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Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs

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Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs

#51
post #48

Also is a computer science or business degree recommended? Computer science. Hands down. am wondering which college would be the best for an aspiring start up entrepreneur. I think that Stanford is obviously the best choice, they push entrepreneurship pretty hard. But at the same time, I don't really think that it's the school, it's the student. And, Stanford is really expensive. If you get in to Stanford and can get…

"as long as you have money for rent, ramen and bandwidth" Can you reformulate that to use three 'R's?

"rent, ramen, Rackspace"?

"food, a flat, fiber"?

"home, hamburgers, hosting"?

Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs

#53
post #45

If you live in the midwest, I highly recommend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It's a top 5 CS program.

If you live in Illinois, it is a great idea. Otherwise, you will pay dearly for the degree.

Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs

#54
post #9
post #3

Harvard. Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mark Zuckerberg.

Sergey Brin went to the University of Maryland. Larry Page went to Michigan. Marc Andreessen and Max Levchin went to the University of Illinois. This not to say some schools aren't better than others, but when people do great things it's usually because of who they are rather than where they went to college.

Well, I'm not fully agree on the examples with Sergey and Max. Sergey's father is a very qualified ex-soviet mathematician, he gave very good basics to Sergey. Max moved to US when he was 16. He's got grounds from the soviet education system, which was very different comparing to US. So, their college choice (theoretically) could not change their fate. ;)

But in overall you're right. Don't treat college as your pass to success, however it could be your backup, just in case if you're not that smart as you think. ;)

Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, the attitude evident in the last two paragraphs of your comment runs deep in young people. Zuckerberg at YC Startup last year, age discrimination suit at Google, etc. Logan's Run in Silicon Valley. It's also upside down compared to other fields like medicine and writing. In medicine, you make your "mark on the world" after you go through significant training, which ends around 30 or later. As far as making it…

Markus Frind is quite a bit more intelligent than many people give him credit for, eg. he discovered the then-longest arithmetic progression of prime numbers in 2004. Same goes for many other entrepreneurs that people assume were just lucky - James Hong, Marc Andreesen, Brad Fitzpatrick, etc. And the variation due to age may be much less than the variation due to person, but remember that there are many more smart pe…

I didn't know about Markus Frind's intelligence (interesting info), but in PlentyOfFish's case (and successes like MySpace), it's no masterpiece of hacking.

Writing prose can be similar in intensity to writing code. John Scalzi, a recent sci-fi award winner, wrote a book for writers called "You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffeeshop." Many writers block out pure concentration time. Nonetheless, I'll concede that long stretches of time are more available to the young, unless they are out partying :)

I wonder how many big successes depend on bleeding edge software? For every Google, there are plenty more like MySpace, Ebay, Amazon, and Facebook.

I usually live off specialized applications, where you build software that focuses on a particular need for a niche population. Knowing the domain (say radiotherapy or creative writing) is really useful because of insights into how you can fashion new tools using advancing technology (e.g., faster 3D graphics or a better web framework). So while I agree that creating totally innovative approaches might be easier for the young, I think experience helps in creating domain-specific software.

My main point, though, is even if you believe you have a limited shelf-life, you might consider it's your shelf-life in only one of many possible avenues to make your mark.

Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs

#56
post #34

You can learn (or incidentally, not learn) CS at most decent colleges. What I think is a lot more interesting about college is everything else that you'll learn there along the way and learning to get along and have fun with other smart people. When I was college shopping, I was choosing between a liberal arts school and a top-tier engineering school. I visited the engineering school and realized that while they had…

I would disagree with this, not because it isn't very good advice in general, but because its not good advice for entrepreneurs. The fact is that other people with motivation and drive to start something are quite rare to find in non top-tier schools, and you not only want people who think like an entrepreneur, but you also want them to be able to carry part of the load of the initial work (for web-based applications, code). Don't apply to the top tier schools because its something that everyone else is doing - do it because you'll find the best people there, and anything less is giving yourself a handicap that just isn't worth it. If you're scared about not making it into the top tier, well just remember, wanting to be an entrpreneur already puts you above many, many people.

One thing I do agree on is that starting something requires more than just coding skills - your ability to socialize, to motivate other people, and to get along with others is critically important. However, I would recommend teaching yourself how to socialize and getting academic schooling on code rather than the other way around.

If you're choosing your college based on where you can build a startup, you should look at 3 things:

1) Smart, motivated people. I would say Stanford, Harvard, MIT have taken most of them. Startups are rarely 1 person endeavors, and having a lot of candidates for a partner really helps.

2) Skills. This is why any top-tier university is good, because the skill-sets there are abundant. Plenty of smart people are looking for the next frontier, and you can give it to them.

3) Community. Most people don't get serious about entrepreneurship until they meet an entrepreneur. Make sure you have some sort of VC connection in your school, or a business program in entrepreneurship and a lively entrepreneur community. Also take entrepreneurial classes if you can, and try to connect with the community as fast as possible.

I go to CMU (Carnegie Mellon), and while it has, to some extent, all of the 3 points above, I do sometimes regret not going somewhere better. The difference in the caliber of people and the quantity and quality of the entrepreneurs here is quite apparent. CMU has a lot of old VCs that don't really know the web, and the entrepreneur community here is mostly older people doing older stuff (but still fascinating startups). One thing I'm very satisfied with is the professors here teaching entrepreneurship, as they have their own companies and provide a LOT of advice and motivation (they just are limited in how much help they can give if you're doing a web startup). I would say its a tier or 2 below the top three.

There seems to be a good correlation between the VC money in a certain area and how startup-friendly the colleges nearby are. Its best if you just follow that.

also - business vs CS - do CS.

The business school here at CMU produces the worst slackers-that-look-good-in-suits that I've ever seen. It does wonders to your presentation skills but kills your ability to do any serious work whatsoever.

Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs

#57
post #43

If you're a junior in high school, I'd take as many college level courses (mostly math and CS) as I could in your senior year and seriously consider skipping college. I would normally never recommend this to anyone who cared about their future, but if you truly are an "aspiring start up entrepreneur", then you already know this is the right answer. In your case, college is an unnecessary detour.

Strictly-speaking, it is unnecessary for an entrepreneur, but I wouldn't be very keen to skip college (what's the rush to start your first business? Your career as an entrepreneur doesn't end at 30). The educational background will be very useful -- you can learn Rails, SQL, and the like on your own, but tackling true CS subjects individually is not something a lot of people can truly do. Going to college is also a great experience, from a networking and personal maturity perspective.

Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs

#58
a) Answers without reasons are more or less alma mater shoutouts, I recommend you ignore them.

b) Stanford and UIUC tend to be more entrepreneurial than other CS colleges (I find Carnegie Mellon/MIT tend to lean towards academia), but I'd say it's more important to go where you'll be happy...visit everywhere and find a place that won't drive you insane, since nothing kills the startup spirit faster than being forced to work day-in and day-out on things you don't enjoy.

That being said, I love Carnegie Mellon :-P

Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs

#59
post #57
post #43

If you're a junior in high school, I'd take as many college level courses (mostly math and CS) as I could in your senior year and seriously consider skipping college. I would normally never recommend this to anyone who cared about their future, but if you truly are an "aspiring start up entrepreneur", then you already know this is the right answer. In your case, college is an unnecessary detour.

Strictly-speaking, it is unnecessary for an entrepreneur, but I wouldn't be very keen to skip college (what's the rush to start your first business? Your career as an entrepreneur doesn't end at 30). The educational background will be very useful -- you can learn Rails, SQL, and the like on your own, but tackling true CS subjects individually is not something a lot of people can truly do. Going to college is also a g…

For "networking" and "personal maturity", agreed.

"but tackling true CS subjects individually is not something a lot of people can truly do"

Unless they have jobs.

Please don't kid yourself into thinking that CS in college is anything other than the warm-up act for the real thing. It's strictly optional.

Re: Ask YC: Best undergraduate college for hopeful startup entrepeneurs

#60
post #59
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly-speaking, it is unnecessary for an entrepreneur, but I wouldn't be very keen to skip college (what's the rush to start your first business? Your career as an entrepreneur doesn't end at 30). The educational background will be very useful -- you can learn Rails, SQL, and the like on your own, but tackling true CS subjects individually is not something a lot of people can truly do. Going to college is also a g…

For "networking" and "personal maturity", agreed. "but tackling true CS subjects individually is not something a lot of people can truly do" Unless they have jobs. Please don't kid yourself into thinking that CS in college is anything other than the warm-up act for the real thing. It's strictly optional.

Well, I'm just saying that the number of people with the enthusiasm to really, deeply grok, say, the PCP theorem, Bayes nets, or the FFT in their spare time is quite small. Sure, undergrad CS is just a "warm-up act for the real thing", but a solid grounding in all those topics is a really useful thing for someone planning a career doing technology startups.
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