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Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

ycombinator.com

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Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#52
post #6

This is basically ensuring YC starts to get more absolute top graduates. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as the default path for top people in the USA. All other career paths are for people that want to take the risk of ending up in a 50 year assembly line. This is probably good for society If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.

I feel like being "the best and brightest" is quite orthogonal to having what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

I also feel like highly intelligent people might quite reasonably decide for themselves that they shouldn't have to take on that kind of risk to get what they want out of life.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#53
post #6

This is basically ensuring YC starts to get more absolute top graduates. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as the default path for top people in the USA. All other career paths are for people that want to take the risk of ending up in a 50 year assembly line. This is probably good for society If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.

Having done this, and acknowledging the fuzzy definition of "rich" etc - going through YC after graduating is a great career move. You have to do everything yourself so you learn a lot. About business, about a specific industry, about programming, whatever. You make connections. But unless you walk an absolute golden path (hey it happens), > 90% chance you don't get rich. > 99.9% chance you won't get rich by 30.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's 1000x better than a career and you believe it's achievable, why haven't you done it yet?

why do you think i havent

It seems like you would've mentioned your own success rather than those around you when talking about how feasible it is. It's a lot easier to say something is achievable when you've done it yourself.

And again, I think you would've simply responded "I have" rather than ask me what I think. Obviously I could be wrong.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#56
post #32
post #21

To what extent is YC's current strategy a form of "cookie-licking"? I.e. capture a small fraction of every plausible startup created by the next generation of students?

100% at this point. The industry's leading AI for start-up ideas has run out of AI for _____ suggestions. It was pretty obvious they were scraping the bottom of the barrel a month ago when I made this list from their current batch: Acrely — AI for HVAC administration Aden — AI for ERP operations AgentHub — AI for agent simulation and evaluation Agentin AI — AI for enterprise agents AgentMail — AI for agent email infr…

This makes me want to reach for a tool that definitely has no AI whatsoever involved.

Specifically, the one described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287474.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#58
post #44

If the funding is available immediately (not just an immediate commitment for funding once they start a batch), would it address the following problem I've run into a few times? In the last year alone, I've had to bow out of co-founding two promising startups with good biz co-founders, because first-year MBA students wanted to finish their degree before they sought funding. Two ways funding could help: 1. I couldn't…

Yes, I think it would.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#59

I loved YC and can't recommend it enough. But if you're going to start a company, please consider working at another company first, even if briefly. (And make it a company you respect and want to emulate.) The amount of wheels you won't have to reinvent if you work at another company are astronomical. From engineering practices to sales to management, there's a lot you don't want to innovate on. Starting a company is…

This is partially why the average age of a successful founder is late 30s to early 40s at the time of founding.

There’s a lot of focus in the media and in accelerators on the 22 year old with a dream, but it’s nice to have a real adult in charge when the stakes are high.

Not to mention, if you have no work experience, you have no idea what problems are worth solving. So you end up with junk startup ideas from the latest fad / hype cycle.

But a senior partner at a law firm knows the pain points of being a lawyer and they can now start a company to fix them.

And a senior quant at a hedge fund might have some good ideas for automating tedious back office processes.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#60
post #6

This is basically ensuring YC starts to get more absolute top graduates. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as the default path for top people in the USA. All other career paths are for people that want to take the risk of ending up in a 50 year assembly line. This is probably good for society If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.

> If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad. I am 30, I am rich by most measures of wealth and probably in the minds of most college grads. I worked in various big tech companies (incl stints in FAANG) after graduating with my BS in CS. A lot of my peers did do startups, and they had varying degrees of success. But almost everyone who went…

By rich I mean like 25 million +, not 3 million
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