Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes

blakemasters.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 26 posts

Re: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes

#11

Post by dm8 »

vidar wrote: post #2

"It’s like getting a degree at Berkeley. Okay. It’s not Stanford. You can a complicated story about how you had to do it because your parents had a big mortgage or something. But it’s a hard negative signal to get past." I agree that YCombinator is head and shoulders above its competitors but is Stanford really considered that much better than Berkeley? Honest question.

I believe in terms of entrepreneurial culture on campus, Stanford is slightly ahead of Cal. However, I don't think there is a difference in academic quality. Lot of Stanford CS professors are Berkeley alums and vice versa for Cal.

Stanford definitely has leg up in terms of Startups. Especially the dot com era. At Cal we don't have equivalent of Google or Yahoo. However, Startups are just one dimension of innovation in technology. Berkeley can easily boast some of the groundbreaking research (not just engineering but overall sciences) during last 100 years.

Disclosure: UC Berkeley Alum here.

Re: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes

#12

Post by pchristensen »

Simpletoon wrote: post #6

Paul Graham: "$50m companies innovate. Mine did. We basically invented the web app. We were doing complex stuff in LISP when everyone else was doing CGI scripts. And, quite frankly, $50m is no small thing. " Of course, no one uses CGI now. It's all complex stuff done in LISP. Innovation is amazing, isn't it?

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt

That's more advanced stuff than most web apps or frameworks do today. If viaweb had been done now instead of 15 years ago, they probably would have spun off lots of open source projects.

Re: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes

#13

Post by dm8 »

karpathy wrote: post #4
vidar wrote: post #2

"It’s like getting a degree at Berkeley. Okay. It’s not Stanford. You can a complicated story about how you had to do it because your parents had a big mortgage or something. But it’s a hard negative signal to get past." I agree that YCombinator is head and shoulders above its competitors but is Stanford really considered that much better than Berkeley? Honest question.

That quote was the highlight of the class :) He's not only playing the audience-- In an earlier class (class 3 or so), Peter Thiel justified his views on Stanford vs. Berkeley based on their track record with creating successful companies. Maybe someone can find the exact quote, but he said that between the two, vast majority of successful companies start at Stanford and that he's only aware of 1 or 2 that started ou…

Successful startups is not the best signal to judge overall quality of academic institution. Stanford became synonymous with dot com era due to successes like Google and Yahoo. However, Berkeley (along with MIT) was epicenter of open source movement in sixties and seventies. Things like BSD, Sendmail etc. started on Cal's campus.

I've heard one joke on Cal's campus - "Stanford creates companies, Cal creates industries".

Re: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes

#17

Post by Simpletoon »

pchristensen wrote: post #12
Simpletoon wrote: post #6

Paul Graham: "$50m companies innovate. Mine did. We basically invented the web app. We were doing complex stuff in LISP when everyone else was doing CGI scripts. And, quite frankly, $50m is no small thing. " Of course, no one uses CGI now. It's all complex stuff done in LISP. Innovation is amazing, isn't it?

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt That's more advanced stuff than most web apps or frameworks do today. If viaweb had been done now instead of 15 years ago, they probably would have spun off lots of open source projects.

Doubtful. Yahoo rewrote Viaweb in C or C++, didn't they?

There's a reason why so many programmers still use CGI scripts. And why they depend on a host of scripting languages that rely on external libraries written by others. Perhaps it's because they just don't grasp what Paul Graham is describing. They can't comprehend languages like Lisp or Forth or developing incrementally from an interpreter prompt. And they don't need to. "Web 2.0" is an easy sell, no matter how crappy the "web apps" are, no matter what library-dependent, inflexible language they are written in. "Market forces" inhibit the few folks who do understand Lisp and Forth from spending more serious time with those languages.

The web browser as a UI. Brilliant. Programmers and end-users (a group to which programmers themselves belong) are getting smarter every day.

Anyway, you're right. It is definitely more advanced. Let's keep that in mind as we're looking at what's coming down the pipe hence forward and marvelling at what some will portray as "innovation".

Re: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes

#18

Post by MaxGabriel »

vidar wrote: post #2

"It’s like getting a degree at Berkeley. Okay. It’s not Stanford. You can a complicated story about how you had to do it because your parents had a big mortgage or something. But it’s a hard negative signal to get past." I agree that YCombinator is head and shoulders above its competitors but is Stanford really considered that much better than Berkeley? Honest question.

Joke aside, Paul Graham found no correlation between college attended and startup success.

http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

Re: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes

#19

Post by jblow »

seiji wrote: post #3
vidar wrote: post #2

"It’s like getting a degree at Berkeley. Okay. It’s not Stanford. You can a complicated story about how you had to do it because your parents had a big mortgage or something. But it’s a hard negative signal to get past." I agree that YCombinator is head and shoulders above its competitors but is Stanford really considered that much better than Berkeley? Honest question.

I read it as a joke just playing to the audience (ongoing good-natured rivalry, etc). It's like when someone really likes reddit. Okay, it's not HN. They can tell a complicated story about how they like cats and populist rage politics, but it's a hard negative signal to get past.

I agree that it is sort of good-natured rivalry, but it sort of isn't. I went to Berkeley and know that it is true.

Re: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes

#20

Post by anamax »

dm8 wrote: post #13
karpathy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote was the highlight of the class :) He's not only playing the audience-- In an earlier class (class 3 or so), Peter Thiel justified his views on Stanford vs. Berkeley based on their track record with creating successful companies. Maybe someone can find the exact quote, but he said that between the two, vast majority of successful companies start at Stanford and that he's only aware of 1 or 2 that started ou…

Successful startups is not the best signal to judge overall quality of academic institution. Stanford became synonymous with dot com era due to successes like Google and Yahoo. However, Berkeley (along with MIT) was epicenter of open source movement in sixties and seventies. Things like BSD, Sendmail etc. started on Cal's campus. I've heard one joke on Cal's campus - "Stanford creates companies, Cal creates industrie…

> I've heard one joke on Cal's campus - "Stanford creates companies, Cal creates industries".

The Stanford equivalent is "Stanford produces CEOs, Berkeley produces VP-Engr".

Which one would trade places with the other?

Post reply on HN