I don’t necessarily disagree with this but is it the universities job to prepare founders at the expense of everyone else? Under his proposal the motivated founders succeed and everyone else is a loser. This is a very VC focused lens that ignores all the other possible outcomes a human could pursue that are valuable. Established corps need workers, unis need new teachers, hospitals need doctors, etc. So we should let all those people suffer to promote a small group of founders by reducing course load?
How Universities Should Prepare Founders
61–70 of 333 posts
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Funny enough, this is why I think a PhD is undervalued by many no, the opportunity cost is too great for this field, for people that saw the light in just undergrad or wound up building software for other people without an undergrad CS degree
the moment you start talking about opportunity cost, I think you've already ducked the intent of the majority of startup-strategizers-for-exponential-gains-only, for which the carrot on the stick is "unbounded" gain
can you repeat that in a different way? opportunity cost is prioritizing gains - or at least a window of opportunity for outsized gains - I don't see how "ducked the intent" fits in
but yes I realize that any conversation with academics is going to be skewed from the market, I think its worth representing nonetheless since academics often interpret their privilege of choice as a nobler cause because they made that choice at all
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#63One thing I agree with and one I disagree with: - I've always thought it was silly my university had an Entrepreneurship major. Starting a company is probably much better achieved by studying something technical or going deep into a problem space and seeing a problem there, not a generic "entrepreneurship" curriculum. - I think startups starting as side projects was more of an artifact of the early YC days where star…
Much of yc advice is correct. But much of it is also dated as you're noticing
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's telling of the fact that we don't see most, or even 10%, of what gets posted here. There's far too much to read. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I don't expect you to read everything, but your choice of what to call out is still telling. If you truly think this is the sort of comment that needs direct intervention, I'd politely suggest you should set aside 2-3 hours per week to read comments on /new posts. To be clear: I do not have the time or energy to back this up statistically, but my experience is that you are substantially more likely to choose to get i…
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Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#65Agreed. 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 goal of encouraging entrepreneurship. The means became the end: the optimal strategy turned into presenting whatever scores well with the review panel. People took the money and technically started companies, but without underlying curiosity they couldn't carry it for long.
Teaching people how to build things, and the experience of actually making something from nothing, is special. But I also saw students who had no idea such possibilities existed, unknown unknowns, get gripped by the idea that they had to make something, and end up building only software, and within software, only dating apps.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#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.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#67> Startups succeed or fail based on how much customers like the product. This is in theory. In practice, a worse product with more money and louder marketing easily wins against a better product nobody knows about. I'm sure Paul perfectly understands it. There are other idealizations I won't comment on, but the whole piece reads like an attempt to nurture an application pipeline for YC rather than the genuine writing…
This is a common approach (very close to the norm for the most successful startups and companies I have worked with in my career), but I strongly disagree with this: "go back to university to learn business basics (finance, marketing, management)".
You will learn all of that on the job by the time you make it to Principal Engineer, Senior Sales Engineer, Staff Product Manager, or Enterprise AE in the American/Israeli/Indian and Chinese startup and BigTech scenes and especially in Enterprise SaaS, Cybersecurity, Hardware, AI/MLOps, Infra, and other high domain expertise but high revenue and exit potential heavy segments.
Also, a plurality of VCs in the segments I mentioned above tend to have learnt on the job and later switched to VC after successful exits and/or head-hunting.
If you do consider going back to school - only do a graduate research driven CS, EE, CE, or ECE degree program like Stanford, UIUC, CMU, GT (their online program is as good as on-campus with the right courses), UT Austin (their online program is as good as on-campus), and a handful of others.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#68One thing I agree with and one I disagree with: - I've always thought it was silly my university had an Entrepreneurship major. Starting a company is probably much better achieved by studying something technical or going deep into a problem space and seeing a problem there, not a generic "entrepreneurship" curriculum. - I think startups starting as side projects was more of an artifact of the early YC days where star…
> Increasingly I feel like the next generation of startups is more capital intensive and requires more time commitment from deeply technical talent.
Would that be more like other engineering fields? An interesting comparison would be aerospace, for example – it took 15 years to build the first A380, and tens of thousands of indispensable technical niches.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#69Where I live a university prepares you for an academic career. Business has no place at a university. If you want to learn a trade such as being a software developer or a plumber you go to a trade school.
It’s interesting to see how the Americans have a different view on this.
Re: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
#70[deleted]