51–60 of 66 posts
Actually, does anyone have data on the average student debt of MIT grads. To start a company, Even with a million $ seed, the founders can take home around 80k. Will that be sufficient to afford the monthly debt payments ? This might be a huge factor for grads while making the choice to startup or join a big company. A large company can at least guarantee a consistent loan repayment schedule. It's immensely difficult…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some people might do better (even financially) staying at more stable companies. I would venture to say that MOST people will do better financially if they stay at a large, established company. A new grad might think their 0.05% equity stake will make them rich, but most startups fail, and even the ones that don't are rarely homeruns. Established companies with deep pockets often pay better, and grant their employe…
Getting hired by Google / Apple / Facebook isn't exactly easy. If you don't have the required credentials, getting into the startup world suddenly seems more appealing I think.
Sam is obviously not a disinterested party here. Don't join a big company- start a new investment for him to participate in or join one of his existing investments and help to make it a success. But in my experience nothing opens doors for you like having solid experience at a well known and well respected company. If you put in 5 years at Google, Apple, etc. you will find it to be much easier to start (or to get hir…
If you put in 5 years at Google, Apple, etc. you will find it to be much easier to start (or to get hired at) a start-up than if you had joined a start-up right away. Like Zuck? Drew Houston? It's easy to rattle off a dozen names who wouldn't have started their company if they'd worked at a big company for 5 years. The correct answer is "figure out what works for you." And stop being cynical. It's really crummy to se…
Like Instacart (Amazon), Parse (Google), or Zenter (Amazon & GoDaddy)?
Or going beyond YC, Twitter (Google), FourSquare (Google), Instagram (Google), Quora (Facebook), Asana (Facebook), Cloudera (Google, Yahoo, Facebook), YouTube (PayPal), Yelp (PayPal), Palantir (PayPal), SpaceX (PayPal), Tesla (PayPal), WhatsApp (Yahoo), StackOverflow (Microsoft), Android (Apple), EBay (Apple), NeXT (Apple), Nest (Apple), Amazon (D.E. Shaw), Oracle (Ampex), and Apple (Hewlett-Packard)?
Empirically, having a "brand name" on your resume isn't necessary to found a great company, but it helps a lot. The companies above comprise almost all of the modern tech industry. The ones missing are almost all founded by founders recently out of a brand-name college or grad school: Google (Stanford), Microsoft (Harvard), Facebook (Harvard), Viaweb/YC (Harvard), DropBox (MIT), SnapChat (Stanford).
Sam is obviously not a disinterested party here. Don't join a big company- start a new investment for him to participate in or join one of his existing investments and help to make it a success. But in my experience nothing opens doors for you like having solid experience at a well known and well respected company. If you put in 5 years at Google, Apple, etc. you will find it to be much easier to start (or to get hir…
I don't disagree about self interest playing a role, consciously or unconsciously. But there is some of the tent revialist's 'true belief' in the sermonizer and most likely many of the audience are 'already saved.' The be startup entrepreneur meme is so prevalent that there could easily have been people in the audience who planned on applying to YC while filling out their MIT application. In other words, I suspect th…
> "Alabama bumpkins at cow colleges"
Perhaps I am wrong, but this seems like horrible advice. For example, while working for a big co, you could come across a problem that you want to solve with a startup. If you are a kid just out of college, you probably don't have enough experience to work on anything but a consumer facing startup - and those have very low odds of success, despite a few big unicorns we all know about
I don't think you can make a blanket statement about it, but there is a good reason to work for a small company or startup: you get to write more of the stack. At large companies, you often end up working on a tiny piece of a module, and then you work you way up. You don't learn much that way. There are companies that try to give you more control, but no one is going to throw you into the deep end at those companies.…
At a big company, you write a tiny piece of software that has to fit a number of constraints that have evolved over years. Things like "This has to work in Chinese" and "This has to work in Arabic" and "This can't be O(N^2), you'll burn a million dollars in CPUs" and "This will crash the whole server if something goes wrong" and "This is a race condition. You're going to have a helluva time debugging that" and "Nobody else will be able to read this in a month". It can take you years of trial and error to amass that experience on your own, or you may never if (as is likely) your startup never takes off. If, ten years into your career, all you know how to do is cobble open-source programs together, you have a big problem on your hands.
At a startup, you get to build the whole stack yourself. You face problems like "What database should I use to store this data? How can I measure and improve its performance? What's the best front-end technology to deliver the data to the client? How do I setup my build?" So you learn how to, very quickly, get something up and running from nothing. If, ten years into your career, all you know how to do is make little tweaks to already-existing programs, you have a big problem on your hands.
You really need both, but I would recommend doing the big company first. (Disclaimer: I did it the other way around, doing startups first.) Why? Because the big company also gives you a brand-name boost and some context about what decision-makers in the industry consider important, which makes it much more likely you'll pick a good startup when you move to do that. While if you screw up in picking an initial startup, it can be very hard to un-do that and qualify yourself for big-company jobs later in life.
I'm not someone that drinks the startup koolaid by any means, but I agree with them that working for a large company has very limited value if your goal is to start your own company. I worked for one of the biggest tech companies as a developer, and I learned no real skills in my tenure there. My responsibilities were just so narrowly focused and any knowledge I gained was specific to that codebase, which is not usef…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't disagree about self interest playing a role, consciously or unconsciously. But there is some of the tent revialist's 'true belief' in the sermonizer and most likely many of the audience are 'already saved.' The be startup entrepreneur meme is so prevalent that there could easily have been people in the audience who planned on applying to YC while filling out their MIT application. In other words, I suspect th…
> "Alabama bumpkins at cow colleges" I'm not sure what you're suggesting here, exactly, but I am sure that I don't like it. We have enough problems with ageism and sexism in this industry, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at regionalism.
The surface text is that MIT students are better positioned to succeed at YC than people from more pedestrian socio-economic backgrounds. Altman isn't directly recruiting at community college students for reasonable reasons [by which I am not saying that there aren't potential founders among community college students, but that it is easier to optimize on eliminating false positives among MIT students than among students at less selective institutions]. You're on your own for the hermeneutics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Alabama bumpkins at cow colleges" I'm not sure what you're suggesting here, exactly, but I am sure that I don't like it. We have enough problems with ageism and sexism in this industry, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at regionalism.
It gives me faith in humanity that someone can be offended by a phrase that they admittedly don't understand the meaning of or point of reference. The surface text is that MIT students are better positioned to succeed at YC than people from more pedestrian socio-economic backgrounds. Altman isn't directly recruiting at community college students for reasonable reasons [by which I am not saying that there aren't poten…