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

PG used to tell students to work for an established company for a while after college, then start a startup later with that experience under their belt. After a few years of YC, he changed that to: if you want to start a startup you should just start a startup. (Pretty sure he still makes an exception for finishing school though.) I don't recall him saying that experience at BigCo was bad, just that it turned out not to prepare people for startups after all, so if a startup is what you want to do then you should just plunge in and figure it out.

Experience at BigCo can be a mixed bag. I worked for two years at one, and it took me perhaps 10 years after that before I stopped noticing bad habits in myself that I'd acquired there—and I still wince at the memories. But the experience was valuable in one way: I learned a lot about users and their problems.

MIT students are objectively better than those graduating from other institutions. The institution is prestigious in the field, highly selective in its admissions, and maintains a diverse and challenging curriculum.

If you are trying to recruit the best of the best, it makes sense to recruit there. But you will have stiff competition from everyone else seeking the same. You're probably also looking at CalTech, Stanford, Berkeley, and Princeton with the same eyeball. And sama is saying that some of those companies that set out to recruit the very best and most prestigious graduates are not always the very best companies to work for. That's it. If you graduate from MIT, you don't have to work for Apple, Google, Facebook, or any other company that anyone has actually heard of.

I came from the middle of the bell curve, and my first job was working for a start-up. I didn't need sama's advice, because I was just looking for the first thing I could find, rather than the first thing that would not spoil the purity of my perfect, pre-planned resume. That's why he was aiming at those busy beavers in Boston. He's just saying that people might be happier if they chased after the rainbow unicorn farts rather than prestige.

I have worked closely with graduates of Alabama, Auburn, and Alabama A&M, including the smaller satellite campuses. Those are not "cow colleges". Their graduates are not bumpkins. They are overly religious and entirely too enthusiastic about football, in my opinion, but they still know how to do the work. They also know how to chase their dreams, even when afforded fewer opportunities to do so.

Recognize that "bumpkin" and "cow college" are derogatory or dismissive terms, you may have used them without thinking about why you shouldn't, and that you may need to reflect on that a bit.

YC can chase MIT graduates because they operate in that social stratum - YC's ex con is a professor there. Its most famous founder got his CS degree from the liberal arts school on the 'good' side of the Cambridge tracks. The third worked in Boston's second industry, banking up to the founding.

There are highly capable graduates from community colleges, e.g. Hanselman. But investing is about maximizing the odds with finite time to collect information. Altman is chasing the odds by taking his dog and pony to Cambridge, Mass rather than Troy, Al. It's business.

I apologize for offending you. The reference was self-depreciating on one level and an obscure reference to a respected tech leader that Altman's recruiting optimization tactic would miss. I'll point out that your stereotyping is 'Alabama bumpkin' by value rather than reference.