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Ask HN: Does higher education matter for a startup to be successful?

4 points by anantzoid ↗ HN
Do people with higher education (say, Masters in Artificial Intelligence) have more chances of their startup being successful? Since their product may be better in terms of technology and also the founder would have gained more maturity, experience and contacts in course of his higher education. We have a huge number of examples like Google, Foursquare where the founders were doing their PhDs.

7 comments

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michaelpinto
That would depend on the specific nature of the startup. Although on a meta level I would say that having a high quality colleges and universities improves the success rates of a geographic location.
anantzoid
The nature of the startup in this case would be an app or a system as a service or a product.
keiferski
It really depends on what the startup is doing. PhDs in Machine learning (probably) aren't gonna know a thing about sales. General intelligence is useful, sure, but being a successful entrepreneur isn't about being smart, it's about finding an opportunity and putting in the hard work to take advantage of it.
michaelpinto
That's a very vague description: You're describing a technology, and not what the technology does or who it serves.
Joeboy
People with higher education are likely to be somewhat smart, somewhat capable of acting on their own initiative and from somewhat well-off backgrounds, all of which are likely to be somewhat beneficial in a startup. Correlation is not necessarily causation though.
[dead] kevinp2012
Gets the help what they actually need from schoolanduniversity.com
alid
Unless a startup's highly technical, I wouldn't solely equate higher education with success - more than anything it's the behavioural skills of entrepreneurism, resilience, persuasion and street smarts that will help set you apart (unfortunately these skills are not focused on enough in formal education, IMO). It's important to know the ecosystem of the area you're going into - where the needs are, who the customers are, what the value chain looks like etc, and typically this would best be gained by work experience rather than theory.

There's many examples of successful people who never completed or went to college: e.g. Richard Branson, Henry Ford, David Ogilvy, Pete Cashmore, Walt Disney etc et al. Richard Branson once noted that the first three months of running a business teaches you more than three years at business school.

So it's not to say higher education isn't valuable, but 'learning' isn't confined to the classroom and practice oft trumps theory :)