- 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Also, just logically considering hundreds of thousands of students have been part of Harvard reading periods over the years, and there are two unicorn events where reading period may have played some small part in the formation of a trillion dollar company, I'd imagine that if the reading period at Harvard were twice as long the US GDP would likely be approximately exactly the same as it is 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.
In hindsight it was quite early in my career, but a bit over 20 years ago I felt burnt out in tech and wanted to try something new. I was share trading quite a bit so thought maybe I'd become a stock broker (online trading was only just starting to become a thing, so being a broker was still a real job at the time!). I finished the degree and got qualified, and while I loved the learning I discovered I hated the industry and that it wasn't for me.
But all of that discovery work, the financial planning, what their actual objectives were, having to dig into why someone wanted to buy a house, etc. proved to be some of the most invaluable and transferable skills I've learned (that, and SQL ;). A lot of that part of the course was learning how to ask questions, and learning how to follow-up to get past the superficial and often incorrect initial answers.
To your point I feel like there's these kind of meta skills that are transferable to many domains, but are sadly lacking these days from a lot of education that is hyper-focused on very role-specific qualifications. The ones that immediately come to mind:
- Learning how to learn (i.e., how to understand yourself, and improve)
- How to ask good questions (similar to above, but about others)
- And something I need a better label for because I just clumsily call it "sales", but in the Daniel Pink "To Sell is Human" style. Something like being able to structure a coherent and compelling narrative to other people. Clearly I fall short on this one.
Maybe the failure mode isn't the PhD itself, but environments where publishing becomes the objective rather than a byproduct of getting unusually good at understanding and building things
> 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
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...
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?
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."
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.
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.
Paul does seem to be somewhat aware that his thesis is "optimize for founders at everyone else's expense".
I mean, if you want the university to churn out plumbers then by all means do plumber things.
I'm somewhat less sure that optimizing for founders turns out better, or even more, founders. Ultimately probably 1% or less of people start a business (of any form, much less venture capital financed.)
You can't give people time and expect them to "create". Creators create not because it's convenient, they create in spite of it being inconvenient. They find the time regardless. (And universities already have scads of free time.)
95% of startups will fail. That statistic does not cause a founder to retreat. And that perseverance when the odds are poor is exactly why some succeed.
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.
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..
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.
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.
It's... not? He's describing how to cultivate founders in university. I'm saying that it's not what a university should be focused on.
A startup is not a technical project, it's an organisational endeavour. They don't live or die by the product alone, but by the market demand, organisational robustness and a little bit of luck.
Exactly. Answer: How universities of yore have “prepared” founders thus far. The premise of PG’s otherwise insightful prose is on shaky ground - or at the very least - debatable.
(I hope PG isn’t outsourcing his thinking to some agentic workflow.)
> 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.
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.
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 view
The difficult in it being a ‘startup’ was more about business execution than building execution. And luck of course. Hence Harvard students applying to become founders
Now 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
Take solar or battery technology — that requires deep knowledge of materials and chemistry that you don’t get from an undergrad. And why ASML didn’t get built in the US. Or why TSMC exists in Taiwan
They lead because of a devotion to depth of expertise - not becoming a billionaire
So again, if you want sustainable hugely profitable 0-1 companies you better hope for a monopoly business, and why lobbyiny government to protect your rents is a faster alternative to PHDs, Postgrads, and long term industrial policy
> 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-diff
But 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.
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.
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!
While I agree the comment will rub the startup groupies the wrong way, I don't really think the question itself is unsubstantial, especially in comparison to the post, as the post does not address the question. And I elaborated in response to a comment to it.
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.
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 involved in threads/comments that challenge startup culture than you are in threads/comments that embrace bigotry, conspiracy theories, and other genuinely appalling content.
Edit: To elaborate a bit and put a final touch on this before I call it a night, the problem isn't that I see you condemning comments like this; it's that I rarely-to-never see you condemning substantially worse comments. It seems to communicate a clear choice to allow repugnant behavior as long as it doesn't criticize startup culture/founder worship.
It’s hard to know what you mean without links, but, as the other moderator, I do spend at least that number of hours each week looking at or looking for substantially worse comments than that, and usually they’re from troll accounts that we insta-ban without commenting about it.
But as for the topics in which we do post moderation replies: you can easily see in our feeds that we’ve posted plenty of similar comments in non-startup-related threads.
Similar in smell to political science degree --> career politician, I think pg nails it:
> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it. And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance.
> Another thing that will tend to draw universities away from the optimal path is business schools, if they have them. Business schools were not designed to train founders. They were designed to train the managerial class of the large industrial companies that arose in the early 20th century; they're the West Points of industrial capitalism. That's why their official name is usually the School of Management. But while the skills they teach might be useful in running companies beyond a certain size, they're not the critical ingredient in founding them. And the skills that are are already taught by other departments. So to the extent business schools affect their parent university's strategy for preparing founders, it can only be by adding error.
> And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance.
But then he also states:
> Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to the ideal of liberal education than preparing them for almost any other kind of career.
This is pretty myopic and is obviously biased from someone embedded in the startup space, perhaps not surprising given how little value most startups provide. Not everything in life is a whiz-bang, fail fast, build-some-new-product-from-scratch startup. In fact, most things are not.
Pay attention to actual liberal arts universities. Their goal is on the long-term and not to satisfy some near-term need of startup founders making the next killer app or product. It can be argued that most startups build towards generating value only in the sense of monetary value, in that most startups' goal are purely about the exit. It really has little to do with building products. Most venture capitalists got their wealth from the dotcom bubble. Almost none of them know how to build actual products.
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.
> 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.
Much of yc advice is correct. But much of it is also dated as you're noticing
> 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.
Also, just logically considering hundreds of thousands of students have been part of Harvard reading periods over the years, and there are two unicorn events where reading period may have played some small part in the formation of a trillion dollar company, I'd imagine that if the reading period at Harvard were twice as long the US GDP would likely be approximately exactly the same as it is now.
(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.
In hindsight it was quite early in my career, but a bit over 20 years ago I felt burnt out in tech and wanted to try something new. I was share trading quite a bit so thought maybe I'd become a stock broker (online trading was only just starting to become a thing, so being a broker was still a real job at the time!). I finished the degree and got qualified, and while I loved the learning I discovered I hated the industry and that it wasn't for me.
But all of that discovery work, the financial planning, what their actual objectives were, having to dig into why someone wanted to buy a house, etc. proved to be some of the most invaluable and transferable skills I've learned (that, and SQL ;). A lot of that part of the course was learning how to ask questions, and learning how to follow-up to get past the superficial and often incorrect initial answers.
To your point I feel like there's these kind of meta skills that are transferable to many domains, but are sadly lacking these days from a lot of education that is hyper-focused on very role-specific qualifications. The ones that immediately come to mind:
- Learning how to learn (i.e., how to understand yourself, and improve)
- How to ask good questions (similar to above, but about others)
- And something I need a better label for because I just clumsily call it "sales", but in the Daniel Pink "To Sell is Human" style. Something like being able to structure a coherent and compelling narrative to other people. Clearly I fall short on this one.
I wouldn't sell yourself short on the last one... the comment itself is a decent example of it :)
To sell is human; to scam, divine.
Maybe the failure mode isn't the PhD itself, but environments where publishing becomes the objective rather than a byproduct of getting unusually good at understanding and building things
> 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
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...
My university prepared me to be a founder by making me so unemployable that starting a business was my best option.
Computer Science at School of Hard Knocks?
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?
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.
[0] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/6/10/mark-e-zuckerbe...Indeed, pg might be familiar with that author.
What about Page? Brin? Etc.
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.
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.
Is it too late to get zuck back to whatever he was doing before his current activities?
Simul gradiuntur fractae spes ?
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428589
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo
Paul does seem to be somewhat aware that his thesis is "optimize for founders at everyone else's expense".
I mean, if you want the university to churn out plumbers then by all means do plumber things.
I'm somewhat less sure that optimizing for founders turns out better, or even more, founders. Ultimately probably 1% or less of people start a business (of any form, much less venture capital financed.)
You can't give people time and expect them to "create". Creators create not because it's convenient, they create in spite of it being inconvenient. They find the time regardless. (And universities already have scads of free time.)
95% of startups will fail. That statistic does not cause a founder to retreat. And that perseverance when the odds are poor is exactly why some succeed.
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.
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…
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.
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.
That’s compatible with the thesis though. Read past the headline.
He says good founders learn actual stuff at college and get good at something, without any ambition to make it profitable initially.
It's... not? He's describing how to cultivate founders in university. I'm saying that it's not what a university should be focused on.
A startup is not a technical project, it's an organisational endeavour. They don't live or die by the product alone, but by the market demand, organisational robustness and a little bit of luck.
Exactly. Answer: How universities of yore have “prepared” founders thus far. The premise of PG’s otherwise insightful prose is on shaky ground - or at the very least - debatable.
(I hope PG isn’t outsourcing his thinking to some agentic workflow.)
Although in principle I agree, cultivating founders could be an added mission.
> 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.
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.
the most pragmatic approach indeed!
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 view
The difficult in it being a ‘startup’ was more about business execution than building execution. And luck of course. Hence Harvard students applying to become founders
Now 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
Take solar or battery technology — that requires deep knowledge of materials and chemistry that you don’t get from an undergrad. And why ASML didn’t get built in the US. Or why TSMC exists in Taiwan
They lead because of a devotion to depth of expertise - not becoming a billionaire
So again, if you want sustainable hugely profitable 0-1 companies you better hope for a monopoly business, and why lobbyiny government to protect your rents is a faster alternative to PHDs, Postgrads, and long term industrial policy
> 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-diff
But 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.
seems like you understood the general purpose of the equation... no need to over analyze it. Roughly does all the work it needs to.
Sure, but it's like someone saying, "I could care less" or "I literally died". I understand the meaning, but it's still ugly.
And, of course, I should say that this is just how it struck me. Other people may not care and that's fine too.
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.
What's worse is when it is used as a job title, a role, which people are hired for!
Sounds like a complete nonsense, yet here we are.
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!
Isn't it amazing how posts about Paul, who has rejected Trump, are so civil compared to other Silicon Valley movers who embrace him?
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?
cmd-+ or ctrl-+, hit as many times as you need.
[flagged]
> What do universities have to do with startup founders? Gross.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments or shallow dismissals to Hacker News. We're hoping for curious conversation here, not bilious.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
While I agree the comment will rub the startup groupies the wrong way, I don't really think the question itself is unsubstantial, especially in comparison to the post, as the post does not address the question. And I elaborated in response to a comment to it.
I'm not concerned with "groupies", but with the quality standard on HN, which the GP post was obviously below.
The "Gross." remark (Edit: now removed) at the end was unnecessary, but the bulk of the comment seems like a pretty legitimate question to me.
It's telling that I see far worse HN comments on a daily basis that don't warrant a finger-wagging condemnation from you.
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 involved in threads/comments that challenge startup culture than you are in threads/comments that embrace bigotry, conspiracy theories, and other genuinely appalling content.
Edit: To elaborate a bit and put a final touch on this before I call it a night, the problem isn't that I see you condemning comments like this; it's that I rarely-to-never see you condemning substantially worse comments. It seems to communicate a clear choice to allow repugnant behavior as long as it doesn't criticize startup culture/founder worship.
It’s hard to know what you mean without links, but, as the other moderator, I do spend at least that number of hours each week looking at or looking for substantially worse comments than that, and usually they’re from troll accounts that we insta-ban without commenting about it.
But as for the topics in which we do post moderation replies: you can easily see in our feeds that we’ve posted plenty of similar comments in non-startup-related threads.
I edited the comment to contain only the question and not commentary.
I appreciate the edit, but now that I read the edited comment, I think I was responding mostly to the "Gross." bit.
What is the point of a university if it not to provide education that could benefit wide areas of the human experience?
That's not what he is arguing, though, is it?
Is founding a company not a thing some humans experience?
Ever heard of an MBA?
Similar in smell to political science degree --> career politician, I think pg nails it:
> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it. And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance.
> Another thing that will tend to draw universities away from the optimal path is business schools, if they have them. Business schools were not designed to train founders. They were designed to train the managerial class of the large industrial companies that arose in the early 20th century; they're the West Points of industrial capitalism. That's why their official name is usually the School of Management. But while the skills they teach might be useful in running companies beyond a certain size, they're not the critical ingredient in founding them. And the skills that are are already taught by other departments. So to the extent business schools affect their parent university's strategy for preparing founders, it can only be by adding error.
He states:
> And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance.
But then he also states:
> Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to the ideal of liberal education than preparing them for almost any other kind of career.
This is pretty myopic and is obviously biased from someone embedded in the startup space, perhaps not surprising given how little value most startups provide. Not everything in life is a whiz-bang, fail fast, build-some-new-product-from-scratch startup. In fact, most things are not.
Pay attention to actual liberal arts universities. Their goal is on the long-term and not to satisfy some near-term need of startup founders making the next killer app or product. It can be argued that most startups build towards generating value only in the sense of monetary value, in that most startups' goal are purely about the exit. It really has little to do with building products. Most venture capitalists got their wealth from the dotcom bubble. Almost none of them know how to build actual products.