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  dofm
  This is shockingly vapid and wishy-washy even for PG.Leaving this weird, rather Valley-specific, even YC-specific, navel-gazing definition of "founder" aside, universities should do what they promise to do for their students. And if possible for way, way, way less money.He seems quite out of touch with the level of economic hardship involved in being a student; a huge number of students already work a couple of jobs and are navigating small businesses, especially here in the UK where he apparently now lives. They aren't going to have enough "free time" to play with a "project" even if a bit more is made available by loosening the curriculum.If any change is necessary it should be that every university student has access to actual education and ongoing (post-graduation) support to start a real, not hypothetical business, rather than leaving them in this "ripe for YC picking" state where they have "done projects" but don't really have any awareness of business.If students leave university immediately able to run their own businesses, understand how to bootstrap, be closer to self-funding etc., that leaves them in a stronger position than if they can show they have done stuff but need an external startup meat grinder to get them anywhere. Especially since the job market is being screwed the world over.But YC doesn't want its people to be that independent. It wants them persuadable, overconfident and desperate to sign up to space camp.
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  bix6
  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?
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  jspann
  (Disclosure: I'm getting a PhD in CS now)> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build itFunny enough, this is why I think a PhD is undervalued by many. You spend years focused on a single area, sometimes pivoting topics, and getting hands on experience with operating solo on the outskirts of a particular field.The overall point of the degree is you learn how to learn. The nice part is you have the padded walls of university equipment, funding, and time; So failure isn't terminal, just an opportunity to figure out what didn't work.There's a few reasons how and why this message got distorted and lost in modern academia (honestly it would be a great subject for a book). It's no mistake that better known programs and programs with ties to a stream of successful startups are also the ones where there's a culture of builders and makers.
• odyssey7
  On the statement regarding the students of universities,> we get them next. We're like grad school.Really, my bs meter started going off when I saw this kind of posturing, a company positioning itself as a sort of grad school. Then again, grad schools and universities impress me less with each passing year as they transform themselves to be more like companies. And also, thank you to yc for offering a forum where I feel comfortable enough to post a contrary opinion. That’s better than can be said for some universities these days.Maybe I don’t disagree after all—or maybe if I do disagree with that point, maybe it’s just not that important to defend the unique role of universities these days as the universities themselves are just continuing to forfeit that on their own.
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  01284a7e
  My university prepared me to be a founder by making me so unemployable that starting a business was my best option.
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  scottfits
  One 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 startups could just be simple software that some engineers built on nights and weekends. Increasingly I feel like the next generation of startups is more capital intensive and requires more time commitment from deeply technical talent. Not in 100% of cases obviously.
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  bryanhogan
  I really liked my modern Bachelor's called Code & Context, it focussed on creating potential founders.It combined coding, design and entrepreneurship. I felt like the idea behind this major was being able to go from idea / problem to finished product sold by a company.The three main fields are very related:- Coding: How to actually code and build the solution.- Design: How to identify problems and design solutions around them. So it's actually multiple different fields of design, e.g. including product design and UX and UI design.- Entrepreneurship: How to actually build and sustain a company around that.There were many opportunities to work on your own projects. Increasingly so actually by intention (2 weeks to 8 weeks in later semesters). It's also close to many entrepreneurship programs for potential funding for ideas, but also networking and guidance.I wrote a blog post about it: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/what-is-cocoTheir website (in German): https://coco.study/The university's page on it (in German): https://www.th-koeln.de/studium/code--context-bachelor_62103...
• ErigmolCt
  The irony is that universities are probably best at producing founders when they're not explicitly trying to produce founders. Teach difficult things, put smart people together, give them access to equipment and enough free time to build weird stuff. The hard part institutionally is that "we gave students fewer assignments and left them alone" is much harder to sell than an Innovation Center with a nice sign on the building...
• tescreal
  I suspect there's a disconnect. I'm noting a lack of note about the real burden of finding capital to launch even a rather modest venture.YC is an exclusive club (no offense folks, it is very much a club), and there's only so many venture bucks to go around. Before we produce more 'founders', it would be very beneficial to examine how they're to secure the very necessary funding. Not everybody has access to a personal reserve of capital for many many reasons.
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  Swankivo
  Agreed. 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.
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  pilingual
  Mark Zuckerberg was good at programming, but he was a psychology major, not a CS major."For Zuckerberg, the school’s major selling point was its Latin program. The current computer science concentrator originally intended to study classics at Harvard."[0]There's a book called Founders at Work by one J. Livingston. I'd suggest replacing Zuckerberg with an incredible founder who was interviewed in that book, Steve Perlman. Livingston: Were you an engineering major ? Perlman: No, I have a liberal arts background. My engineering background is as a hobbyist. ... I designed a software-based modem when I was in college and I got an F for it because the professor said it would never work. But I got it working at my first company. I sent him an email later on and said, "This email is being sent to you on the modem that I designed at Columbia." [0] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/6/10/mark-e-zuckerbe...
• mettamage
  > whereas the laziest students already learn so little that there's not much room for them to do worseSource neededAlso if he talks about 90% of all students not being founders then I want data on all 90% before I accept this argument as it seems hastily thought outI do agree with the general ideas in his essay but these kind of comments that I cite make it seem a bit… too self-interested?
• Animats
  This reads like a voice from the past. The past where someone coded a web site or an "app" and it turned into a big business. Too many people have explored the web and app spaces, and new ideas that don't need a huge infusion of cash for marketing are very rare.The AI area is different, in that it's still hard to make things work. There are lots of things to be done, but they're not the quick demos and launches YC used to like.[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Winter%202027&ba...
• bob1029
  > Startups succeed or fail based on how much customers like the product. Customers don't care what the founders studied in college. So founders are free to study whatever they want, as long as they get good at building things.Being able to build things isn't important. You need to build things that make the customer happy. Building the wrong things really well is the most typical failure mode I see in technology leadership. It doesn't matter how "good" something is if the customer doesn't give a shit about it.The simplest suggestion I can make to noob founders is to do part of the product or technology ugly on purpose. Give yourself permission to not be perfect. You may find a similar practice in warehouses and on construction sites. Whenever a new piece of equipment arrives, the manager or foreman will take out a blade and put a nice big scratch on the machine while the team observes. Dethroning the shiny new things as quickly a possible should be the goal. You don't want a bunch of weird ideological gods jerking your chain around all day. The customer is already quite the handful.
• anon
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• wewewedxfgdf
  Founders thinking of applying to YC ......Take any advice about "what YC is looking for" with a very large grain of salt.Many people do the assessments, and I'm far from convinced that they are all working to assess according to exactly what PG or Garry or Michael or anyone else say are the criteria.There's TONS of advice written and video on what YC is looking for and no evidence that all that advise is scientifically followed.If YC is a bunch of normal humans then the assessors are just deciding however they think right.So you will be disappointed (as I was) if you research and tune your application to "exactly what PG is looking for" and you're rejected.In articles like this I think PG is just saying "if I was doing YC application assessments, as I did 15 years ago, then this is what I would be looking for", not "this is what todays YC assessors are definitely looking for". Big difference.
• karol
  It's not in universities interest to prepare ideal startup founders. They are not supposed to be preparatory schools.
• anon
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• podgorniy
  Something is missing in this text. I feel like key ingredient or two are completely left unarticulated.
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  jimnotgym
  I just wondered, what is YCs success rate vs other business or career options?I think universities should focus on academic studies, not as a pipeline to YC.
• ozereray1
  Building a solid technical foundation before rushing into a startup is crucial. The best founders I know focused on solving deep infrastructure problems first rather than just chasing trends.
• madrox
  My alma mater, Cal Poly SLO, I think, already does a lot of this, and are working on getting better. They have the CIE, something I wish I had back in the day: https://cie.calpoly.edu/I do wonder if entreprenuership would be higher if we gave students more gap years, because I find it rare that someone who has not been in the world knows they want to start their own business. Tech is an exception because it's more of a lifestyle and culture than other STEM-based business.
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  srveale
  The article advocates lighter course load so ambitious undergrads can work on personal projects, some of which (preferably for the author) would be startup ideas.Glossing over the fact that ambitious undergrads are more likely to be ambitious about grad school rather than starting a company, and reducing their course work is a hindrance if anything.The goal of a physics degree is not to prepare you to start a business. Don't disadvantage your future physicists on the off chance one of could be the next zuck.
• realysy
  > The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build itDefinitly true. Recently I've written a piece of software that I need myself, and I released it as a product but the response is not good. If this were my main startup product, I believe I would be broken. That is, I did not find the right product to build, I think it is need by people, but it is actually not.Also, after a product in need is built, you should promote to make it known by people who need it.
• capibara13
  This is what I'm saying to my kids all the time: don't expect to work for a boss in the future, but count on starting something for yourself. I just don't see most companies hiring loads of people, when they can also summon some robots and agents.
• jillesvangurp
  It's nice that Y Combinator cherry picks the best students from the ivy league universities. But of course universities need to serve all students and most universities aren't in Silicon Valley (ivy or otherwise). A lot of students might not be starting companies or they might do something entirely reasonable such as taking a traditional job as a doctor, a lawyer, or even as a teacher. And quite many of them flow into the regular job market or pivot to become artisanal bakers or whatever.But I agree universities can be more open to some of their students pursuing a research career in companies rather than in universities and that they have an important role to play in the transition from one to the other.Here in Berlin there are local discussions about the lack of engagement of local universities with the startup world here vs. the relative success with which that is done in e.g. Munich and other German cities which have a longer tradition of university spinoffs as startups. There are big differences between universities in Germany. There are also a few private universities in Berlin that are more successful. For example, my office is in a building that hosts the Code university and they definitely have a track record of churning out successful startups that get invested straight out of their program. But the big public universities seem a bit more hands off. I've heard local investors complain that they have more contact with universities elsewhere in Germany than the local ones. They are calling this out as a thing that needs fixing.
• jedberg
  There used to be a class at Berkeley that was cross listed between the CS department and the business school. When you were in the class, the CS kids and B-School kids were teamed up, and the B-School kids would write the business plan and product description, and the CS kids would make the prototype.Then they would pitch in front of investors with both. Sometimes the ideas got funded and the kids would actually keep working on them.
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  heikkilevanto
  99% of university students will never start a company. 99% of those who do will close down without making any measurable difference to the world. I think the world would be better off if the universities actively discouraged the idea of starting companies. Those few who really burn for the idea might do it anyway, and might be more likely to succeed.
• tcfhgj
  A University isn't a institution to serve the economic system
• mmmgge3
  Now all the future founders lack are rich parents to lend them a small loan of a million dollars.
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  golly_ned
  > 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.
• contubernio
  Instrumental education is less effective at producing innovation and utility than is basic education.Forgetting this is (and has been) destructive to universities.
• DragonStrength
  The context from working in a Valley startup funded by YC and run by one of their former executives is they are not seeing the talent they once did despite mining the same sources. There is little self reflection to consider the Silicon Valley offer has changed versus the talent itself.I literally said, "we're all adults here," and I was corrected. The new batch of Cal grads are children, they said -- which is an indictment of all US graduates and not just Cal for some reason. Or maybe the startup funders are just like the ancient Greek writers who complained kids today don't want to work.
• anon
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  retired
  Where 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.
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  fyredge
  I disagree with the underlying assumption that it's the universities responsibility to cultivate founders.Universities were initially built to further the knowledge of specific fields, for the sake of its own advancement, producing philosophers, artists and scientists.In other words, universities are for people to learn for the sake of learning, not to earn a wage. New institutions should be built to cultivate founders and entrepreneurs. Career development centers, maker spaces, co-working spaces, these are the places to build the entrepreneurial spirit.
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  abu-matterize
  mostly agree, universities should also encourage a throw away prototypes, students should start building instead of thinking/speaking about building.
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  dgudkov
  > 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 I liked in earlier Paul's essays.Here is an alternative point of view: get your degree and work for a few years. Then go back to university to learn business basics (finance, marketing, management). Start a company in your late 30s, when you know your subject area well and you have an idea how to steer finance/marketing (marketing is much harder that it might seem). Bootstrap or take as little investment as possible until you get PMF. Then scale up without giving away (much) equity.It worked well for me. It can surely work well for others.
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  newbie578
  PG has become pretentious and doesn’t allow people to disagree with him. Anyone following him on X can confirm that, where he chooses to reply to only certain replies with weaker arguments or just refuting the strong ones..Don’t meet your heroes I guess…
• MrJobbo
  How about no.
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  camillomiller
  That is not what universities are for. Just another biased take by someone with a massive survival bias
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  rurich2747
  The thing that this misses is the value of craftsmanship and the time that it takes to develop that increases based on the difficulty of the domain AND how long that domain has existed.Brand new industries don’t have depth, and may not even have high difficulty and so starting a SAAS business or Social Media startup 2008-2014 was easy from a technical point of viewThe difficult in it being a ‘startup’ was more about business execution than building execution. And luck of course. Hence Harvard students applying to become foundersNow the craftsmanship involved in building novel solutions in complex domains that are not new requires deep knowledge.Hence PHDs and Postdocs, which are projects, but projects that rely on existing knowledge.Paul thinking of founders being a replacement for grad school is a result of his experience building startups in low complexity novel industries with large financial upside.That’s not what a nation needs to move itself forward. It is what VCs need to generate alpha, and so you’ll see exploration in novel low complexity industries with large financial upside, and not hard science - so Harvard grads make sense.This idea that ‘builders’ are ‘builders’ misses the need for craftsmanship and apprenticeship
• krautburglar
  I'd prefer it if they did not prepare people to destroy civilization to further pad some decrepit boomer's already ample pension. It's not like you can take it with you Paul.We should have known better than to put the nerds in charge -- too focused on their spreadsheets and making the big number go up, while completely ignoring the calamities they have wrought upon both the people and their environs.
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  GMoromisato
  > How inspiring founders are to students is a function roughly of how rich and famous they are divided by how much older they are than the students.I'm not fond of this kind of math metaphor. "roughly" is doing a lot of work here. He's saying that richer founders are more inspirational than poorer founders and younger founders are more inspirational than older founders. But when you put it that way, it's so obvious that maybe it's not worth saying. So he cast it as an equation:inspiration = wealth / age-diffBut you can't take this equation literally. I mean, what if the founder is younger than the students? Do you get negative inspiration? What happens if you divide by 0? Is inspiration undefined in that case? Is a $2 billion net-worth 30-year-old really twice as inspirational as a $1 billion net-worth at the same age? Is Elon Musk 10 times more inspirational than Bill Gates?This is excessive, and unjustified precision. Save equations for actual equations.Obligatory disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of Paul Graham, and I only criticize because he is worth criticizing. Please don't block me.
• baxuz
  The fuck is a founder
• anon
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  BobbyTables2
  I hate the term “founder”.It grossly blurs the distinction between those who put in personal blood, sweat, tears, and money into starting a business versus those who make a few slides so they can use other people’s money to hire others to do all the work and come up with all the ideas.
• anon
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• 4ndrewl
  Clickbait title, but it boils down to"In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects."
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  sdh
  Early internet founders were not CS majors. Most of them dropped out of college. They weren't seeking fortunes or careers. They were creatives, oddballs, outcasts, pirates!Today, everyone is a founder. Founders of bubbles and bro culture. Herd-minds, chasing the Californian greed rush. Round 'em up, Angel Investors!
• AIorNot
  Nowhere in this essay is it mentioned why its good to start a startup..Given the 20 years of twisted and evil greedy nature of most successful VC level startups and their founders, tech bros and VCs and the evil of MBA optimized Private Equity should we not instead teach young people to run away from startups and greed?Paul Graham is selling a drug to societyThat drug has infected the world.. we need to review what value all this disruption is providing anyone
• Tbarlow
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• anon
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• milhan00
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  bmitc
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• bizstrategy10
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• mnmnmn
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• ffounders
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• dayyan
  Isn't it amazing how posts about Paul, who has rejected Trump, are so civil compared to other Silicon Valley movers who embrace him?
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  volandovengo
  Isn't it amazing that Paul Graham hasn't updated his CSS in 20 years?Paul - spend a few tokens to give me a text size I can read?
• hndqbrg2uk
  Been thinking about this for years