[flagged]
Senior year of college, aren’t we talking 21/22 year olds?
Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
201–210 of 290 posts
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not spending years of my life trading money for lottery tickets, startups are worse than lottery tickets
I said "serious".
Thought experiment: who do you think would be better off as a group? 10 college grads working at any of the FAANG+ companies or the same 10 being YC founders?
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Paul Graham Essay and early YC: live your life, don’t start a company in your 20s. You are young only once. I've been lurking on HN since 2008 and can't remember a time where i got the vibe from pg to be like "live your life" instead of "start a company now and apply". Can you point to some specific essay you had in mind?
https://paulgraham.com/before.html "Given this dichotomy, which of the two paths should you take? Be a real student and not start a startup, or start a real startup and not be a student? I can answer that one for you. Do not start a startup in college. How to start a startup is just a subset of a bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a good life. And though starting a startup can be part of a good life f…
Totally disagree with Paul here. If you are growing up rich, you can take your time with no deadlines.
If you grew up with responsibilities, you cant ignore the ticking clock. You have to start working on a career path asap.
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#204Paul Graham Essay and early YC: live your life, don’t start a company in your 20s. You are young only once. Post Paul Graham YC: reserve your YC spot now. There’s no downside!
If there is a single advice i would give the young folks here: Don't listen to VC's. Live your life. Startup founder is more comparable to an olympic athlete in terms of what you have to give up to get there - by definition 99% of people who try no matter how brilliant won't walk this path successfully - but both will lose many things on this way without being much happier than before. This is also where most of this…
>extreme resilience
You misspelled narcissistic psychopath.
The Best of Gavin Belson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30WTWkFe910
The Best of Russ Hanneman:
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#205Paul Graham Essay and early YC: live your life, don’t start a company in your 20s. You are young only once. Post Paul Graham YC: reserve your YC spot now. There’s no downside!
If there is a single advice i would give the young folks here: Don't listen to VC's. Live your life. Startup founder is more comparable to an olympic athlete in terms of what you have to give up to get there - by definition 99% of people who try no matter how brilliant won't walk this path successfully - but both will lose many things on this way without being much happier than before. This is also where most of this…
This. I'd also add that, in general, you don't need a large sum of money in the early stages, as long as your basic needs are covered. For instance, living with your parents for a while can be a smart move. More importantly, use time wisely: with discipline you can do or validate a lot over several quarters. By contrast, if you take the VC route, the metronome ticks much faster, often in a way that can be counterproductive for your startup. As unintuitive as it sounds.
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#206[flagged]
Senior year of college, aren’t we talking 21/22 year olds?
Having had friends that went to a technical high school I have a feeling that there's a subtle suggestion that, "graduates" might refer to talented kids coming out of high school. At any rate suggesting to a young person that they should essentially ruin their life to chase a pipe dream is unethical especially when you benefit financially from making these suggestions.
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
A classmate of mine dropped out to do this. Failed, and ended up picking up later to finish the last two years of college. It really didn’t seem to have slowed them down, and finishing college a few years later (with some startup founders experience) seems to have been overall good. Unfortunately did end up going to Boston Consulting Group from on-campus recruiting, so not a great end to the story, but historically t…
I get the feeling only very affluent and well-supported people follow this path, and they probably don't need THiel's money to do it. The vast majority don't have a few years at this stage of their life to play the lottery.
Yeah, I hung out with one of the early batches of these people (my former supervisor was involved) and would agree that they tended to be from better off families. How much of that was the Ivy league selection bias vs anything else I dunno though.
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#208I think this is oddly predatory, and sends the wrong idea to graduating students who have not even entered the real world. There is no need to rush to get into YC, and it would help to get actual experience in a job before setting out to build a whole company.
Putting inexperienced kids with good credentials who are amenable to listening to a board in charge of these things is part of the yc business model.
As someone who has worked with many boards and execs, I cannot tell how wrong this way of looking at the world is.
Execs universally love working with people who maximize proactivity and strong opinions. The opposite of what you think.
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
YC is not really advocating you to become a worker at a startup. They want you to become a founder. As a founder you don't need to be a huge success for you to be well off. I'm one of 3 founders currently in a bootstrapped company that has done okay. We are approaching end of year 5. This year we will make 700k revenue, 240k profit and 50% yearly growth. Typically this kind of business is not something a VC would con…
You realize that you’re kind of making my point? Even with your rosy projections, you’re still going to be making much less than a few returning interns I know made in their first three years working at BigTech. Heck you’re making less than a run of the mill enterprise dev is making in a second tier major city in Atlanta And as a founder, you still need to do well to do better off than a BigTech employee and statisti…
Don't forget the actual rate of return vs time spent working too. As a founder you're probably working at least 50% more time than the average faang dev, plus the added stress of being in a high impact, high consequence role.