The irony is that universities are probably best at producing founders when they're not explicitly trying to produce founders. Teach difficult things, put smart people together, give them access to equipment and enough free time to build weird stuff. The hard part institutionally is that "we gave students fewer assignments and left them alone" is much harder to sell than an Innovation Center with a nice sign on the building...
How Universities Should Prepare Founders
71–80 of 333 posts
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#72One thing I agree with and one I disagree with: - I've always thought it was silly my university had an Entrepreneurship major. Starting a company is probably much better achieved by studying something technical or going deep into a problem space and seeing a problem there, not a generic "entrepreneurship" curriculum. - I think startups starting as side projects was more of an artifact of the early YC days where star…
I think side projects still matter, but maybe in a slightly different way now. They don't necessarily have to become the company themselves. They can be how you discover the problem, test an approach, meet the people you eventually build the company with
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#73PG has become pretentious and doesn’t allow people to disagree with him. Anyone following him on X can confirm that, where he chooses to reply to only certain replies with weaker arguments or just refuting the strong ones..
Don’t meet your heroes I guess…
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#74One thing I agree with and one I disagree with: - I've always thought it was silly my university had an Entrepreneurship major. Starting a company is probably much better achieved by studying something technical or going deep into a problem space and seeing a problem there, not a generic "entrepreneurship" curriculum. - I think startups starting as side projects was more of an artifact of the early YC days where star…
> Increasingly I feel like the next generation of startups is more capital intensive and requires more time commitment from deeply technical talent. Would that be more like other engineering fields? An interesting comparison would be aerospace, for example – it took 15 years to build the first A380, and tens of thousands of indispensable technical niches.
You probably aren't building the next Airbus in a dorm room, but you might build a weird propulsion prototype, simulation tool, control system, manufacturing technique that eventually becomes the reason a company exists
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#75(Disclosure: I'm getting a PhD in CS now) > The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it Funny enough, this is why I think a PhD is undervalued by many. You spend years focused on a single area, sometimes pivoting topics, and getting hands on experience with operating solo on the outskirts of a particular field. The overall point of the degree is you learn how to learn. The…
Maybe the failure mode isn't the PhD itself, but environments where publishing becomes the objective rather than a byproduct of getting unusually good at understanding and building things
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#76(Disclosure: I'm getting a PhD in CS now) > The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it Funny enough, this is why I think a PhD is undervalued by many. You spend years focused on a single area, sometimes pivoting topics, and getting hands on experience with operating solo on the outskirts of a particular field. The overall point of the degree is you learn how to learn. The…
In hindsight it was quite early in my career, but a bit over 20 years ago I felt burnt out in tech and wanted to try something new. I was share trading quite a bit so thought maybe I'd become a stock broker (online trading was only just starting to become a thing, so being a broker was still a real job at the time!). I finished the degree and got qualified, and while I loved the learning I discovered I hated the indu…
I wouldn't sell yourself short on the last one... the comment itself is a decent example of it :)
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#77> Merely eliminating [homework[ for a few weeks resulted in two trillion dollar companies. Imagine what the US GDP would be if reading period at Harvard were twice as long. This idea that "very large company" -> "productive economy" needs to die.
Also, just logically considering hundreds of thousands of students have been part of Harvard reading periods over the years, and there are two unicorn events where reading period may have played some small part in the formation of a trillion dollar company, I'd imagine that if the reading period at Harvard were twice as long the US GDP would likely be approximately exactly the same as it is now.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's telling of the fact that we don't see most, or even 10%, of what gets posted here. There's far too much to read. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I don't expect you to read everything, but your choice of what to call out is still telling. If you truly think this is the sort of comment that needs direct intervention, I'd politely suggest you should set aside 2-3 hours per week to read comments on /new posts. To be clear: I do not have the time or energy to back this up statistically, but my experience is that you are substantially more likely to choose to get i…
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Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#7999% of university students will never start a company. 99% of those who do will close down without making any measurable difference to the world. I think the world would be better off if the universities actively discouraged the idea of starting companies. Those few who really burn for the idea might do it anyway, and might be more likely to succeed.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#80One thing I agree with and one I disagree with: - I've always thought it was silly my university had an Entrepreneurship major. Starting a company is probably much better achieved by studying something technical or going deep into a problem space and seeing a problem there, not a generic "entrepreneurship" curriculum. - I think startups starting as side projects was more of an artifact of the early YC days where star…
> Increasingly I feel like the next generation of startups is more capital intensive and requires more time commitment from deeply technical talent. Would that be more like other engineering fields? An interesting comparison would be aerospace, for example – it took 15 years to build the first A380, and tens of thousands of indispensable technical niches.
I have no idea how you could think a startup is comparable to a project that ended up costing 25 billion dollars to devolop and involved something like 15k engineers. It's began development in 1988 and the first flight wasn't until 2005.
I want to ask you, what do you think a startup is?