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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
When one choice is a very very very small chance at effectively unbounded money, the expected value of making that choice is also effectively unbounded, so the opportunity cost compared to literally anything else makes it look like an obvious chioce, meaning there's no actual rational weighing of an "opportunity cost".
e.g. "I could be an engineer, or I could be a billionaire. Which one should I pick? If I'm an engineer, I could have a nice career in the industry; but if I'm a billionaire I wouldn't have to ever work again and could just do all the software engineering I want, so it's an obvious choice to pick being a billionare."
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
> (...) 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.
Your role is to publish papers so your PI is able to get grants, and to network, so the lab profile gets better known in the research community, and then as a more senior grad student you can help write grant applications, and you can build a track record of mentoring (e.g. master students). At the end of the day, you want to demonstrate that you can come up with projects and pursue the research up until publication in a top-tier venue, and the ultimate goal (from the point of view of hiring committees) is obtaining prestige and funding for the university.
If you plan to go to industry, your incentives are somewhat misaligned with your PI. In that case you want to pursue multiple internships and getting networked with top companies in your field, and demonstrating practical output, well-released code, demonstrated downstream value for followup projects etc.
That's not my experience -- there's a whole pretense about being experts in a field, which is exactly what the poster above bought into. Having a PhD doesn't make or prove you're an expert about anything. It just proves you know how to do research in a thing, but that doesn't stop us from presenting PhDs in front of juries as if they're the only ones who know what they're talking about.
I don't see how these are incompatible. The PhD prepares you to be an independent researcher. The way you prove this is by studying the same topics for a few years, and by the time you reach your viva, you'd be expected to know a lot about the topic you chose.
It's not incompatible, many people in order to do research have to gain a great expertise in a thing. Others can get a Ph.D. having really no expertise at all, but just the ability to get through a research program. Others still can be experts and unable to navigate a research program due to how capricious and political they are. So the pretense is that the Ph.D. is a marker of expertise. It's correlated with expertise, but the actual thing it signals is you've gotten through a research program.
> In an ideal world, sure. In reality, a PhD[1] is about publishing papers in the hope that you learn something along the way.
You're being needlessly dismissive of what "publishing papers" mean. Writing down what you learn is what papers are for, and the only papers that count for a PhD are those which are accepted by reference journals, which impose a relatively high bar on what content they accept.
So you still need to explore uncharted areas, and your main output is still writing down what you found for others to build upon. Those are the deliverables. For the person doing the PhD, the primary benefit is developing research skills, such as independente and self-reliance.
Which is ironic, because self-publishing then should automatically qualify you for a PhD. In fact, I believe more people should take this approach. As far as I'm aware, there's no law or regulation from declaring yourself a "PhD" backed by autoresearch.
> Which is ironic, because self-publishing then should automatically qualify you for a PhD.
No. What qualifies you as a researcher is being able to output work that is accepted by your peers. Hence the peer review process is critical. You fail to meet this bar if you publish something in blogspot or even arxiv for that matter.
A key problem is upper-level academia is rife with the same sorts of human-scale power dynamics. Petty squabbles, ideological (and ideological-flavoured) views can and do hold entire fields from time to time. It is only a particular type of tenacity that breaks up the status quo from time to time. (consider the Marvin Minsky era of AI research. A big personality can stifle an entire field). Peers aren't usually the appropriate measuring stick of credit.
> A key problem is upper-level academia is rife with the same sorts of human-scale power dynamics.
You are trying too hard to come up with excuses. The paper review process is double-blind, and nothing prevents you from publishing the same work in multiple journals. If your goal is to do meaningful contributions to science then "power dynamics" are irrelevant.
You do need to develop a meaningful network in the field if your goal is to collaborate with other researchers, but that's basically what everyone needs to do in any professional field.
Eh, in theoretical fields we now have good formal verification tools so that someone publishing a code repo on their personal website is more meaningful in pretty much every way than a peer reviewed journal article. The article becomes an archaic formality.
Like I get that the current social norms around "research" might not be there yet, but if they fail to adapt, I just see that as a reason to defund "research" and start from scratch.
I've got a PhD in Physics and I have to say that the quality of most "self published" physics is very low, which probably explains why people would not accept a self-declared PhD.
You can't generalize from your personal experience to the rest of academia. There is far too much variation between fields, institutions, and countries as well as over time. ML in particular is an extreme outlier due to amount of money and business interests involved. Your experience would already have been quite different in a less fashionable subfield of CS.
I once asked asked my professor for advice. I said, I am drawn to both doing a startup and doing a PhD. How do I do both? He advised me to choose one. “Either one will take the whole of your youth and all its energy”, he said.
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.
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.
The high rate of college degrees is a historical anomaly, and of course it's a sham. Most are not truly intellectually challenged in some deep formative ways who get some easy BA diploma to then do some generic administrative MS Office point and click job. It's just due to education inflation, where now everyone is pushed though high school regardless of what they know, so it lost its signaling value. In a sane world, tertiary education would be much smaller, for those who actually need it and have aptitude. It would avoid wasting so many years.
I don't think that's true at all, although the roles which falsify it are generally invisible to or (as you can see downthread) looked down upon in Internet discourse. You do well at your local state school, you join whichever company's hiring near you as a low-level analyst, and with a bit of luck and hard work maybe you make it to Senior Manager of Regional Operations by the time your second kid is born. This is a valuable career path which many people are happy with and proud of.
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.
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."
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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, or Staff Product Manager in the American, Israeli, Chinese, and Indian startup 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.
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!
- 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.
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?
I'm a little confused by what you mean with your question? I was trying to ask what features of an engineering discipline OP was pointing towards with his comparison. I wasn't intending to describe what the next generation of startups might look like!
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
> 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”.
It looks like I wrote that in a confusing way! My intention was to ask about what features of the engineering discipline was motivating OP's comparison. Maybe a better series of comparisons would have been...
- the 747 – program conception in '63, delivery in '69;
– the A350 - first sales in '05, delivery in '13;
which I think captures the slow pace, and large dependency chain, of any significant program beyond a revision.
"Starting a company is probably much better achieved by studying something technical or going deep into a problem space and seeing a problem there, not a generic "entrepreneurship" curriculum."
I think this is beyond bad.
The #1 thing anyone could ever to do study entrepreneurship is to do 'case studies'.
Liteally just learning/observing how they work - the nature of founding, structure, power relationships, what debt and equity are for.
Learning 'how a VC firm' operates, and indeed how other kinds of investment bankers work is golden.
HBS is almost a glorified 2 years of basic concepts + 'a lot of case studies'.
Learning how IBM, Standard Oil, Apple and a host of companies you've never heard of operate is deeply enlightening.
The 'Naive By Design' approach by the YC people is almost toxic.
There is definitely some insight in it - that 'seasoned executives' are probably worse at starting small companies in many ways, but, understanding why that is is really important. It has a lot to do with risk, the kinds of things CEO's of established companies are good at etc..
It's as absurd as saying 'Don't Learn Nursing By Studying Nursing - Just Do Music and Engineering'.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
The libertarian take is surely exactly this, with the elitism either stripped out or pushed into the background (depending on your political bent): rather than employees and employers everyone should be a founder of their one-person company that raises money to do things that align with the interests of other individual founder-investors.
Mind you, I'm not totally sure how this differs from employer/employee relationships in practice except I suppose that each side has less contractual protection from the other.
N=1 but my dead VC funded YC company taught me more about the ins and outs of what it takes to run a complex successful engineering and sales operation than any number of years in business school or grinding in consultancies.
YMMV you do have to have a different less nihilistic mindset but it really is a bit of a Neo in the Matrix moment because it lets you see through a bit of the corporate veneer to see the complex mess of personal and group foibles that run our major corporations.
In the end it also ends up making you a 10x more effective corporate worker if that’s where you end up even if just to protect your mental health by being able to explain what’s going on.
> VC funded YC company taught me more ... really is a bit of a Neo in the Matrix moment ... ends up making you a 10x more effective corporate worker if that’s where you end up
No doubt there are learnings worth a lifetime, and changes that alter careers. You hope, the sense of superiority the experience seems to breed is not merely a coping mechanism, but an exercise in positive self-image [0]
“the sense of superiority the experience seems to breed"
I dont know how re-reading is going to help me see this sentence differently. I am just telling you my lived experience shows me this prior is simply not true. That's all.
"In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects."
I'd argue that both of these would be highly beneficial for all kinds of students, founders and non-founders alike.
Starting a startup could be generalized for all students to having a dream or goal, taking ownership of it, and making it happen. A startup is just one possible path, pg is probably too specific here, I would agree.
Having more free time to work on my own projects is probably the freedom I missed most at university. I think learning to choose what to work on and making something happen would benefit future workers, teachers, doctors, and engineers just as much as entrepreneurs.
It's a trade-off in terms of time and other resources, since parts of the existing curriculum would have to fade away. But I think it's a good starting point for change and a good direction to move in.
Most engineering classes include projects, but they're presented as homework and/or "something you can show an employer."
And "building things" isn't enough. Many projects have zero commercial potential.
I don't think PG is wrong, but I also don't think he's right. I think if universities wanted to do something with startup culture they could filter the more motivated and talented students into incubators of their own - not through some kind of overly academic post-grad degree, but literally a startup school where the university provides resources, subsistence, and access to funding, in return for a share of project equity. The "teaching" would be more about finding customers and handling finances and less about managerial MBA nonsense.
The big win for students would be "You don't have to worry about food, rent, or basic running costs."
Post-grad research overlaps with this, but is more fundamental. The emphasis here would be more on projects with immediate income potential, not on technology that could be commercialised in the future, possibly.
The problem is academic culture is very different to startup culture, so the startup school would need a much looser relationship to its parent than a typical academic department.
My first reflex would be to ctiticise PG, but after reading the article, I don't think I agree here.
First he doesn't say universities should prepare founders - his advice is to those universities that do want to do that.
Second, his advice is basically to skip BS business education and make students good professionals, well-rounded intellectuals, not afraid of starting a business. Anyone would benefit from such education, not only prospective founders
As a university professor, I've seen that all universities want to do everything.
By which I mean, they employ all sorts of people who are pushing a huge range of agendas. You can't meaningfully speak about "what universities want", because various factions tend to expect free rein to pursue their goals, and there is no mechanism to get everyone pushing in the same direction.
There are founders and there also are the rest of the startup workers.
I felt my most valuable formative experience for being a startup worker was the summer I was back from college and the supermarket I worked at in high school felt they owed me a job even though they weren't really hiring.
I was assigned 50% as a bagger in the front end and 50% a pinch hitter attached to the store manager who did whatever random things we needed whether it was deep clean the floor, paint a metal strip around the building, learn to work the meat slicer to sub for somebody in the deli, sub for people in the bakery, etc.
That made me into somebody who did whatever need to be done, but people who haven't had that kind of experience get really hung up on job titles and think "I'm a data scientist, I don't need to do that."
This was my thought when I read the title, but after reading the essay I don't think it's really even about VC and founders. The essay's critique and resulting prescriptions apply equally well to the work of preparing students for employment in large institutions.
The prescriptions from the essay are probably even more important for universities preparing students who will go on to work in ossified institutions (particularly large corporations and the medical industry).
Let me explain.
When a large University wants to do something, the impulse is to study whether they should spin up a dedicated course of study. So you might end up with a degree or specialization in Entrepreneurship. And new programs -- particularly those which are priorities for Administrators -- often come with money. The faculty will compete over who gets that program, and for something like "Make Startup Founders" there's a high chance that the program would be attached to a Business or Finance degree.
I have never founded or worked at a startup, so I have no idea if this is true. But I do think that "seek out powerful ideas and then work on self-directed projects to test and extend those ideas" is the most valuable thing kids can do in College (aside from course-work).
There's kind of no replacement for good peers + curiosity + free time. Universities often squander the opportunity for their students by funneling students into silly three-course-sequence curricula instead of just giving them resources, time, and space to dive deep on the ideas they're encountering.
The recommendation of the essay, as I read it, is something like "stop spinning up silly degree specializations and go back to providing a liberal education". From the essay:
> Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to the ideal of liberal education than preparing them for almost any other kind of career.
> So we should let all those people suffer to promote a small group of founders by reducing course load?
IMO, from a societal perspective, it's (ironically!) exactly the opposite. On the margin, reducing specialized course load in favor of giving students space to work on projects and think deeply about powerful ideas provides a net benefit to society precisely because it's non-startup-like institutions where society benefits most from employees having a liberal education.
It's kind of funny because the standard critique of business types interjecting into universities is that they push immediately employable skills at the expense of liberal education, and here PG is doing exactly the opposite. In fact, a quote from the essay:
"Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to the ideal of liberal education than preparing them for almost any other kind of career."
If we take the author on his word regarding startups and founders, then society doesn't really need startup founders to get that sort of education! The very nature of "doing a startup" provides a crucible. More startup founders might fail, of course, but from a societal perspective "oh well". Some other founder will succeed in their place.
But large corporations, schools, and (I assume) hospitals do not provide that natural crucible. Those institutions, which we all rely on, will crumble and become expensive broken husks of their former selves when their constituent employees do not think deeply about what's going on around them and adapt.
I think society is definitely better off if we have inquisitive and motivated engineers/administrators/educators/doctors/nurses/etc. So society does benefit from those people being given the structured free time and space to learn how to think deeply about powerful ideas.
I also think that "prepare students with powerful ideas then give them good peers and free time to build things" is a decent way of teaching people the "think deeply about the world and your place in it" thing. And I am generally suspicious of mini sub-degree pathways that purport to teach immediately useful skills but do so at the expense of the time and space necessary to teach the more important meta thing. Which I think might be the sort of thing PG is reacting to here ("So the way to prepare undergraduates to become successful founders is not to give them some new curriculum focused on "entrepreneurship".").
In short, once the foundation for working in a field is provided, I this society is better off when we prefer liberal education over incremental highly structured courses on minutiae.
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.
> Agreed. A university is a place for learning how to ask questions, and it runs on curiosity.
This is a rather oversimplified, old-fashioned take on the purpose of university.
University in the modern world is simple: a straightforward high-stakes gamble, particularly in the UK and the USA.
Can I risk taking three years away from the job market, at high cost, in order to gain qualifications that give me access to higher-than-minimum-wage jobs that I can get no other way, and will there be jobs at the end of it?
It is something that in most cases you can't afford to do and you also can't afford not to do.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
it's a crude approximation to economies of scale. However, big doesn't always mean economies of scale because efficiency tends to drop when growing big, unless the head works hard to ensure it isnt bloating. Unfortunately, sometimes these managers (i.e., non-founding managers) rather have a bigger fiefdom rather than a better/more efficient company.
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
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.'
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.
> Walmart and Amazon are the two biggest employers in the US.
One of the two biggest employers in the US is one who treats their employees so poorly that they have to pee in bottles and continue working after a colleague has died and been left on the floor? If that’s the kind of jobs large companies “provide”, it’s not worth it. We’d much better off with several small companies that give people the flexibility to escape draconian working conditions.
And both of them rely on government welfare to keep their employees from starving so that they can pass more wealth on to shareholders. A study earlier this year (below) estimated that more than a million Walmart and Amazon employees nationwide depend on Medicaid.
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.
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!
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 26.0 ms ] threadPaul - spend a few tokens to modernize it a bit? At least give me a text size I can read?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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
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.
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.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428589
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo
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.
> 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.
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
e.g. "I could be an engineer, or I could be a billionaire. Which one should I pick? If I'm an engineer, I could have a nice career in the industry; but if I'm a billionaire I wouldn't have to ever work again and could just do all the software engineering I want, so it's an obvious choice to pick being a billionare."
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.
[1] My experience in ML in 2026.
If you plan to go to industry, your incentives are somewhat misaligned with your PI. In that case you want to pursue multiple internships and getting networked with top companies in your field, and demonstrating practical output, well-released code, demonstrated downstream value for followup projects etc.
You're being needlessly dismissive of what "publishing papers" mean. Writing down what you learn is what papers are for, and the only papers that count for a PhD are those which are accepted by reference journals, which impose a relatively high bar on what content they accept.
So you still need to explore uncharted areas, and your main output is still writing down what you found for others to build upon. Those are the deliverables. For the person doing the PhD, the primary benefit is developing research skills, such as independente and self-reliance.
No. What qualifies you as a researcher is being able to output work that is accepted by your peers. Hence the peer review process is critical. You fail to meet this bar if you publish something in blogspot or even arxiv for that matter.
You are trying too hard to come up with excuses. The paper review process is double-blind, and nothing prevents you from publishing the same work in multiple journals. If your goal is to do meaningful contributions to science then "power dynamics" are irrelevant.
You do need to develop a meaningful network in the field if your goal is to collaborate with other researchers, but that's basically what everyone needs to do in any professional field.
Like I get that the current social norms around "research" might not be there yet, but if they fail to adapt, I just see that as a reason to defund "research" and start from scratch.
"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...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 hope PG isn’t outsourcing his thinking to some agentic workflow.)
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.
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.
I still agree with you though in that it is not necessarily the universities responsibility to cultivate founders.
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.
Sounds like a complete nonsense, yet here we are.
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.
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, or Staff Product Manager in the American, Israeli, Chinese, and Indian startup 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.
Today, everyone is a founder. Founders of bubbles and bro culture. Herd-minds, chasing the Californian greed rush. Round 'em up, Angel Investors!
- 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
It looks like I wrote that in a confusing way! My intention was to ask about what features of the engineering discipline was motivating OP's comparison. Maybe a better series of comparisons would have been...
- the 747 – program conception in '63, delivery in '69; – the A350 - first sales in '05, delivery in '13;
which I think captures the slow pace, and large dependency chain, of any significant program beyond a revision.
I think this is beyond bad.
The #1 thing anyone could ever to do study entrepreneurship is to do 'case studies'.
Liteally just learning/observing how they work - the nature of founding, structure, power relationships, what debt and equity are for.
Learning 'how a VC firm' operates, and indeed how other kinds of investment bankers work is golden.
HBS is almost a glorified 2 years of basic concepts + 'a lot of case studies'.
Learning how IBM, Standard Oil, Apple and a host of companies you've never heard of operate is deeply enlightening.
The 'Naive By Design' approach by the YC people is almost toxic.
There is definitely some insight in it - that 'seasoned executives' are probably worse at starting small companies in many ways, but, understanding why that is is really important. It has a lot to do with risk, the kinds of things CEO's of established companies are good at etc..
It's as absurd as saying 'Don't Learn Nursing By Studying Nursing - Just Do Music and Engineering'.
Doing 'projects' however, is a wonderful idea.
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.
Mind you, I'm not totally sure how this differs from employer/employee relationships in practice except I suppose that each side has less contractual protection from the other.
Has anyone ever plotted the lifespan of YC companies from each cohort?
Most of them end up dead…
YMMV you do have to have a different less nihilistic mindset but it really is a bit of a Neo in the Matrix moment because it lets you see through a bit of the corporate veneer to see the complex mess of personal and group foibles that run our major corporations.
In the end it also ends up making you a 10x more effective corporate worker if that’s where you end up even if just to protect your mental health by being able to explain what’s going on.
But just to caveat, its not YC or VC funding that is critical.
It’s the act of building something and trying to sell it that is.
No doubt there are learnings worth a lifetime, and changes that alter careers. You hope, the sense of superiority the experience seems to breed is not merely a coping mechanism, but an exercise in positive self-image [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34053801
Mostly an extremely online problem, not a real world one. More so the nature of the medium in fact.
I dont know how re-reading is going to help me see this sentence differently. I am just telling you my lived experience shows me this prior is simply not true. That's all.
wait till you see what happens to a lot of forbes 30 under 30
I'd argue that both of these would be highly beneficial for all kinds of students, founders and non-founders alike.
Starting a startup could be generalized for all students to having a dream or goal, taking ownership of it, and making it happen. A startup is just one possible path, pg is probably too specific here, I would agree.
Having more free time to work on my own projects is probably the freedom I missed most at university. I think learning to choose what to work on and making something happen would benefit future workers, teachers, doctors, and engineers just as much as entrepreneurs.
It's a trade-off in terms of time and other resources, since parts of the existing curriculum would have to fade away. But I think it's a good starting point for change and a good direction to move in.
And "building things" isn't enough. Many projects have zero commercial potential.
I don't think PG is wrong, but I also don't think he's right. I think if universities wanted to do something with startup culture they could filter the more motivated and talented students into incubators of their own - not through some kind of overly academic post-grad degree, but literally a startup school where the university provides resources, subsistence, and access to funding, in return for a share of project equity. The "teaching" would be more about finding customers and handling finances and less about managerial MBA nonsense.
The big win for students would be "You don't have to worry about food, rent, or basic running costs."
Post-grad research overlaps with this, but is more fundamental. The emphasis here would be more on projects with immediate income potential, not on technology that could be commercialised in the future, possibly.
The problem is academic culture is very different to startup culture, so the startup school would need a much looser relationship to its parent than a typical academic department.
First he doesn't say universities should prepare founders - his advice is to those universities that do want to do that.
Second, his advice is basically to skip BS business education and make students good professionals, well-rounded intellectuals, not afraid of starting a business. Anyone would benefit from such education, not only prospective founders
As a university professor, I've seen that all universities want to do everything.
By which I mean, they employ all sorts of people who are pushing a huge range of agendas. You can't meaningfully speak about "what universities want", because various factions tend to expect free rein to pursue their goals, and there is no mechanism to get everyone pushing in the same direction.
I felt my most valuable formative experience for being a startup worker was the summer I was back from college and the supermarket I worked at in high school felt they owed me a job even though they weren't really hiring.
I was assigned 50% as a bagger in the front end and 50% a pinch hitter attached to the store manager who did whatever random things we needed whether it was deep clean the floor, paint a metal strip around the building, learn to work the meat slicer to sub for somebody in the deli, sub for people in the bakery, etc.
That made me into somebody who did whatever need to be done, but people who haven't had that kind of experience get really hung up on job titles and think "I'm a data scientist, I don't need to do that."
Just like mostly everything he writes about.
The prescriptions from the essay are probably even more important for universities preparing students who will go on to work in ossified institutions (particularly large corporations and the medical industry).
Let me explain.
When a large University wants to do something, the impulse is to study whether they should spin up a dedicated course of study. So you might end up with a degree or specialization in Entrepreneurship. And new programs -- particularly those which are priorities for Administrators -- often come with money. The faculty will compete over who gets that program, and for something like "Make Startup Founders" there's a high chance that the program would be attached to a Business or Finance degree.
I have never founded or worked at a startup, so I have no idea if this is true. But I do think that "seek out powerful ideas and then work on self-directed projects to test and extend those ideas" is the most valuable thing kids can do in College (aside from course-work).
There's kind of no replacement for good peers + curiosity + free time. Universities often squander the opportunity for their students by funneling students into silly three-course-sequence curricula instead of just giving them resources, time, and space to dive deep on the ideas they're encountering.
The recommendation of the essay, as I read it, is something like "stop spinning up silly degree specializations and go back to providing a liberal education". From the essay:
> Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to the ideal of liberal education than preparing them for almost any other kind of career.
IMO, from a societal perspective, it's (ironically!) exactly the opposite. On the margin, reducing specialized course load in favor of giving students space to work on projects and think deeply about powerful ideas provides a net benefit to society precisely because it's non-startup-like institutions where society benefits most from employees having a liberal education.
It's kind of funny because the standard critique of business types interjecting into universities is that they push immediately employable skills at the expense of liberal education, and here PG is doing exactly the opposite. In fact, a quote from the essay:
"Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to the ideal of liberal education than preparing them for almost any other kind of career."
If we take the author on his word regarding startups and founders, then society doesn't really need startup founders to get that sort of education! The very nature of "doing a startup" provides a crucible. More startup founders might fail, of course, but from a societal perspective "oh well". Some other founder will succeed in their place.
But large corporations, schools, and (I assume) hospitals do not provide that natural crucible. Those institutions, which we all rely on, will crumble and become expensive broken husks of their former selves when their constituent employees do not think deeply about what's going on around them and adapt.
I think society is definitely better off if we have inquisitive and motivated engineers/administrators/educators/doctors/nurses/etc. So society does benefit from those people being given the structured free time and space to learn how to think deeply about powerful ideas.
I also think that "prepare students with powerful ideas then give them good peers and free time to build things" is a decent way of teaching people the "think deeply about the world and your place in it" thing. And I am generally suspicious of mini sub-degree pathways that purport to teach immediately useful skills but do so at the expense of the time and space necessary to teach the more important meta thing. Which I think might be the sort of thing PG is reacting to here ("So the way to prepare undergraduates to become successful founders is not to give them some new curriculum focused on "entrepreneurship".").
In short, once the foundation for working in a field is provided, I this society is better off when we prefer liberal education over incremental highly structured courses on minutiae.
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.
This is a rather oversimplified, old-fashioned take on the purpose of university.
University in the modern world is simple: a straightforward high-stakes gamble, particularly in the UK and the USA.
Can I risk taking three years away from the job market, at high cost, in order to gain qualifications that give me access to higher-than-minimum-wage jobs that I can get no other way, and will there be jobs at the end of it?
It is something that in most cases you can't afford to do and you also can't afford not to do.
I think PG is very out of touch.
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?
i see it as: large companies are proof that much trade and consumption has occurred.
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
Rhetorical question.
One of the two biggest employers in the US is one who treats their employees so poorly that they have to pee in bottles and continue working after a colleague has died and been left on the floor? If that’s the kind of jobs large companies “provide”, it’s not worth it. We’d much better off with several small companies that give people the flexibility to escape draconian working conditions.
https://nypost.com/2026/04/15/business/amazon-warehouse-empl...
https://futurism.com/future-society/amazon-accused-hiding-de...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...
https://www.ips-dc.org/report-americas-20-largest-low-wage-e...
It’s interesting to see how the Americans have a different view on this.