Y Combinator vs. Graduate School | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator vs. Graduate School

startupboy.com

13 pointsvibhavs15 comments

After your YC startup fails, you have 2 less years of your life and "failed startup" on your resume. After graduate school, you have letters after your name that makes it easier to get jobs.

Just sayin', this article is very fanboish. Startups are for people that want to do startups, not for people that want to "do something" after college. In many cases, starting a startup can be a bad decisions. (And in some, like Google, it can be pretty good.)

A failed startup is not necessarily a bad thing. Depends on a lot of factors like how far it got, what funding was used, and challenges that were overcome.

A person who has business, financing, customer, technical, and product management exposure is likely a very promising asset to a company.

How often do you find those qualities in a graduate student where academia itself gives you little real world experience? Need some good internships to back up that degree.

A failed startup with experience doing cutting edge product R&D could have a lot more value in the job market than two years in school and a master's degree. Its worked out well for me - failure after failure, learned a ton, career doing quite well. I work with PhD's all day long, and they are bright, capable people. I also interview PhD's who are incapable of building things, or demonstrating their intelligence whatsoever. The Valley is a meritocracy - if you can do things, you are employable. If you can do difficult things, you'll get good work alongside degreed persons.

As long as you learn a ton - its not hard to make a startup as valuable as a degree. Its called 'equivalent experience,' and in Silicon Valley at least - it means what it says.

If you're "repeating the works of the greats" in grad school, you're doing it wrong. That's what undergrad is for, and maybe a masters, but getting a PhD is supposed to be all about producing something new. By the end you should be the world expert in your (admittedly narrow) area, and have produced published scientific results that were previously not known to the field.

Overall though, they're two totally different things, and if you don't know which of the two is more appealing to you, you don't have a very good idea of what you want to do. Do you want to advance the current state of scientific knowledge? Or do you want to produce products and services that people will find useful? The two occasionally overlap, but in general they're fairly different occupations.

If you're paying to go to grad school, you're doing it wrong.

Can you expand on this idea? Law school can be expensive but worth the cost, for counterexample.

I'm assuming that the author is not referring to post-graduate professional schools, e.g. law and medical school. In these cases its more or less impossible to get into the profession without the degree.

I'm talking specifically about CS, as CS students would be the main group of people who can choose between grad school and YC. The point is probably valid for all science courses.

Good students get paid to do PhDs in science. That's not generally true for grad school in arts and humanities, but those students would rarely be looking to apply to YC/techstars, etc.

Perhaps he was thinking more of MS programs for which I think most people pay.

Maybe. I wouldn't use the term 'grad school' for an MSc program, unless its the first two years of a US PhD.

I think the OP is talking about PhD programs too. After all, doing a short MSc doesn't prevent you doing YC afterwards.

Far be it from me to suggest that YC is not good for people, but...

After school, you get a job. After YC, you create jobs.

Not necessarily.

You repeat the works of the greats in school. YC expects you to do original work.

There is value in standing upon the shoulders of giants.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -George Santayana

Two years of industry experience can be a wonderful thing, too. Ideally your job will teach you all the bits of professionalism that your schooling left out (a short list from mine: SQL, SVN, and how to obsessively document everything), and you'll probably get good exposure to an industry. If you want ideas of things which need fixing, work for a living; you'll end up with more than you could ever use.

   “Y Combinator” is a generic term

Well that is interesting. Why shouldn't YC be a xerox or kleenex brand? PG seems consistently annoyed with naming and labels applied to YC, but I don't think he'd mind a generalization of the name.

Agreed contingent on two points of concern:

1. Did you gain enough practical/technical knowledge before or during undergrad to attack a given problem with a profitable solution?

2. Can you convince an investor of point #1?

Most people don't go to grad school to start companies.

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