{ "archive_path": "archive/1787687485.216939", "base_url": "paulgraham.com/prepare.html", "basename": "prepare.html", "bookmarked_date": "2026-08-25 19:51", "canonical": { "archive_org_path": "https://web.archive.org/web/paulgraham.com/prepare.html", "dom_path": "output.html", "favicon_path": "favicon.ico", "git_path": "git/", "google_favicon_path": "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=paulgraham.com", "headers_path": "headers.json", "htmltotext_path": "htmltotext.txt", "index_path": "index.html", "media_path": "media/", "mercury_path": "mercury/content.html", "pdf_path": "output.pdf", "readability_path": "readability/content.html", "screenshot_path": "screenshot.png", "singlefile_path": "singlefile.html", "warc_path": "warc/", "wget_path": "paulgraham.com/prepare.html" }, "domain": "paulgraham.com", "extension": "html", "hash": "1W6WERAJBBGHEK7937P0", "history": { "archive_org": [], "dom": [], "favicon": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "60", "--output", "favicon.ico", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=paulgraham.com" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T20:03:53.152917+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "favicon.ico", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787687485.216939", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T20:03:52.527980+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "git": [], "headers": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--head", "--max-time", "60", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://paulgraham.com/prepare.html" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T20:03:53.540821+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "headers.json", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787687485.216939", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T20:03:53.158760+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "htmltotext": [], "media": [], "mercury": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/@postlight/parser/cli.js", "https://paulgraham.com/prepare.html" ], "cmd_version": "1.0.0", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T20:04:00.520939+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "mercury", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787687485.216939", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T20:03:57.174461+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "pdf": [], "readability": [ { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmpwztj0fut", "https://paulgraham.com/prepare.html" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T20:03:57.167128+00:00", "index_texts": [ "August 2026How should universities prepare students to start startups?\nY\u00a0Combinator is in the perfect position to answer this\nquestion, because we get them next. We're like grad school.\nAnd because YC has had 20 years to refine its model of what\na promising founder looks like, you probably won't find a\nbetter target.What do the YC partners look for? It's surprisingly simple.\nThey want people who are good at building things and have a\nhabit of doing it.The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build,\nand being able to build it. And that kind of knowledge comes\nfrom studying computer science or mechanical engineering or\nmolecular biology, not management or finance.\n[1]So the way to prepare undergraduates to become successful\nfounders is not to give them some new curriculum focused on\n\"entrepreneurship\". It's to do what universities already do\nbest \u2014 to teach them computer science and mechanical\nengineering and molecular biology. \n[2]Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to\nthe ideal of liberal education than preparing them for\nalmost any other kind of career. Startups succeed or fail\nbased on how much customers like the product. Customers\ndon't care what the founders studied in college. So founders\nare free to study whatever they want, as long as they get\ngood at building things.But building should be understood in a very broad sense. It\ndoesn't mean all would-be founders have to study some form\nof engineering. Almost any kind of expertise that could be\ndescribed as building or creating could be useful. It was\nuseful to Steve Jobs to have studied calligraphy, for\nexample; it was one of the reasons Apple dominated desktop\npublishing. So while math and science and engineering and\ndesign tend to be good bets, I would not want to draw a\nsharp line around them, because I can imagine other\nforms of building that could be useful. And of course you\ndon't have to major in something to be good at it. Mark\nZuckerberg was good at programming, but he was a psychology\nmajor, not a CS major.The best way to describe what would-be founders should study\nis that they should seek out powerful ideas. But smart\npeople are naturally attracted to powerful ideas anyway. So\nas long as departments teaching powerful ideas exist, the\nsort of people who'd make good founders will find them.\n[3]In fact there are only two things universities need to\nchange to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to\nmake students feel that starting a startup is something they\ncan do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own\nprojects.At the moment, the belief that it's possible to start a\nstartup is very unevenly distributed. YC now gets so many\napplications that our application data is a reasonable proxy\nfor interest in startups at different universities, and\nHarvard alumni, for example, apply at about twice the rate\nof Yale and Princeton alumni. Presumably Harvard students\naren't that different from Yale and Princeton students; the\nreason Harvard students go on to start more startups is just\nthat it's more customary there. Which in turn implies that\nmerely by making their students feel that starting a startup\nis a viable option, Yale and Princeton could at least double\nthe number who do.Once a university has a culture of starting startups, you\ndon't have to convince students that it's a viable option.\nNew students learn that from older ones. But at a university\nthat doesn't have much of a startup culture yet, there are\nthings you can do to help this realization along. The most\neffective is probably to show students examples of people\nwho've done it.Until you've seen some founders in real life, you tend to\nthink that starting startups is something done by other\npeople. Seeing them pops that bubble. In fact seeing\nfounders in real life is doubly inspiring: they seem\nimpressive, but they also seem human. Especially when they\ntalk about the early years, when they were clueless and made\nlots of mistakes. So strangely enough seeing founders in\nreal life makes being one seem simultaneously both desirable\nand accessible. It makes students think \"I want to be like\nthat, and I could.\"How inspiring founders are to students is a function roughly\nof how rich and famous they are divided by how much older\nthey are than the students. So it's not essential to bring\nfamous billionaires to campus. Founders in their mid\ntwenties who are 3 years into a startup with a valuation of\na couple hundred million will do as well; they may only be a\ntwentieth as rich and famous, but they're twenty times\neasier for students to identify with.________________\nIt's obvious why universities that want their students to\nstart startups need to make them believe it's a viable\noption. But why is it so important for students to work on\ntheir own projects?There are four reasons. The first is simply that it's a\ngreat way, possibly the best way, to understand a subject\nreally deeply. The excitement of creating something new is a\nmuch more powerful motivator than the fear of doing badly on\nan exam.Second, working on projects together is the best way for\ncofounders to discover one another. The most successful\nstartups tend to have multiple founders, and the only way to\ntell for sure if someone will be good to work with is to\nwork with them. Apple and Microsoft were just the last of\nmany projects their founders had worked on together.Third, a startup is a project, so starting one will feel\nnatural to someone who's used to working on projects of\ntheir own. It won't seem weird that there's no teacher or\nboss telling them what to do. They're used to telling\nthemselves.Fourth, and perhaps most surprisingly, random side projects\nare where the best startup ideas come from. The best startup\nideas tend to seem so implausible at first that anyone\nconsciously looking for startup ideas would reject them.\nWho'd expect to start a huge company by creating a student\ndirectory? So the way to discover the best startup ideas is\nnot to look for startup ideas but just to work on whatever\nrandom projects seem interesting. Because in fact such\nprojects are far from random: young people who are good at\nbuilding things are technological bellwethers, so any idea\nthat seems interesting to them is disproportionately likely\nto lead somewhere valuable, even if they themselves don't\nrealize it yet.Now it should be clear why the YC partners care a lot about\nthe projects that applicants have worked on and not at all\nabout their GPAs. Projects are the best source of knowledge,\nthe best source of founding teams, and the best source of\nstartup ideas.But encouraging students to work on their own projects may\nbe difficult for universities. It will mean giving the\nstudents more free time, and universities may not like to do\nthat.Microsoft and Meta have something in common that few people\nrealize. They both got started during reading period at\nHarvard. Reading period is the gap between the end of\nclasses and the beginning of final exams. It's called\nreading period because students are supposed to spend it\npreparing for exams. But reading period also turns out to\nhave the unique combination of qualities that make it\nperfect for starting new projects: the students are all on\ncampus, and they don't have anything due the next day. That\nlatter constraint, especially, is a huge drag on the most\nambitious students. Merely eliminating it for a few weeks\nresulted in two trillion dollar companies. Imagine what the\nUS GDP would be if reading period at Harvard were twice as\nlong.Universities will tend to resist the idea of keeping\nstudents less busy with coursework. Partly because\nadministrators feel that if they want to achieve something,\nthey have to do it by taking active measures. Achieving\nsomething merely by leaving students alone is alien to their\nnature.And they should be left alone. These things should be the\nstudents' own projects; the university should resist the\ntemptation to make them official. Partly because students\nwill be more excited to work on a project that's entirely\ntheir own, and partly because many projects wouldn't survive\nofficial recognition, because they break some sort of rule.\nBill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both got in trouble with the\nHarvard administration over projects they worked on as\nundergrads. Bill broke university rules by bringing Paul\nAllen, who wasn't a student, into the computer lab with him\nto work on Altair Basic. Zuck got in such trouble over\nFacemash that he was put on disciplinary probation. And\ntheir cases are probably more the rule than the exception.\nUniversities have lots of rules, and novel projects are\noften untidy things.Right now there are students flying drones out of line of\nsight. Turn a blind eye to it.Another reason it will be hard for universities to keep\nstudents less busy is that they'll worry that without some\nkind of oversight, most students will just waste whatever\nfree time they're given. And they will! The price of giving\nthe most energetic students room to do even better is that\nit leaves the least energetic ones room to do even worse.\nBut that's a price that's worth paying, because if the most\nenergetic students do better they could do a lot better,\nwhereas the laziest students already learn so little that\nthere's not much room for them to do worse. So giving all\nthe students some of their time back could improve the\naverage outcome a lot, even if it doesn't move the median.\n[4]It may seem a bit excessive to change the whole schedule of\nthe university just to encourage would-be founders. They're\nnever going to be more than 10% of the students. And it\nprobably would be excessive if this change only helped\nfounders. But in fact giving the students some of their time\nback would help all the most energetic and ambitious ones.\nThey'd all explore new things of one type or another if the\npressure of work were relieved for even a week or two.________________\nNow that I've explained how universities should prepare\nfounders, I should explain how not to. One thing\nuniversities can't do is actually teach students how to\nstart startups. Starting a startup is one of those things,\nlike chemistry or painting, that you have to learn by doing.\nWhich means a properly run class on how to start a startup\nwould have to be a lab class: the students would actually\nhave to start startups. And I know exactly what a class of\nthis type should look like, because YC is it. But YC is very\ndifferent in structure from a university, and if you tried\nto cram it into an undergrad degree program, it would become\na joke. Are the students supposed to start these companies\nwithout any funding? Are they supposed to run startups,\nwhich notoriously take every moment of your time when done\nproperly, while simultaneously taking three or four other\nclasses? And what if, despite these handicaps, some of the\nstartups actually take off? Are the students just supposed\nto abandon them? Because it's either that or drop out.Running a startup is incompatible with being a full time\nstudent. The only way to learn how to start a startup is to\ndo it. Those two statements are so obvious that they're\npractically truisms. And yet so many people manage to remain\nin denial about what they imply. You can't teach students\nhow to start startups.One common response to this inconvenient truth is to pretend\nto teach them how to start startups, for example by\norganizing business plan competitions. The students\ncollaborate to come up with a startup idea, which they then\npitch to simulated investors. This kind of exercise is not\nmerely useless but positively misleading. It trains founders\nto think that fundraising is the essential step in starting\na startup \u2014 that the core of starting a startup is to\ncreate a story that appeals to investors. As an investor, I\ncan tell you that's not true. Fundraising is merely a\nnecessary evil. The people you need to impress are users,\nnot investors, and the way you impress them is with\nprototypes, not words. The core of starting a startup is not\ncreating a story that appeals to investors, but creating a\nproduct that appeals to users.\n[5]In fact would-be founders should be doing exactly the\nopposite of what students do in business plan competitions.\nInstead of thinking about startups without building\nanything, they should be building things without thinking\nabout whether they'll turn into startups.Probably one of the reasons universities are tempted to\norganize bogus things like business plan competitions is\nthat if they actually took the optimal measures to prepare\nstudents to start startups, it would look too quiet. Imagine\nif a university were doing everything right. Students would\nbe getting a deep knowledge of how to build things in\nclasses they were taking out of genuine interest, and\nworking eagerly with their friends on side projects that had\nnothing to do with school. The students would graduate with\nexactly what predicts success in founders: the ability to\nbuild things and a habit of doing it. Plus a significant\nnumber of those side projects would be incipient startups.\nAnd yet it would look to parents and prospective students as\nif the university wasn't doing anything. Where are the\nclasses on \"entrepreneurship\"? Where is the Innovation\nCenter?And indeed this is another great thing about the optimal\nplan for preparing startup founders: it costs nothing extra.\nYou don't have to hire any deans of entrepreneurship or\nbuild any new buildings. In fact if you do, those things\nwill tend to drag you down; there's no need for them, so if\nthey have any effect at all it will tend to be for the\nworse. If you have spare money, give it to the people\nteaching computer science or mechanical engineering or\nmolecular biology.\n[6]But if the optimal route looks too quiet, the solution is\nnot to avoid it. The solution is to stand firm, knowing that\nyou're doing the right thing, and eventually the results\nwill speak for themselves. If you can develop an organic\nstartup culture among your students and there are multiple\nstudents in every year who go on to start successful ones,\nthis will soon become evident to anyone paying attention.\nNotes[1]\nShould students still study computer science if AIs\nwill write most code? Definitely. CS is an interesting\nsubject in its own right and also a great way to understand\nproblem solving in general. And even if you have AIs writing\nall your code for you, you're still in the position of an\nengineering manager, and good engineering managers should be\nable to do the work of those working for them.[2]\nOne reason I always put \"entrepreneurship\" in quotes\nis that it's a misleading word to use to describe starting\nstartups. \"Entrepreneurship\" simply means starting one's own\nbusiness, and startups are a microscopically small subset of\nthat world in which the rules are completely different. So\nconflating the two is asking for trouble.[3]\nOf course all departments will claim to be teaching\npowerful ideas. But false claims of this type don't seem\nmuch of a danger. The sort of people who'd make good\nfounders wouldn't even need to see through them; they simply\nwouldn't be interested enough in the classes taught by such\ndepartments to have much of their time wasted by them.[4]\nThere's an interesting parallel here to variation in\nincome. The bottom of the income scale is anchored firmly at\nzero, because there are some people who are either incapable\nof working or just not interested in doing it at the moment.\nIf you let there be more variation in income, it won't\naffect the income of the people at this end of the scale; n\ntimes zero is zero; but at the other end of the scale you'll\nsee enormous change.[5]\nPresumably one reason these competitions lean toward\nimpressing investors rather than users is that it's the only\nway to have a single set of judges. Investors can be treated\nas interchangeable, whereas the users of each product might be\ndifferent. But if it's impractical to measure the right\nthing, that doesn't mean the solution is to measure the\nwrong one.[6]\nAnother thing that will tend to draw universities away\nfrom the optimal path is business schools, if they have\nthem. Business schools were not designed to train founders.\nThey were designed to train the managerial class of the\nlarge industrial companies that arose in the early 20th\ncentury; they're the West Points of industrial capitalism.\nThat's why their official name is usually the School of\nManagement. But while the skills they teach might be useful\nin running companies beyond a certain size, they're not the\ncritical ingredient in founding them. And the skills that\nare are already taught by other departments. So to the\nextent business schools affect their parent university's\nstrategy for preparing founders, it can only be by adding\nerror.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, \nDaniel Diermeier, Jared\nFriedman, Diana Hu, Michael Kotlikoff, Jessica Livingston,\nRobert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts\nof this." ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787687485.216939", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T20:03:55.430318+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "60", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://paulgraham.com/prepare.html" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T20:03:55.425844+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "How Universities Should Prepare Founders", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787687485.216939", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T20:03:55.418127+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [ { "cmd": [ "wget", "--no-verbose", "--adjust-extension", "--convert-links", "--force-directories", "--backup-converted", "--span-hosts", "--no-parent", "-e", "robots=off", "--timeout=60", "--restrict-file-names=windows", "--warc-file=/data/archive/1787687485.216939/warc/1787688233", "--page-requisites", "--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) wget/GNU Wget 1.21.3", "--compression=auto", "https://paulgraham.com/prepare.html" ], "cmd_version": "GNU Wget 1.21.3", "end_ts": "2026-08-25T20:03:55.412607+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "paulgraham.com/prepare.html", "pwd": "/data/archive/1787687485.216939", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-08-25T20:03:53.547873+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": null, "dom": null, "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": null, "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "How Universities Should Prepare Founders", "warc": null, "wget": "paulgraham.com/prepare.html" }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1787687485.216939", "newest_archive_date": "2026-08-25T20:03:57.174461+00:00", "num_failures": 0, "num_outputs": 6, "oldest_archive_date": "2026-08-25T20:03:52.527980+00:00", "path": "/prepare.html", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_id": "6d8ffb08-753e-40af-b8ba-02cdb8b31f65", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1787687485-import.txt" ], "tags": null, "tags_str": "", "timestamp": "1787687485.216939", "title": "How Universities Should Prepare Founders", "updated": "2026-08-25T20:03:52.527492+00:00", "updated_date": "2026-08-25 20:03", "url": "https://paulgraham.com/prepare.html" }