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How Universities Should Prepare Founders

paulgraham.com

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Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#221

Post by 59percentmore »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #199
dofm wrote: post #152

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 job…

> 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. Empirically, student free time grew for…

I was going to say, "You might not have noticed, but it has been the 21st century for a quarter-century." However, you clearly did notice, so I'm not sure why you bothered to make this post. It's like you came to a conclusion, realized your empirical data was empirically out-of-date, but decided to press on anyhow. Rather than elucidate the subject, you just exposed your biases.

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#222

Post by neomantra »

I am more interested in the question of how Y-Combinator has changed Stanford over the last two decades rather than the question of how Stanford should change to accommodate Y-Combinator.

Notice there is no mention of ethics, philosophy, or human connection, except maybe Zuck being a psych major. Do we really want the future of education to be an incubator pipeline?

That said I wholehearted agree with the second half of this paragraph: "In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects."

For the first part, I suspect that money, and the safety net it provides, is a bigger impediment to entrepreneurship than its collegiate advocacy. It's hard to start a company or join a fledgling one when you are staring at an immense debt.

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#223

Post by CompoundEyes »

Some of my best output has happened during life’s “reading periods”.

Working on something other than what I’m “should to be doing”…because an adjacent or completely unrelated thread HAD to be pulled…and then a period of “off task” deadline be damned irrational monomania…it’s bliss and always turns out well. I’ve learned to trust this.

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#224

Post by diego_moita »

Rich people love to do this.

They love to "teach" how everyone else in the world should help rich people get richer. And their favorite trick is to sell this solution to their own problems as a "win-win", a benefit for everyone.

It is the standard in the discourse of every oligarch and billionaire: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Ellison, Altman,... : "everyone will be happier if they make me more money".

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#225

Post by zer00eyz »

zigman1 wrote: post #203
dofm wrote: post #152

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 job…

> This is shockingly vapid and wishy-washy even for PG He has been like this for a while now. His last few essays are simply advertisement for a startup accelerator. Conveniently, he also owns one of them.

30 years ago you needed PG / YC to have a startup. Hardware was expensive, bandwidth wasn't ubiquitous, there wasn't a massive breadth of libraries and lessons online of what to do and not do.

None of that is true today. And though its is possible to build another unicorn there is not a really good reason to do that any more.

Learning about taxes, business structures (CoOp's any one), HR (how not to get sued, how BAD hr means the IRS comes to get you), reading a cap table, reading a contract, accounting are all skills that a solid tech team needs to "build a business". Marketing, Customer acquisition, Customer retention, Customer Service are all places where most recent grads might not have the skills to "do the needful"

LLM's have compressed the early build out stage. The tech portion, getting from zero to one is now partly trivial. If you are going to build out a niche business that does 1-10 million ARR now is the time. Thats not a product at a scale the at PG and other VC's are really interested in, but it is possible to run a project that size with a very small multi-talented team. They need all those other non technical skills to make it happen.

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#226

Post by singpolyma3 »

dofm wrote: post #152

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 job…

> 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.

I agree with this, but also people in this sort of situation aren't socially situated to become startup founders so probably not the target of this?

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#228

Post by cushychicken »

What about the status quo is broken?

YC seems to be serving its function perfectly well, if you think of it's function as: "start many venture funded SaaS businesses, with the goal of a small number achieving Unicorn or bigger exits".

Stanford, Harvard, and other elite schools seem to be filling YC's applicant pipeline really handily with smart undergraduates. In a sense, YC is kind of like biz school for startup founders.

The path I see unaddressed: what's the development track for an SMB founder?

YC has the startup/tech company development track pretty well on lock. Traditional MBA programs have the "bigco advancement" track sewn up. How do I learn how to start a small business?

I'd love to eventually start an EE / embedded business on the scale of 5-10 people, ideally selling a niche product to other technical businesses. I have no idea where to start here.

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#230

Post by alistairSH »

neomantra wrote: post #222

I am more interested in the question of how Y-Combinator has changed Stanford over the last two decades rather than the question of how Stanford should change to accommodate Y-Combinator. Notice there is no mention of ethics, philosophy, or human connection, except maybe Zuck being a psych major. Do we really want the future of education to be an incubator pipeline? That said I wholehearted agree with the second half…

I had a similar thought... starting a business is risky. And health insurance (among other things) is expensive. Once the VC class starts pushing for health care reform (among other things), maybe I'll take what they want seriously.
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