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- Hacker News
- Whatever about specifically founding tech companies to generate a pipeline for SF VCs, universities should be in the business of preparing people to live their lives with agency.
You don’t need to raise VC money to live your life, but if you become an accountant, a mechanical engineer, or an artist, you should also have the skills you need to go and set up a business to do that work wherever you decide to go.
- 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?by bix6
- > This is a very VC focused lens
Just like mostly everything he writes about.
- Article also ignore’s that very few founders succeed
Has anyone ever plotted the lifespan of YC companies from each cohort?
Most of them end up dead…
by youngtaff - > So we should let all those people suffer to promote a small group of founders by reducing course load?
Yes, that is pretty much VC enterprenour philosophy in nutshell. It is value system that value only one small group only. And if that small group has to put in effort into learning in school or doing something other then building unicorns, that is a great unfairness.
by watwut - My first reflex would be to ctiticise PG, but after reading the article, I don't think I agree here.
First he doesn't say universities should prepare founders - his advice is to those universities that do want to do that.
Second, his advice is basically to skip BS business education and make students good professionals, well-rounded intellectuals, not afraid of starting a business. Anyone would benefit from such education, not only prospective founders
by oytis - "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."
I'd argue that both of these would be highly beneficial for all kinds of students, founders and non-founders alike.
Starting a startup could be generalized for all students to having a dream or goal, taking ownership of it, and making it happen. A startup is just one possible path, pg is probably too specific here, I would agree.
Having more free time to work on my own projects is probably the freedom I missed most at university. I think learning to choose what to work on and making something happen would benefit future workers, teachers, doctors, and engineers just as much as entrepreneurs.
It's a trade-off in terms of time and other resources, since parts of the existing curriculum would have to fade away. But I think it's a good starting point for change and a good direction to move in.
by beklein - 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...by ErigmolCt
- 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.
by scottfits - I think side projects still matter, but maybe in a slightly different way now. They don't necessarily have to become the company themselves. They can be how you discover the problem, test an approach, meet the people you eventually build the company withby ErigmolCt
- Much of yc advice is correct. But much of it is also dated as you're noticingby jchonphoenix
- > 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.
by nxobject - "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 this is beyond bad.
The #1 thing anyone could ever to do study entrepreneurship is to do 'case studies'.
Liteally just learning/observing how they work - the nature of founding, structure, power relationships, what debt and equity are for.
Learning 'how a VC firm' operates, and indeed how other kinds of investment bankers work is golden.
HBS is almost a glorified 2 years of basic concepts + 'a lot of case studies'.
Learning how IBM, Standard Oil, Apple and a host of companies you've never heard of operate is deeply enlightening.
The 'Naive By Design' approach by the YC people is almost toxic.
There is definitely some insight in it - that 'seasoned executives' are probably worse at starting small companies in many ways, but, understanding why that is is really important. It has a lot to do with risk, the kinds of things CEO's of established companies are good at etc..
It's as absurd as saying 'Don't Learn Nursing By Studying Nursing - Just Do Music and Engineering'.
Doing 'projects' however, is a wonderful idea.
by bluegatty - 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-coco
Their website (in German): https://coco.study/
The university's page on it (in German): https://www.th-koeln.de/studium/code--context-bachelor_62103...
by bryanhogan - Hi Bryan, thanks for digging up that gem! As prof, I‘ve been thinking a lot about how to modernize our Information Systems Bachelor‘s here in Berlin, Germany. Clearly, the old model has become obsolete in the Age of AI. In my own (tech heavy) courses I‘m increasingly weaving product into the curriculum - eg, how to empathize with users, and how to collaborate in a dev team. I‘d love to pick your brain on your experiences in your Bachelor‘s!by blindseeker
- can vc money just fund basic research?
im slowly getting confused on what founding a company even is. i am in grad school right now. a lot of funding and opportunities come from guys who are like "we need you to innovate we need you to act like a startup." its honestly kinda annoying. i just want to do basic research. i dont want to sell anything. i just want to build things. but the way this article frames it- is founding a company just getting funding for a research project? but using different words? could i just pull up with a list of my research interests, convince people its a sellable product, and score funding? obviously id need to deal with financial overhead myself (a pain) but hypothetically. lets say i complete my degree, maybe spend a year or three in industry networking and better understanding the problem space. then pitch myself to vcs with hope of funding whatever topics im interested and have my company function like a research group except instead of publishing papers we build products? like no profit no big deal, i never intended to profit. which, is this not what openai is doing?
unethical to lie about my intents (i want to do research not start a company) but i feel the end goal (more funding for research) could be worth it.
- > im slowly getting confused on what founding a company even is.
> i dont want to sell anything. i just want to build things.
These are incompatible. If you start a company, whether you're CTO or CEO, you'll need to sell things. Both founders have to focus on the product, since it's being sold to people. And people refuse what they don't like. Which means your most valuable feedback mechanism comes from trying to sell something and then doing something different in response, until people buy it.
> could i just pull up with a list of my research interests, convince people its a sellable product, and score funding?
You can, but your company will eventually die because you won't be able to raise more money. VCs want signs that a company is growing. So if you raise money and then ask for more without strong sales, they won't give you more.
> then pitch myself to vcs with hope of funding whatever topics im interested and have my company function like a research group except instead of publishing papers we build products? like no profit no big deal, i never intended to profit. which, is this not what openai is doing?
That's not what OpenAI is doing. They're so focused on selling that they were even willing to sacrifice some of their research culture just to get everyone on the same page of "we have to make money, otherwise research can't happen." Sam explained to everyone that money comes from sales, not research, and money is a requirement for research. Thus they had to focus on selling.
by sillysaurusx - What you’re running into is the trend away from investing in basic research, in which almost everything (in the US) is now centered around a supposed path to profitability.
As a result, in a sense, founding a company can be getting funding for a research project.
A good example is nuclear fusion. There’s no nuclear fusion company, or research institute for that matter, that’s within even 50 years of having a commercially viable end product. There’s no strong evidence that that’s even possible. In other words, the entire field is still very much in the research phase, with no clear path to a commercial outcome.
Yet there are something like 50 - 80 funded nuclear fusion companies, collectively funded to the tune of at least about $14 billion. They’re all essentially doing research, which includes building prototypes and testing.
Of course, in order to get that funding, most of these companies have announced milestone dates of various kinds, including dates by which they’ll have a saleable product. All of those dates are ridiculously optimistic, and any investor who’s done due diligence should know that.
Which leads one to wonder what these investors are thinking. Some of them are explicitly indulging in moonshots: funding something desirable that may not work. They’re essentially funding research, and they know it. There are several other categories though, including people that are hedging - betting on a possible payoff. There are also presumably some people who actually believe the target dates (who also presumably have not done good due diligence.)
Is what these fusion companies are doing unethical? A case can be made that it is, particularly when it comes to that last category of investor I mentioned. On the other hand, in an environment where basic research is discouraged, “life will find a way,” and you get these weird distortions of what a funded company is.
> could i just pull up with a list of my research interests, convince people its a sellable product, and score funding?
If you can pull off the middle part about convincing people, the answer is definitely yes. That’s ultimately what the situation you described is about.
by antonvs - My university prepared me to be a founder by making me so unemployable that starting a business was my best option.by 01284a7e
- Giving me whiplash how close to home this hit. Same boat, thought I'd studied the right thing, didn't conduct enough research, now sitting here with a student debt dreaming up a way to get myself out of the hole through self-employment. That and just having the insatiable desire of free-agency and not working for someone else but the driving force is definitely the debt and unemployment lmfao.by featwanz
- Computer Science at School of Hard Knocks?by altmanaltman
- I don't think there's much value in college anymore outside of as a class signifier, and most schools are signifying that you are not in the right social class.by ipnon
- 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.
by odyssey7 - I think there's a very interesting history to be written/read about the emergence of the persona of 'founder'. I'm seeing it all over the place these days (alt. 'entrepeneur' or 'changemaker', the second of which really grates on me). It feels (to me) very much like 'small business owner' or 'the kids' or something: an idea or prototype of a person who is to be managed and possibly even produced by society. Not saying this in a critical way, I think every era has it's various typologies of 'person in society', but this one seems kind of unique in some interesting ways; very much a product of the last ~50 years of US history.
edit: I'll say that in my personal opinion the critical thing a founder needs is a strong internal locus of control. I feel that this is also an important product of a liberal arts education, so I see some natural alignment. I worry about the degree to which the 'total university' strips 18-22 year olds of important rites of development: learning to feed for yourself, find housing, meet friends organically (as opposed to because you share a dorm), etc. I could see a more pared down, "education-mostly" school in a large city being an interesting avenue for new models of university.
by tech_ken - What about the status quo is broken?
YC seems to be serving its function perfectly well, if you think of it's function as: "start many venture funded SaaS businesses, with the goal of a small number achieving Unicorn or bigger exits".
Stanford, Harvard, and other elite schools seem to be filling YC's applicant pipeline really handily with smart undergraduates. In a sense, YC is kind of like biz school for startup founders.
The path I see unaddressed: what's the development track for an SMB founder?
YC has the startup/tech company development track pretty well on lock. Traditional MBA programs have the "bigco advancement" track sewn up. How do I learn how to start a small business?
I'd love to eventually start an EE / embedded business on the scale of 5-10 people, ideally selling a niche product to other technical businesses. I have no idea where to start here.
by cushychicken - There's a trend in top MBA programs called entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA) where you raise money to buy a business that you acquire through a mixture of debt and equity. Basically lets MBAs skip the building phase of building a small business and go right into operating it.
I run a small business on the side, and although I did a ton of preparatory reading and learning not much of it was useful in retrospect. Most of it you learn by doing and it's not that hard to learn. The top three things that were useful to me to learn were sales, basic accounting and how to read financial statements, and what metrics to track/manage with. You can learn the basics for all of those in less than a month.
My advice is just start. You are probably wrong about what the market wants unless you are selling a product or service that you know there is already demand for. Figure out what it is you're offering and try selling it to people. If they want it you figure out how to make it better, if they don't you try something else.
Edit: I had wanted to start a business for a long time. I thought I needed some tricky new idea to be successful. That's really hard to come up with since most new ideas are bad or are too hard to sell/explain to people. In my case it was also a form of procrastination since I had to wait for the right idea. Things got easier when I just picked an existing problem/industry and decided to do that with my own proprietary software to make it easier for me. I know a guy making a couple million a year from owning multiple tanning salons. There's a lot of opportunity out there that doesn't require any special insight.
- I guess one thing universities have to decide is how important having founders is to them. PG talks about how Harvard has more founders than Yale and Princeton, but I don't really see that as a good or bad thing for any of those schools. There probably aren't infinite good ideas that can be successful at any one time. If you encourage more people to become founders then they aren't going to go into other places where their skills might be better suited.
YC's founders also skew heavily towards a certain type of person and business. The returns of VC in biotech for example are much lower than the returns in B2C and B2B software. It's just a harder, more capital intensive, and more uncertain industry. Over optimizing for the YC archetype means you get less of the people who succeed in other areas.
Also, although PG disdains finance and management, many large problems are better addressed through people with skills in these areas IMO, since often the returns are not sufficient to attract VC interest but the financial and human resources that need to be coordinated to address them are substantially beyond the ability of a small, undercapitalized group.
- > Harvard has more founders
Rich parents/families are the actual founders, via their children. Harvard is because mostly rich can study there (and drop out at will).
by zx8080 - There are so many VC's and so much money today the demand for "Founders" is high. One way to increase supply is to manufacture what you need - much like Korean K-Pop bands. Band members start in a Bootcamp. They learn to dance and get a vocal coach. As their fan base grows they start to disrupt and displace older bands that are aging out. The industry as a whole does well but individual band may or may not. Do they produce new and innovative music? - meh. Let's face it - a "Founder" with the right fan base can get valuations over a trillion:)
- > Also, although PG disdains finance and management, many large problems are better addressed through people with skills in these areas IMO
I find this view from pg very narrow minded, and borderline ignorant. He is shaping his essay as in the role of higher education and academia is only to produce startup founders. Which is not, it is a way of a state investing into a labor force that is needed. As long as there are large corporate multinationals, there will be a need for finance, economics and yes, even management. Are a lot of that studies fugazi? Sure they are, but so are a lot of startups.
If everyone coming out of academia would be startup-like, corporations and other businesses simply wouldnt have the workforce for their machinery, and then some big shoot CEO would write blogs how Universities Should Prepare White Collars.
And indeed, reading period produced two trillion dollar companies, but this is statistical anomaly. You could just as well argue, that it keps economy afloat by educating up-coming workforce, but thats harder to prove.
by zigman1