SnapChat (Stanford).
Working for larger companies will make you dislike bureaucracy but also understand how it mitigates risk (and hopefully allow you to find a happy medium). It also will push you to compete under pressures that you won't normally just put on yourself, it will teach you how to take customers seriously, how to build systems and applications seriously.
This is not to say big companies get all this right; far from it. But working for them will make you much more bulletproof than working on your startup by yourself.
This is why most successful startups are NOT started by 20-something kids, but actually 40-something former corporate employees.
I'm sorry, but this is really bad advice for engineers graduating from MIT in 2015 and predisposed to starting a new company.
You have your whole career to settle into a big corporate job for a long stretch; why do that right out of college? An entrepreneurial software engineer graduating from anywhere, let alone MIT, should almost certainly move to San Francisco after college and start or join a startup. If it doesn't work out, they'll find themselves looking for a job in an extremely favorable market.
Letting assumptions about what's "easier" cow you into taking some job for five years is no way to live, certainly not for a recent MIT grad with the most highly sought after skill set in the world.
In other words, I suspect the audience was largely self selected. And in fairness to Altman he wasn't pitching the rainbows and unicorns to people in the middle of the bell curve. MIT students are a cohort statistically more likely to succeed in Silcon Valley tech culture than Alabama bumpkins at cow colleges.
But again, I agree there's self interest involved. That's also true for Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft recruitment.
> "Alabama bumpkins at cow colleges"
The surface text is that MIT students are better positioned to succeed at YC than people from more pedestrian socio-economic backgrounds. Altman isn't directly recruiting at community college students for reasonable reasons [by which I am not saying that there aren't potential founders among community college students, but that it is easier to optimize on eliminating false positives among MIT students than among students at less selective institutions]. You're on your own for the hermeneutics.
If you are trying to recruit the best of the best, it makes sense to recruit there. But you will have stiff competition from everyone else seeking the same. You're probably also looking at CalTech, Stanford, Berkeley, and Princeton with the same eyeball. And sama is saying that some of those companies that set out to recruit the very best and most prestigious graduates are not always the very best companies to work for. That's it. If you graduate from MIT, you don't have to work for Apple, Google, Facebook, or any other company that anyone has actually heard of.
I came from the middle of the bell curve, and my first job was working for a start-up. I didn't need sama's advice, because I was just looking for the first thing I could find, rather than the first thing that would not spoil the purity of my perfect, pre-planned resume. That's why he was aiming at those busy beavers in Boston. He's just saying that people might be happier if they chased after the rainbow unicorn farts rather than prestige.
I have worked closely with graduates of Alabama, Auburn, and Alabama A&M, including the smaller satellite campuses. Those are not "cow colleges". Their graduates are not bumpkins. They are overly religious and entirely too enthusiastic about football, in my opinion, but they still know how to do the work. They also know how to chase their dreams, even when afforded fewer opportunities to do so.
Recognize that "bumpkin" and "cow college" are derogatory or dismissive terms, you may have used them without thinking about why you shouldn't, and that you may need to reflect on that a bit.
There are highly capable graduates from community colleges, e.g. Hanselman. But investing is about maximizing the odds with finite time to collect information. Altman is chasing the odds by taking his dog and pony to Cambridge, Mass rather than Troy, Al. It's business.
I apologize for offending you. The reference was self-depreciating on one level and an obscure reference to a respected tech leader that Altman's recruiting optimization tactic would miss. I'll point out that your stereotyping is 'Alabama bumpkin' by value rather than reference.
So that when small company gets acquired later on by the big company, Sam makes a lot of money.
YC companies acquired by google: BufferBox, Flutter, TalkBin, the Fridge, Bump, reMail, Omnisio, Appjet, Zenter
YC companies acquired by facebook: Carsabi, Midnox, Parse,Sendoid, GazeHawk, Divvyshot, Parakey
etc.
edit: upon reflection, my comment probably reads somewhat flippant. That's a pity, but it's a pity too the crass manner in which Sam says the things he says in his YC campaign tours.