Instrumental education is less effective at producing innovation and utility than is basic education.
Forgetting this is (and has been) destructive to universities.
How Universities Should Prepare Founders
141–150 of 333 posts
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think universities should focus on academic studies, not as a pipeline to YC. No, they should focus on providing investors the resources they want to get richer. Investors are the only people who matter in the world. Academic studies and knowledge are literally a worthless waste of time, compared to the investments of investors.
I assume this is satire. I hope it is, at least.
I guess it being on HN does tweak the sensor calibration a bit.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think universities should focus on academic studies, not as a pipeline to YC. No, they should focus on providing investors the resources they want to get richer. Investors are the only people who matter in the world. Academic studies and knowledge are literally a worthless waste of time, compared to the investments of investors.
> Academic studies and knowledge are literally a worthless waste of time Not everything is about money
Compared to the investments of investors who invest, literally nothing is as important as VCs in the world, not even doctors! Like what would humans even be without money? Probably poor, and who wants to be poor?
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#144Mark Zuckerberg was good at programming, but he was a psychology major, not a CS major. "For Zuckerberg, the school’s major selling point was its Latin program. The current computer science concentrator originally intended to study classics at Harvard."[0] There's a book called Founders at Work by one J. Livingston. I'd suggest replacing Zuckerberg with an incredible founder who was interviewed in that book, Steve Pe…
Indeed, pg might be familiar with that author.
He dedicated an entire essay to her: https://paulgraham.com/jessica.html
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#145[dead]
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#146I really liked my modern Bachelor's called Code & Context, it focussed on creating potential founders. It combined coding, design and entrepreneurship. I felt like the idea behind this major was being able to go from idea / problem to finished product sold by a company. The three main fields are very related: - Coding: How to actually code and build the solution. - Design: How to identify problems and design solution…
Hi Bryan, thanks for digging up that gem! As prof, I‘ve been thinking a lot about how to modernize our Information Systems Bachelor‘s here in Berlin, Germany. Clearly, the old model has become obsolete in the Age of AI. In my own (tech heavy) courses I‘m increasingly weaving product into the curriculum - eg, how to empathize with users, and how to collaborate in a dev team. I‘d love to pick your brain on your experiences in your Bachelor‘s!
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#147A University isn't a institution to serve the economic system
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#148I don’t necessarily disagree with this but is it the universities job to prepare founders at the expense of everyone else? Under his proposal the motivated founders succeed and everyone else is a loser. This is a very VC focused lens that ignores all the other possible outcomes a human could pursue that are valuable. Established corps need workers, unis need new teachers, hospitals need doctors, etc. So we should let…
Article also ignore’s that very few founders succeed
Has anyone ever plotted the lifespan of YC companies from each cohort?
Most of them end up dead…
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#149> Startups succeed or fail based on how much customers like the product. Customers don't care what the founders studied in college. So founders are free to study whatever they want, as long as they get good at building things.
Being able to build things isn't important. You need to build things that make the customer happy. Building the wrong things really well is the most typical failure mode I see in technology leadership. It doesn't matter how "good" something is if the customer doesn't give a shit about it.
The simplest suggestion I can make to noob founders is to do part of the product or technology ugly on purpose. Give yourself permission to not be perfect. You may find a similar practice in warehouses and on construction sites. Whenever a new piece of equipment arrives, the manager or foreman will take out a blade and put a nice big scratch on the machine while the team observes. Dethroning the shiny new things as quickly a possible should be the goal. You don't want a bunch of weird ideological gods jerking your chain around all day. The customer is already quite the handful.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#150I don’t necessarily disagree with this but is it the universities job to prepare founders at the expense of everyone else? Under his proposal the motivated founders succeed and everyone else is a loser. This is a very VC focused lens that ignores all the other possible outcomes a human could pursue that are valuable. Established corps need workers, unis need new teachers, hospitals need doctors, etc. So we should let…
Article also ignore’s that very few founders succeed Has anyone ever plotted the lifespan of YC companies from each cohort? Most of them end up dead…
N=1 but my dead VC funded YC company taught me more about the ins and outs of what it takes to run a complex successful engineering and sales operation than any number of years in business school or grinding in consultancies.
YMMV you do have to have a different less nihilistic mindset but it really is a bit of a Neo in the Matrix moment because it lets you see through a bit of the corporate veneer to see the complex mess of personal and group foibles that run our major corporations.
In the end it also ends up making you a 10x more effective worker if that’s where you end up even if just to protect your mental health by being able to explain what’s going on.