It's not in universities interest to prepare ideal startup founders. They are not supposed to be preparatory schools.
How Universities Should Prepare Founders
171–180 of 333 posts
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#172[deleted]
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#173On the statement regarding the students of universities,
> we get them next. We're like grad school.
Really, my bs meter started going off when I saw this kind of posturing, a company positioning itself as a sort of grad school. Then again, grad schools and universities impress me less with each passing year as they transform themselves to be more like companies. And also, thank you to yc for offering a forum where I feel comfortable enough to post a contrary opinion. That’s better than can be said for some universities these days.
Maybe I don’t disagree after all—or maybe if I do disagree with that point, maybe it’s just not that important to defend the unique role of universities these days as the universities themselves are just continuing to forfeit that on their own.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#174I 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…
> This is a very VC focused lens
Just like mostly everything he writes about.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#175Building a solid technical foundation before rushing into a startup is crucial. The best founders I know focused on solving deep infrastructure problems first rather than just chasing trends.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And if possible for way, way, way less money. Enough universities in Europe that do this. I am thinking of studying maths at the German distance university. I forgot the name. It would mean that I neef to speak good German. I might just do that too
There's also the Open University in the UK — an extraordinary institution. AFAIK it's also accredited in the USA. (I have been thinking about an OU degree for a second act)
the OU now costs the same as cambridge!
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#177Been thinking about this for years
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (...) a byproduct of getting unusually good at understanding and building things A PhD is not about getting good at understanding something, let alone "unusually good". It's about being able to explore an uncharted area with little to no help, and write down your learnings so that those that come after you can build upon your work.
In an ideal world, sure. In reality, a PhD[1] is about publishing papers in the hope that you learn something along the way. [1] My experience in ML in 2026.
Your role is to publish papers so your PI is able to get grants, and to network, so the lab profile gets better known in the research community, and then as a more senior grad student you can help write grant applications, and you can build a track record of mentoring (e.g. master students). At the end of the day, you want to demonstrate that you can come up with projects and pursue the research up until publication in a top-tier venue, and the ultimate goal (from the point of view of hiring committees) is obtaining prestige and funding for the university.
If you plan to go to industry, your incentives are somewhat misaligned with your PI. In that case you want to pursue multiple internships and getting networked with top companies in your field, and demonstrating practical output, well-released code, demonstrated downstream value for followup projects etc.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#179This 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 job…
I don't know how a university could package this, or package "experience" or. "building", etc. I went to college, did engineering and also did economics and did "entrepreneurship". The last 2 were useful not in a sense that they unlocked anything, but I was already starting a business by my second or third year, that I run to this day. I took the courses because I felt I needed them as I bootstrapped. Went on to buil…
Right but what percentage of people doing any given class end up specialising in it?
It's not their job to "inject" it but universities are going to have to grapple with the notion that if they want to keep admitting students, then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses.
So some truly functional support for self-employment, startups, small business working generally seems inevitable. If you're going to persuade students to step out of the job market for up to four years and take on vast debt to hand over then I think pastoral care includes providing the framework to teach them to fend for themselves when the jobs in the brochure don't turn up.
Concrete support, rather than "make yourself ready for something like YC".
(Beyond that I actually think prospectuses should be more closely regulated for what they can and cannot suggest is a likely employment outcome. Because at the moment, prospectuses are aimed at kids and are full of misleading content about how likely they are to get a job.)
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there's much value in college anymore outside of as a class signifier, and most schools are signifying that you are not in the right social class.
College is the last and only place most kids (United States) will ever be academically challenged. It would be scary to live in a world where this is not available.
The high rate of college degrees is a historical anomaly, and of course it's a sham. Most are not truly intellectually challenged in some deep formative ways who get some easy BA diploma to then do some generic administrative MS Office point and click job. It's just due to education inflation, where now everyone is pushed though high school regardless of what they know, so it lost its signaling value. In a sane world, tertiary education would be much smaller, for those who actually need it and have aptitude. It would avoid wasting so many years.