Y Combinator partners tell MIT students to steer clear of big-name companies

Or just a structure that better accommodates capital intensive business. There are markets where there's no MVP, with the emphasis on viable a couple of people can hack up in a year because the list of minimum necessary attributes is too large.

Under the current structure, raising capital can swamp developing a product when the minimum skin is say $12 million even eating ramen. Some businesses require 100 staff and not requiring the founders to sell unrealistic visions of equity turning into wealth compensating for below market salaries is a way to build better company culture when the work demands 35 or 60 people.

Maybe the 'MIT students' are a different enough population that the advice has to be specifically tailored for them.

Somehow, I doubt it. I think the average MIT graduate is just as naive (and inexperienced) as graduates from other universities. If so, then most should join big, established companies.

Startup life is not for everyone. Some people might do better (even financially) staying at more stable companies. There's nothing wrong with that.

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. That's exactly what you need if you want to turn a bunch of academic training into practical experience.

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 the audience was largely self selected. And in fairness to Altman he wasn't pitching the rainbows and unicorns to people in the middle of the bell curve. MIT students are a cohort statistically more likely to succeed in Silcon Valley tech culture than Alabama bumpkins at cow colleges.

But again, I agree there's self interest involved. That's also true for Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft recruitment.

I agree with this, and the fact that I feel there is an under-valuing of the experience working for large companies - whether that experience is good or bad (in general).

Working for larger companies will make you dislike bureaucracy but also understand how it mitigates risk (and hopefully allow you to find a happy medium). It also will push you to compete under pressures that you won't normally just put on yourself, it will teach you how to take customers seriously, how to build systems and applications seriously.

This is not to say big companies get all this right; far from it. But working for them will make you much more bulletproof than working on your startup by yourself.

This is why most successful startups are NOT started by 20-something kids, but actually 40-something former corporate employees.