After Credentials
paulgraham.com
After Credentials
1–10 of 209 posts
Re: After Credentials
#2For those who care, there is a whole branch of labor economics surrounding this topic:
(The wikipedia link had a set of paren that killed the URL)
Re: After Credentials
#3"In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent of a person's future."
I'm sure that I can speak for many of us here when I say, thank God that's not the case here anymore.
Re: After Credentials
#4I think Paul is treading ideas with some interesting implications for him, personally. He is the head of an organization that funds companies on the basis of a written & oral exam, whose principal selling point is the transmission of "credentials" upon the kids they pick. Part of it is the kids' merit, but part of it is YC's past success.
People go to YC for many of the same reasons people went to Stanford -- past seed stage, it's still largely a credentials game. So you have to ask whether the same potential for "corruption" is present. Are they failing to transmit credentials over generations because it's a revolutionary model, or because it's only been around less than one generation?
What if someone did a sweetheart deal for a YC startup as a personal favor/quid-pro-quo/etc? What does it mean when founders who got rich from a YC company start funding new YC companies because they are YC companies? Is that "corruption" in the same sense?
Re: After Credentials
#5One could easily amend this to include "After Perceptions".
As a young geek, I was often passed over because I didn't look like I could do the job. It started with little league and continued on through high school and into the work place. I even quit one of my better jobs because a slicker looking but far less talented peer was promoted into what should have been my job.
No more. As a mild mannered adult geek, I still get the same pseudo-negative first impression reaction until I open my mouth and show them how much they'd benefit from me and technology.
The Performance Economy was a long time coming (and probably taken for granted by anyone under 25), but now that we're there, there's no going back.
Re: After Credentials
#6One could easily amend this to include "After Perceptions". As a young geek, I was often passed over because I didn't look like I could do the job. It started with little league and continued on through high school and into the work place. I even quit one of my better jobs because a slicker looking but far less talented peer was promoted into what should have been my job. No more. As a mild mannered adult geek, I sti…
> until I open my mouth and show them
On a complete tangent, this is one of the perks of living in a foreign country if you speak the language well - instant recognition that you have mastered their language, and that you must therefore not be a complete moron.
The downside of this in Europe, for me, has been moving about 4 hours away (absolutely nothing in the US, in terms of distance) and completely losing this advantage.
Re: After Credentials
#7I think that in the United States a lot of the pressure on students to succeed on entrance exams are in terms of getting into more prestigious schools has more to do with desired prestige and college experience than future success. Few parents would unequivocally claim that going to Harvard over Big State University = more success for their kids. For parents and their kids I think its more of matter of wanting the prestige and college experience that's possible at Harvard.
Re: After Credentials
#8PG claims that a shift towards smaller companies results in people being judged on their performance rather than based on factors which do rather poor jobs of predicting said performance; my experience with tarsnap indicates otherwise.
I have a small number of customers -- somewhere between 10% and 20% -- who are using tarsnap based on a recommendation from another tarsnap user; but the vast majority of tarsnap users signed up based on some other factor which is at best predictive of the quality of tarsnap. Reasons I've heard include:
* I am the FreeBSD Security Officer,
* They find my blog to be interesting and well-written,
* I have a doctorate from Oxford,
* They like the fact that I made the tarsnap client source code available, and
* I beat them on a mathematics competition 10 years ago.
Yes, credentials are an imperfect way of predicting quality; but are they any worse than the marketing and luck which the market introduces?
Re: After Credentials
#9If large organisations are less efficient:
- why do they survive?
- if they survive despite all, why do we permit them?
If the market was regulated to set a cap on the size of a single company's workforce (or some other metric, perhaps market capitalisation), we'd also avoid the 'too big to fail' problem we have at the moment.
Not to mention quasi-monopolistic practices like large chains killing off small local competitor with an externally-funded price war (then raising prices once the competition disappears).
Is it that we need the largest companies for some large-scale activities (chip fabs, aircraft manafacture), or that they can be efficient at scale (fast food, wal-mart)?
Would the world/market be a better place if companies were forced to fission at a certain size?
Re: After Credentials
#10I think Paul is treading ideas with some interesting implications for him, personally. He is the head of an organization that funds companies on the basis of a written & oral exam, whose principal selling point is the transmission of "credentials" upon the kids they pick. Part of it is the kids' merit, but part of it is YC's past success. People go to YC for many of the same reasons people went to Stanford -- past se…
Some of what you say is true, but it's not true that the principal value of YC is the brand name. The YC brand has little weight to the customers of a startup, and without those it quickly dies. YC's principal value is the advice we (and the other YC startups) offer.
The part you're right about is that "admission" to YC is structurally a lot like college or grad school admissions. The difference, though, is that our choices are immediately tested. College admissions officers do not, as far as I know, follow up on the careers of the people they accept and see how they did. Whereas if we pick a bad group, that fact will immediately be thrust in our face. This causes us to work very hard to try to pick the best people.
It was being in a sense a colleague of college admissions officers that made me think about such topics. We're the next bottleneck downstream from them, and it quickly became clear to us what a bad job they were doing: