How Universities Should Prepare Founders

This is shockingly vapid and wishy-washy even for PG.

Leaving this weird, rather Valley-specific, even YC-specific, navel-gazing definition of "founder" aside, universities should do what they promise to do for their students. And if possible for way, way, way less money.

He seems quite out of touch with the level of economic hardship involved in being a student; a huge number of students already work a couple of jobs and are navigating small businesses, especially here in the UK where he apparently now lives. They aren't going to have enough "free time" to play with a "project" even if a bit more is made available by loosening the curriculum.

If any change is necessary it should be that every university student has access to actual education and ongoing (post-graduation) support to start a real, not hypothetical business, rather than leaving them in this "ripe for YC picking" state where they have "done projects" but don't really have any awareness of business.

If students leave university immediately able to run their own businesses, understand how to bootstrap, be closer to self-funding etc., that leaves them in a stronger position than if they can show they have done stuff but need an external startup meat grinder to get them anywhere. Especially since the job market is being screwed the world over.

But YC doesn't want its people to be that independent. It wants them persuadable, overconfident and desperate to sign up to space camp.

It's nice that Y Combinator cherry picks the best students from the ivy league universities. But of course universities need to serve all students and most universities aren't in Silicon Valley (ivy or otherwise). A lot of students might not be starting companies or they might do something entirely reasonable such as taking a traditional job as a doctor, a lawyer, or even as a teacher. And quite many of them flow into the regular job market or pivot to become artisanal bakers or whatever.

But I agree universities can be more open to some of their students pursuing a research career in companies rather than in universities and that they have an important role to play in the transition from one to the other.

Here in Berlin there are local discussions about the lack of engagement of local universities with the startup world here vs. the relative success with which that is done in e.g. Munich and other German cities which have a longer tradition of university spinoffs as startups. There are big differences between universities in Germany. There are also a few private universities in Berlin that are more successful. For example, my office is in a building that hosts the Code university and they definitely have a track record of churning out successful startups that get invested straight out of their program. But the big public universities seem a bit more hands off. I've heard local investors complain that they have more contact with universities elsewhere in Germany than the local ones. They are calling this out as a thing that needs fixing.

> Agreed. A university is a place for learning how to ask questions, and it runs on curiosity.

This is a rather oversimplified, old-fashioned take on the purpose of university.

University in the 21st century is surely a straightforward high-stakes gamble, particularly in the UK and the USA: can I risk taking three or four years away from the job market, and go into life-changing, multi-decade debt, in order to gain qualifications that give me access to higher-than-minimum-wage jobs that I can get no other way, and will there still be enough of the kind of jobs mentioned in the prospectus at the end of it?

It is something that in most cases you can't afford to do and you also can't afford not to do.

I think PG is very out of touch.

> VC funded YC company taught me more ... really is a bit of a Neo in the Matrix moment ... ends up making you a 10x more effective corporate worker if that’s where you end up

No doubt there are learnings worth a lifetime, and changes that alter careers. You hope, the sense of superiority the experience seems to breed is not merely a coping mechanism, but an exercise in positive self-image [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34053801

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