How Universities Should Prepare Founders

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."

(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.

My university prepared me to be a founder by making me so unemployable that starting a business was my best option.

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 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.

> 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 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

[dead]

Isn't it amazing how posts about Paul, who has rejected Trump, are so civil compared to other Silicon Valley movers who embrace him?

[dead]

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?

What do universities have to do with startup founders? Gross.