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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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.
- My university prepared me to be a founder by making me so unemployable that starting a business was my best option.by 01284a7e
- 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 - 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.
- (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 it
Funny 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.
by jspann