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bryanhogan 19 seconds ago [-]
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 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.
palmotea 19 minutes ago [-]
> I think universities should focus on academic studies, not as a pipeline to YC.
No, they should focus on providing investors the resources they want to get richer. Investors are the only people who matter in the world.
Academic studies and knowledge are literally a worthless waste of time, compared to the investments of investors.
codemog 8 minutes ago [-]
This. If people became redundant due to AGI this article would be about best preparing the population to be Soylent Green.
trimethylpurine 12 minutes ago [-]
Universities are doing what they need to do to make money.
That's not applicable to teachers who may often times be doing what they need to do to matter to you (because that's what they genuinely want for themselves).
locknitpicker 31 minutes ago [-]
> I think universities should focus on academic studies, not as a pipeline to YC.
I agree. If someone wishes to study business or even management, let them take a specialized degree or elective courses. There is no wisdom in removing focus from a specialized degree.
IronyMan1 35 minutes ago [-]
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ErigmolCt 2 hours ago [-]
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...
jspann 5 hours ago [-]
(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.
glenngillen 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ErigmolCt 2 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't sell yourself short on the last one... the comment itself is a decent example of it :)
Animats 3 hours ago [-]
To sell is human; to scam, divine.
DiscourseFan 2 hours ago [-]
would've been a great tagline for Better Call Saul
ErigmolCt 2 hours ago [-]
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
locknitpicker 20 minutes ago [-]
> (...) a byproduct of getting unusually good at understanding and building things
A PhD is not about getting good at understanding something, let alone "unusually good". It's about being able to explore an uncharted area with little to no help, and write down your learnings so that those that come after you can build upon your work.
cumshitpiss 21 minutes ago [-]
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yieldcrv 5 hours ago [-]
> 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
asa123 4 hours ago [-]
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
yieldcrv 3 hours ago [-]
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
bix6 3 hours ago [-]
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?
watwut 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
palmotea 16 minutes ago [-]
> Yes, that is pretty much VC enterprenour philosophy in nutshell.
It's time we all admit the VCs are the best people, and we're just worthless in comparison. Anyone with any value at all is an investor or a founder. No one else matters.
That's why neo-reactionary ideology is so profound: it would put those best people in charge, and clear all the useless garbage out of their way.
scottfits 3 hours ago [-]
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.
nxobject 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
elictronic 2 hours ago [-]
I have no idea how you could think a startup is comparable to a project that ended up costing 25 billion dollars to devolop and involved something like 15k engineers. It's began development in 1988 and the first flight wasn't until 2005.
I want to ask you, what do you think a startup is?
amoshebb 1 hours ago [-]
It’s not obvious to me that a “nobody wants this” megaproject by a decades old multinational forced to succeed by government mandate wasting over a decade debating national workshare is a great example of a “startup in aerospace”.
There’s tons of startups making cool fused harnesses and phased arrays and trying to get every permutation of diesel and electric and hydrogen engines certified. Drones and rc aircraft spawn many “built in a dorm room” prototypes for people who don’t value their eyebrows
ErigmolCt 2 hours ago [-]
You probably aren't building the next Airbus in a dorm room, but you might build a weird propulsion prototype, simulation tool, control system, manufacturing technique that eventually becomes the reason a company exists
jchonphoenix 3 hours ago [-]
Much of yc advice is correct. But much of it is also dated as you're noticing
ErigmolCt 2 hours ago [-]
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 with
01284a7e 5 hours ago [-]
My university prepared me to be a founder by making me so unemployable that starting a business was my best option.
featwanz 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
ipnon 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
raegis 7 minutes ago [-]
College is the last and only place most kids (United States) will ever be academically challenged. It would be scary to live in a world where this is not available.
raphman 37 minutes ago [-]
Why do you think that? Does your view include colleges worldwide or is your comment about a specific country?
altmanaltman 4 hours ago [-]
Computer Science at School of Hard Knocks?
3 hours ago [-]
realysy 23 minutes ago [-]
> The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it
Definitly 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.
jedberg 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
pilingual 5 hours ago [-]
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.
heikkilevanto 2 hours ago [-]
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.
331c8c71 27 minutes ago [-]
The idea is quite similar to Chekhov's "Rules for Aspiring Authors":
Any newborn baby should be thoroughly bathed and, after giving him a rest from his first impressions, severely whipped and told: “Don’t write! Don’t write! Don’t be a writer!” If, in spite of this punishment, the baby will show writing tendencies, a caress should be tried. If a caress doesn’t help, give up on the baby – he is as good as lost1. The writing itch is incurable.
The path of the writer from start to finish is paved with thorns, nails and nettle, and therefore any sensible person must remove himself from writing by any means ... (eventually gets to actual advice)
And those who really burn for it probably are not needing university anyway. The landscape of wildly successful people is filled with those who dropped out of high school or college.
spwa4 52 minutes ago [-]
... and VC's will do their best to maximally profit of the 1% that do, ignoring the plight of the 99%.
I mean, this is good advice, but keep a little bit in mind who is talking, right?
FinnLobsien 1 hours ago [-]
I think that undermines a lot of benefits of entrepreneurship - the learning of many different skills, network, etc. and also just the adventure of starting a company.
It’s like saying most people will never be professional athletes so we should discourage sports.
Or most people live in their home country, so we should discourage young people from taking backpacking trips.
ktallett 49 minutes ago [-]
We seem to have become a culture where we unrealistically believe we have a solution. The big issue with many who label themselves as entrepreneurs is that often the problem doesn't exist. You end up networking with people who are less aware and also don't recognise that the problem doesn't exist and then motivate you even more. Then you have funders who rarely have expertise so they will believe you when you say it will change the world which basically all the time it won't.
Now I'm not of the view people shouldn't try to change the world but why should that be fixated on a business, why not a community effort, why not research, why not charity based, they all provide you with a range of skills. We have got a saturation of those starting businesses in every industry (especially mine which is quantum computing) and most have a poor idea or a repetitive idea or an idea that so unthought out it can't go anywhere.
(I will say less should go backpacking. Travelling on the whole now has become a distraction from life instead of a discovery. You are better taking that year or 6 months and spending it on something you love to do. That will show you who you are more than visiting some of the poorest nations on earth.)
madrox 5 hours ago [-]
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.
srveale 5 hours ago [-]
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.
bruce511 4 hours ago [-]
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.
shermantanktop 5 hours ago [-]
Is it too late to get zuck back to whatever he was doing before his current activities?
> 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.
phyzix5761 1 hours ago [-]
Large companies provide people with jobs and fund many suppliers with their transactions/operations. Walmart and Amazon are the two biggest employers in the US.
ktallett 58 minutes ago [-]
It can be viewed that way or it can be viewed that large companies have destroyed smaller companies by utilising slave labour and grey area practices to get the market share and then they are the only employers left for many.
alexashka 34 minutes ago [-]
What do small companies do?
Rhetorical question.
koe123 1 hours ago [-]
> This idea that "very large company" -> "productive economy" needs to die.
I am economically naive, but I also have never understood this argument. I asked a Spanish friend what Spain needed, he said “more big companies”. Is it because a big company provides you something closer to a monopoly, and can do so internationally?
peppevignanello 48 minutes ago [-]
Not that your Spanish friend's opinion on what Spain needs is enough to exemplify what Spaniards (or Europeans) as a whole want and think.
georgemcbay 2 hours ago [-]
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.
DiscourseFan 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah but they'd have twice as many parties at Harvard in that time, and what if that means there are twice as many chances for a Business student at frat party to hook up with the daughter of a billionaire and then rope his technically competent friend into working on this "crazy idea" he had high off his ass? I say, why do we even need classes at Harvard, we just need a lot of frat guys and slutty daughters of billionaires and they can just hire people from MIT to work under them. The system works.
testaccount28 1 hours ago [-]
could you explain your perspective more?
i see it as: large companies are proof that much trade and consumption has occurred.
ant6n 1 hours ago [-]
Large companies are more like proof that much concentration of wealth and power has occurred.
vkou 56 minutes ago [-]
I see it as 'Large companies are proof that concentration of wealth and capital is occurring, and that unless something structural changes, it will continue to occur.'
watwut 1 hours ago [-]
They are proof monopoly power was captured.
And practically, they are not good for democracy or even economy as such.
protocolture 56 minutes ago [-]
Why large company vs lots of money changing hand in the sector over lots of companies?
kakacik 1 hours ago [-]
Big companies like apple or meta screw their home countries (and most other countries, apart from tax havens) dramatically. Basically no taxes paid which is core to how state and everything is financed, have often enough power and huge egos to start meddling with running the state itself. They are utterly selfish entities run by highly functioning sociopaths with no concern about long term wellbeing of population. I could go on and on like this. Yes, some do give nice salaries but apart from faangs in SV its not the rule.
Bunch of smaller companies would have to form some sort of long term cartel and sync those egos to achieve anything close to one major company.
Last thing this world needs is another fuckup trillionaire with massive childhood/mental issues and ego bigger than Everest who thinks he knows where humanity should go (to serve their wishes and needs). Or just milk mankind of anything good remaining like zuckenberg is doing.
I don't need to name further, we can all imagine our own elons on that place
2 hours ago [-]
abu-matterize 2 hours ago [-]
mostly agree, universities should also encourage a throw away prototypes, students should start building instead of thinking/speaking about building.
retired 3 hours ago [-]
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.
ang_cire 25 minutes ago [-]
As an American, it's incredibly sad to watch literally every aspect of life be subsumed by Capitalism. No knowledge for knowledge's sake, you've got to generate PROFIT, or it's a waste of time!
fyredge 5 hours ago [-]
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.
encode 43 minutes ago [-]
The first universities were founded to educate priests, lawyers, and physicians. This can be seen in the way that universities standardized on 4 faculties: theology, law, medicine, and arts. What you are thinking of is the Humboldtian model of higher education which is a set of ideas that emerged in the 19th century and made research a central part of university's mission.
I still agree with you though in that it is not necessarily the universities responsibility to cultivate founders.
vehemenz 4 hours ago [-]
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.
fyredge 4 hours ago [-]
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.
freetinker 4 hours ago [-]
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.)
onion2k 2 hours ago [-]
In other words, universities are for people to learn for the sake of learning, not to earn a wage.
Universities should teach people that they can change the world if they want to, and that they don't have to be passive about accepting what's happening. One way to do that is to be a founder.
Tech founders pretty much always need more than a desire to earn a wage to succeed. Having a genuine belief that something that doesn't exist should exist is the drive to build. If you're in it for the money gets a job with an existing tech company, or a bank, or a hedge fund, is an wildly better idea.
watwut 55 minutes ago [-]
Looking at where startup culture went and where tech billionaires stear the politics, I dont want them changing the world. They are literally bragging about building dystopia.
kensai 4 hours ago [-]
Although in principle I agree, cultivating founders could be an added mission.
Fomite 1 hours ago [-]
Why, in particular, above any other aspect of society?
newbie578 2 hours ago [-]
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…
onion2k 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not going to argue about pg's pretentiousness or lack of, but I will suggest that trying to change someone's mind by presenting them with rational arguments is never going to work to persuade them they're wrong. What someone posts on social media is a reflection of their identity; it's literally who they present themselves as to the world. A well-formed argument will be rationalized away whether it's right or wrong. The way to persuade someone to change their mind is to nudge them to think about what they're posting so they persuade themselves they're wrong. Target their beliefs, not their knowledge.
If pg is wrong about something it isn't because he isn't informed about what's right. It's because he's chosen to frame something in a way that aligns to what he believes.
(Hint: Everyone does this.)
wisty 1 hours ago [-]
> I will suggest that trying to change someone's mind by presenting them with rational arguments is never going to work to persuade them they're wrong.
Were you persuaded of this by rational arguments?
onion2k 32 minutes ago [-]
Someone said I should examine what I believe, and I did. Also experience taught me that presenting a rational argument never works.
dgudkov 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jimnotgym 56 minutes ago [-]
Yes, but in this scenario Paul Graham doesn't get any of your equity, so that clearly won't make any sense to him.
kensai 3 hours ago [-]
the most pragmatic approach indeed!
alephnerd 3 hours ago [-]
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.
camillomiller 2 hours ago [-]
That is not what universities are for. Just another biased take by someone with a massive survival bias
Ekaros 52 minutes ago [-]
Clear answer when you ask from someone whose existence is build on finding enough marks. On both sides of their system. And I will say both the founders and the VC are marks in the system...
MrJobbo 60 minutes ago [-]
How about no.
rurich2747 5 hours ago [-]
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
rurich2747 5 hours ago [-]
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
4ndrewl 58 minutes ago [-]
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."
GMoromisato 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
keithnz 5 hours ago [-]
seems like you understood the general purpose of the equation... no need to over analyze it. Roughly does all the work it needs to.
GMoromisato 5 hours ago [-]
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.
5 hours ago [-]
5 hours ago [-]
AIorNot 2 hours ago [-]
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 society
That drug has infected the world.. we need to review what value all this disruption is providing anyone
BobbyTables2 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Fomite 59 minutes ago [-]
Honestly, I think we would do well to dispose of both "founder" and "startup".
We had words for this. "Small business" and "Small business owner".
watwut 50 minutes ago [-]
They are not the same. Per VC culture, small business owner is a looser, tunning lifestyle business. They produce useful products in competitive markets and nurture relationship with customers.
Startup is meant to become monopoly and does not have to have good economics before abusing monopoly power. Competition is for loosers. It is about disrupting, not about building.
Insimwytim 5 hours ago [-]
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.
sdh 4 hours ago [-]
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!
jimnotgym 50 minutes ago [-]
And look how often he mentions the rich kid schools. Let's get more rich kids into startups
5 hours ago [-]
bizstrategy10 6 hours ago [-]
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bmitc 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
dang 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not concerned with "groupies", but with the quality standard on HN, which the GP post was obviously below.
clipsy 5 hours ago [-]
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.
dang 4 hours ago [-]
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.
tomhow 2 hours ago [-]
> I do not have the time or energy to back this up statistically
Please don't portray this as a case of being asked for an unreasonable level of effort. You've provided no examples or evidence at all.
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.
As for the topics in which we post moderation replies: anyone can easily see in our feeds that we post plenty of similar comments in non-startup-related threads every week. Often I barely even know what the topic of the thread is, because I’m working through lists of flagged and killed comments, not discussion threads. This is why we ask people to flag comments they think break the guidelines.
I don’t see you flagging very often at all. I mean that not as a complaint; nobody is obliged to flag things. But if you did, it would be the simplest and most convincing way of building a case to prove that this bias and inadequate moderation exists.
3 hours ago [-]
bmitc 5 hours ago [-]
I edited the comment to contain only the question and not commentary.
dang 4 hours ago [-]
I appreciate the edit, but now that I read the edited comment, I think I was responding mostly to the "Gross." bit.
jrflowers 5 hours ago [-]
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jmalicki 6 hours ago [-]
What is the point of a university if it not to provide education that could benefit wide areas of the human experience?
bmitc 5 hours ago [-]
That's not what he is arguing, though, is it?
jmalicki 5 hours ago [-]
Is founding a company not a thing some humans experience?
watwut 46 minutes ago [-]
He argues for lowering experience of everyone except founders, so that founders dont have more free time and dont have to learn what university teaches.
It is favoring 1 group, not wide areas of the human experience.
madrox 6 hours ago [-]
Ever heard of an MBA?
metaphor 5 hours ago [-]
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.
bmitc 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ffounders 6 hours ago [-]
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dayyan 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't it amazing how posts about Paul, who has rejected Trump, are so civil compared to other Silicon Valley movers who embrace him?
volandovengo 6 hours ago [-]
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?
ericd 6 hours ago [-]
cmd-+ or ctrl-+, hit as many times as you need.
debo_ 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 5 hours ago [-]
Please follow the site guidelines. They ask you not to post like this here, regardless of who or what you dislike.
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
The official page which is in German: https://www.th-koeln.de/studium/code--context-bachelor_62103...
I think universities should focus on academic studies, not as a pipeline to YC.
No, they should focus on providing investors the resources they want to get richer. Investors are the only people who matter in the world.
Academic studies and knowledge are literally a worthless waste of time, compared to the investments of investors.
That's not applicable to teachers who may often times be doing what they need to do to matter to you (because that's what they genuinely want for themselves).
I agree. If someone wishes to study business or even management, let them take a specialized degree or elective courses. There is no wisdom in removing focus from a specialized degree.
> 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.
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.
A PhD is not about getting good at understanding something, let alone "unusually good". It's about being able to explore an uncharted area with little to no help, and write down your learnings so that those that come after you can build upon your work.
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
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
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.
It's time we all admit the VCs are the best people, and we're just worthless in comparison. Anyone with any value at all is an investor or a founder. No one else matters.
That's why neo-reactionary ideology is so profound: it would put those best people in charge, and clear all the useless garbage out of their way.
- 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.
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.
I want to ask you, what do you think a startup is?
There’s tons of startups making cool fused harnesses and phased arrays and trying to get every permutation of diesel and electric and hydrogen engines certified. Drones and rc aircraft spawn many “built in a dorm room” prototypes for people who don’t value their eyebrows
Definitly 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.
Then they would pitch in front of investors with both. Sometimes the ideas got funded and the kids would actually keep working on them.
"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...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.
Any newborn baby should be thoroughly bathed and, after giving him a rest from his first impressions, severely whipped and told: “Don’t write! Don’t write! Don’t be a writer!” If, in spite of this punishment, the baby will show writing tendencies, a caress should be tried. If a caress doesn’t help, give up on the baby – he is as good as lost1. The writing itch is incurable.
The path of the writer from start to finish is paved with thorns, nails and nettle, and therefore any sensible person must remove himself from writing by any means ... (eventually gets to actual advice)
https://nova-nevedoma.com/rules-for-aspiring-authors/
I mean, this is good advice, but keep a little bit in mind who is talking, right?
It’s like saying most people will never be professional athletes so we should discourage sports.
Or most people live in their home country, so we should discourage young people from taking backpacking trips.
Now I'm not of the view people shouldn't try to change the world but why should that be fixated on a business, why not a community effort, why not research, why not charity based, they all provide you with a range of skills. We have got a saturation of those starting businesses in every industry (especially mine which is quantum computing) and most have a poor idea or a repetitive idea or an idea that so unthought out it can't go anywhere.
(I will say less should go backpacking. Travelling on the whole now has become a distraction from life instead of a discovery. You are better taking that year or 6 months and spending it on something you love to do. That will show you who you are more than visiting some of the poorest nations on earth.)
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.
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.
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.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428589
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo
This idea that "very large company" -> "productive economy" needs to die.
Rhetorical question.
I am economically naive, but I also have never understood this argument. I asked a Spanish friend what Spain needed, he said “more big companies”. Is it because a big company provides you something closer to a monopoly, and can do so internationally?
i see it as: large companies are proof that much trade and consumption has occurred.
And practically, they are not good for democracy or even economy as such.
Bunch of smaller companies would have to form some sort of long term cartel and sync those egos to achieve anything close to one major company.
Last thing this world needs is another fuckup trillionaire with massive childhood/mental issues and ego bigger than Everest who thinks he knows where humanity should go (to serve their wishes and needs). Or just milk mankind of anything good remaining like zuckenberg is doing.
I don't need to name further, we can all imagine our own elons on that place
It’s interesting to see how the Americans have a different view on this.
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.
I still agree with you though in that it is not necessarily the universities responsibility to cultivate founders.
He says good founders learn actual stuff at college and get good at something, without any ambition to make it profitable initially.
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.
(I hope PG isn’t outsourcing his thinking to some agentic workflow.)
Universities should teach people that they can change the world if they want to, and that they don't have to be passive about accepting what's happening. One way to do that is to be a founder.
Tech founders pretty much always need more than a desire to earn a wage to succeed. Having a genuine belief that something that doesn't exist should exist is the drive to build. If you're in it for the money gets a job with an existing tech company, or a bank, or a hedge fund, is an wildly better idea.
Don’t meet your heroes I guess…
If pg is wrong about something it isn't because he isn't informed about what's right. It's because he's chosen to frame something in a way that aligns to what he believes.
(Hint: Everyone does this.)
Were you persuaded of this by rational arguments?
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.
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.
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
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
"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'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.
And, of course, I should say that this is just how it struck me. Other people may not care and that's fine too.
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 society
That drug has infected the world.. we need to review what value all this disruption is providing anyone
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.
We had words for this. "Small business" and "Small business owner".
Startup is meant to become monopoly and does not have to have good economics before abusing monopoly power. Competition is for loosers. It is about disrupting, not about building.
Sounds like a complete nonsense, yet here we are.
Today, everyone is a founder. Founders of bubbles and bro culture. Herd-minds, chasing the Californian greed rush. Round 'em up, Angel Investors!
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
It's telling that I see far worse HN comments on a daily basis that don't warrant a finger-wagging condemnation from you.
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...
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.
Please don't portray this as a case of being asked for an unreasonable level of effort. You've provided no examples or evidence at all.
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.
As for the topics in which we post moderation replies: anyone can easily see in our feeds that we post plenty of similar comments in non-startup-related threads every week. Often I barely even know what the topic of the thread is, because I’m working through lists of flagged and killed comments, not discussion threads. This is why we ask people to flag comments they think break the guidelines.
I don’t see you flagging very often at all. I mean that not as a complaint; nobody is obliged to flag things. But if you did, it would be the simplest and most convincing way of building a case to prove that this bias and inadequate moderation exists.
It is favoring 1 group, not wide areas of the human experience.
> 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.
Paul - spend a few tokens to give me a text size I can read?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html