This is shockingly vapid and wishy-washy even for PG.
Leaving this weird, rather Valley-specific, even YC-specific, navel-gazing definition of "founder" aside, universities should do what they promise to do for their students. And if possible for way, way, way less money.
He seems quite out of touch with the level of economic hardship involved in being a student; a huge number of students already work a couple of jobs and are navigating small businesses, especially here in the UK where he apparently now lives. They aren't going to have enough "free time" to play with a "project" even if a bit more is made available by loosening the curriculum.
If any change is necessary it should be that every university student has access to actual education and ongoing (post-graduation) support to start a real, not hypothetical business, rather than leaving them in this "ripe for YC picking" state where they have "done projects" but don't really have any awareness of business.
If students leave university immediately able to run their own businesses, understand how to bootstrap, be closer to self-funding etc., that leaves them in a stronger position than if they can show they have done stuff but need an external startup meat grinder to get them anywhere. Especially since the job market is being screwed the world over.
But YC doesn't want its people to be that independent. It wants them persuadable, overconfident and desperate to sign up to space camp.
I don't know how a university could package this, or package "experience" or. "building", etc. I went to college, did engineering and also did economics and did "entrepreneurship". The last 2 were useful not in a sense that they unlocked anything, but I was already starting a business by my second or third year, that I run to this day. I took the courses because I felt I needed them as I bootstrapped. Went on to build multiple startups since. Never went to YC though.
So something was already brewing in me much earlier, and idk what advice to give, honestly not sure how a university can inject this into students. But I think the useful part of the advice is to get universities to stop packaging "entrepreneurship" courses as the path to actual entrepreneurship.
What percentage of students in those classes actually go on to become founders? Willing to bet the numbers aren't encouraging.
Right but what percentage of people doing any given class end up specialising in it?
It's not their job to "inject" it but universities are going to have to grapple with the notion that if they want to keep admitting students, then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses.
So some truly functional support for self-employment, startups, small business working generally seems inevitable. If you're going to persuade students to step out of the job market for up to four years and take on vast debt to hand over then I think pastoral care includes providing the framework to teach them to fend for themselves when the jobs in the brochure don't turn up.
Concrete support, rather than "make yourself ready for something like YC".
(Beyond that I actually think prospectuses should be more closely regulated for what they can and cannot suggest is a likely employment outcome. Because at the moment, prospectuses are aimed at kids and are full of misleading content about how likely they are to get a job.)
> then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses.
That has always been the case, because the purpose of universities is not feeding the market with workers or founders, it's feeding society with educated people. Which is incidentally an excellent basis for both founder and worker roles.
That is the aspirational purpose, not the functional purpose. Universities have long advertised job placement rates for the majors in their departments- I recall a lawsuit against a university I was going to by alumni with the allegation that the numbers were artificially padded to the point of false marketing (I don't recall the outcome, though).
Even if we were to accept the premise that universities exist to feed society with educated people, we should then question the value of the education students are getting, given the significant grade inflation over the last 20 or so years.
"Universities have long advertised job placement rates for the majors in their departments" - they shouldn't have, this was actually never their purpose but it was easy to make that promise when jobs were easier for college graduates, so they used it to sell more seats. No one can give you a formula to get a job. You're competing with everyone for a scarce resource. That formula is self defeating. Let's enroll 10000 students and promise all of them that if they are on the top 500 they will be employed at one of the 100 available jobs?
And really, if universities wanted to feed the entrepreneurship engine, they should use their endowments to create funds within their programs, so innovative students could apply for, get some seed funding that is required to actually become a real business and generate a return on the fund.
Then you not only create actual founders, you grow your endowment and you actually evaluate the university on their fund's performance.
You democratize the YC model. I wonder why they haven't tried. Maybe bc they can't actually create founders?
Right but the tenor of it is different. In the 90s if you went more than a fortnight of job search after you graduated and didn’t get to being offered an interview, either you only had a third class degree or there was something very wrong with your CV.
These days every job has hundreds of applicants. In the AI era, thousands.
A University education is priced as though as it has near-term ROI. The government has subsidized it on the basis that it's opening an investment with strong near-term ROI to its citizens.
I don't think you can claim that this ROI is not its purpose.
> He seems quite out of touch with the level of economic hardship involved in being a student; a huge number of students already work a couple of jobs and are navigating small businesses, especially here in the UK where he apparently now lives. They aren't going to have enough "free time" to play with a "project" even if a bit more is made available by loosening the curriculum.
Empirically, student free time grew for much of the 20th century, and students spend much less time on school work than they used to. The decline is not explained by students spending more time on work outside of school; much of it has become leisure time.
Now perhaps there has been a sharp change in the years since those two studies (there certainly has been a sharp change in UK tuition costs), but the point is that our intuitions about how hard students must have to work these days are usually wrong.
When I was an undergrad (35 years ago) I had at least 2 days a week where I was so busy that I had to choose between eating or sleeping. I usually picked eating because not sleeping meant I could pick up another shift or grind on a class project (also because I was young... if I tried that now I'd probably die)
I was going to say, "You might not have noticed, but it has been the 21st century for a quarter-century." However, you clearly did notice, so I'm not sure why you bothered to make this post. It's like you came to a conclusion, realized your empirical data was empirically out-of-date, but decided to press on anyhow. Rather than elucidate the subject, you just exposed your biases.
More recent surveys have not contradicted the trend. For instance, in 2015,
> On average, students spent about 14 HPW preparing for class, 6 HPW working for pay, 12 HPW relaxing and socializing, 7 HPW participating in co-curricular activities and community service, 2 HPW caring for dependents, and 3 HPW commuting to campus. These activities accounted for a total weekly average of 45 HPW.
That's a mischaracterization of the study. The very next sentence:
However, the standard deviations indicate that there is considerable variation in how students allocate their time to these activities.
Additionally, their data is an "analytical sample" extracted via "weighted random selection" from a larger data set from more than 10 years ago. We don't know how well that sample fit the broader reality a decade ago, let alone today.
That you went fishing for research to support your argument and this is the best you could find is telling.
Enough universities in Europe that do this. I am thinking of studying maths at the German distance university. I forgot the name. It would mean that I neef to speak good German. I might just do that too
> The FernUniversität in Hagen is Germany’s only state distance-learning university, and its largest in terms of student numbers. Its flexible degree programs and continuing education options make higher education accessible to students in a variety of life situations. Its five faculties conduct a wide range of theoretical and applied research in their subject areas of Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology, Mathematics and Computer Science, Economics and Business Administration, and Law.
His point is to rethink the purpose education...
Yes, there's a privellaged sense in assuming every student has equal access to time,resources, and family dynamics and economics. I feel the idea that universities and education system in general needs to move away from purely academic style of education to practical startup-forcused is needed for the new era.
You’re talking about trade schools with 3 units in financial accounting.
This “rethinking of education” you’re on about is already incredibly rigid from the start, and will not give young people the generalist skills to weather cycles of hype and economic downturns.
> move away from purely academic style of education to practical startup-forcused is needed for the new era.
The new era does not seem to be startup or small business focused, that period already was - at around the time google and company started. Back then, startup actually meant small business starting up.
What is puzzling is why do you need to highjack academia, make it stop doing academic and turn it into incubator or business hub. VCs have enough money to create own business hubs. And they can even admit people who are not from most flashy universities there. There is no reason to take over academia and stop it from its original purpose.
30 years ago you needed PG / YC to have a startup. Hardware was expensive, bandwidth wasn't ubiquitous, there wasn't a massive breadth of libraries and lessons online of what to do and not do.
None of that is true today. And though its is possible to build another unicorn there is not a really good reason to do that any more.
Learning about taxes, business structures (CoOp's any one), HR (how not to get sued, how BAD hr means the IRS comes to get you), reading a cap table, reading a contract, accounting are all skills that a solid tech team needs to "build a business". Marketing, Customer acquisition, Customer retention, Customer Service are all places where most recent grads might not have the skills to "do the needful"
LLM's have compressed the early build out stage. The tech portion, getting from zero to one is now partly trivial. If you are going to build out a niche business that does 1-10 million ARR now is the time. Thats not a product at a scale the at PG and other VC's are really interested in, but it is possible to run a project that size with a very small multi-talented team. They need all those other non technical skills to make it happen.
> 30 years ago you needed PG / YC to have a startup.
What's a "startup"? For the most part, you're just building a small business. You deal with local bureaucracies, learn about accounting, hire first employees, struggle to find customers. People have been doing this for ages without VCs. And 99% of startups never progress past that stage.
The only thing that VC funding changes is that it lets you grow faster than justified. This can turn you into the next Google, but most often, it puts you on a completely unsustainable path where you only have two outs: writing the project off or offloading it to a FOMO buyer for more than it's worth. The VC ecosystem is exceedingly good at that second part.
I think just as those who have never had kids, those who have never done a (successful) startup do not understand the value of PG's words - the same way those who choose not to have kids do not understand the joy of (having) them. There is great wisdom in PG's essay, and it is not vapid or wishy-washy.
Leaving this weird, rather Valley-specific, even YC-specific, navel-gazing definition of "founder" aside, universities should do what they promise to do for their students. And if possible for way, way, way less money.
He seems quite out of touch with the level of economic hardship involved in being a student; a huge number of students already work a couple of jobs and are navigating small businesses, especially here in the UK where he apparently now lives. They aren't going to have enough "free time" to play with a "project" even if a bit more is made available by loosening the curriculum.
If any change is necessary it should be that every university student has access to actual education and ongoing (post-graduation) support to start a real, not hypothetical business, rather than leaving them in this "ripe for YC picking" state where they have "done projects" but don't really have any awareness of business.
If students leave university immediately able to run their own businesses, understand how to bootstrap, be closer to self-funding etc., that leaves them in a stronger position than if they can show they have done stuff but need an external startup meat grinder to get them anywhere. Especially since the job market is being screwed the world over.
But YC doesn't want its people to be that independent. It wants them persuadable, overconfident and desperate to sign up to space camp.