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How Universities Should Prepare Founders

paulgraham.com

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Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#321

Post by ant6n »

testaccount28 wrote: post #308
ant6n wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large companies are more like proof that much concentration of wealth and power has occurred.

in the examples i can think of, this happens mostly because the company provides a product or service that is valuable to many, and shares the surplus with consumers. i am thinking about companies like microsoft, apple, netflix, google, stripe, walmart, costco, albertson's, starbucks, sysco. what are the companies you are thinking about?

Microsoft, Google, Walmart, Standard Oil, Railways of old…

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#322

Post by jltsiren »

maleldil wrote: post #161
locknitpicker wrote: post #129

Earlier 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.

You can't generalize from your personal experience to the rest of academia. There is far too much variation between fields, institutions, and countries as well as over time. ML in particular is an extreme outlier due to amount of money and business interests involved. Your experience would already have been quite different in a less fashionable subfield of CS.

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#326

Post by alephnerd »

chrisgd wrote: post #301
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #294

I guess one thing universities have to decide is how important having founders is to them. PG talks about how Harvard has more founders than Yale and Princeton, but I don't really see that as a good or bad thing for any of those schools. There probably aren't infinite good ideas that can be successful at any one time. If you encourage more people to become founders then they aren't going to go into other places where…

Anecdotally, I think there are more rich children at Harvard than Yale (more legacies, more donations to get their child in, etc). Those people have more time to take a risk as a founder than non-wealthy.

Other way around from personal experience. Harvard is louder because Harvard and alums from middle class backgrounds like I beat the drum.

Harvard has also offered non-traditional open-entry bachelor degrees for over a century and whose endowment became the precursor for WGBH and therefore PBS, and those of us from other schools don't treat them any different. The only other ivies with large dedicated non-trad programs are Columbia (Asimov was a product of that) and Penn.

Yale, Dartmouth, and to a lesser extent Princeton is blue blood af.

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#327

Post by zx8080 »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #294

I guess one thing universities have to decide is how important having founders is to them. PG talks about how Harvard has more founders than Yale and Princeton, but I don't really see that as a good or bad thing for any of those schools. There probably aren't infinite good ideas that can be successful at any one time. If you encourage more people to become founders then they aren't going to go into other places where…

> Harvard has more founders

Rich parents/families are the actual founders, via their children. Harvard is because mostly rich can study there (and drop out at will).

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#328

Post by Swankivo »

dofm wrote: post #156
Swankivo wrote: post #65

Agreed. A university is a place for learning how to ask questions, and it runs on curiosity. Starting a company is just a means. When there is something you are curious about, or a problem you want solved, a startup is one of the ways to go after it. I went to university in Korea and I'm on my third startup. I watched startup clubs, government grant programs, and university-run programs all operate with the stated go…

> 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 q…

Fair point. I don't know the cost of higher education in the US or the UK well.

In Korea tuition itself is much cheaper, scholarships cover a much wider range of students, and the interest on student loans is noticeably lower. That may be why there is a bit more room to breathe.

That said, I agree that to survive in the Korean job market you also need concrete skills. I just think that for those skills to be learned deeply and then developed further, you need the ability to question and to doubt.

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#329

Post by chii »

koe123 wrote: post #89
golly_ned wrote: post #66

> 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.

> This idea that "very large company" -> "productive economy" needs to die. I am economically naive, but I also have never understood this argument. I asked a Spanish friend what Spain needed, he said “more big companies”. Is it because a big company provides you something closer to a monopoly, and can do so internationally?

it's a crude approximation to economies of scale. However, big doesn't always mean economies of scale because efficiency tends to drop when growing big, unless the head works hard to ensure it isnt bloating. Unfortunately, sometimes these managers (i.e., non-founding managers) rather have a bigger fiefdom rather than a better/more efficient company.

Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders

#330

Post by oliculipolicula »

PaulHoule wrote: post #247

I like 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. I work at a major research university now but spent a lot of time working for various startups. I felt PhD training was great for being involved in startups, I mean, eit…

Tbh I'd rather see paganist cells take on those mantles, not universities.

For one, they are unlikely to be co-opted by rationalist Empires run by navel-gazing non-enbies waving a sceptre of _secret-non-secrets_ (perhaps better unpacked as "these friends of ours don't look/sound like they know better but as it turns out they do")

High priestesses (in general) seem to have other means of allocating secrets/resources; that'd be where the fork shall start I wager

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02377-9

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