Are you building a company, or your credentials?

Getting into and surviving top notch elite business schools requires a whole lot of credentials.

The guys and gals that spent their lives accrediting themselves with clubs, sports, extracurriculars now want to join in on the entrepreneur revolution David Fincher crafted for them.

To do so they're applying their way of "success" to this new field. Because that's all they know. And as long as there's money, there'll be support for these guys. The fervent frothing is a sign of the bubble.

You think brogrammers are bad? Welcome the sharks. We've arrived at the jump zone. What's the real life equivalent of flooding Hacker News with Perl articles for 24 hours?

I question what the relentless seeker of credentials is trying to achieve. Not just here, but in general. If life is an infinite set of boxes to be checked, what's the point of it all?

It seems our society places an unduly large value on achievement, rather than accomplishment. The point of going to a top school is to say you've gone to a top school. The point of working at McKinsey or Goldman is to put it on your resume. The point of being on the board of X is to get onto the board of Y. And so forth. This is the cold, seldom-questioned bargain of achievement. It is a paint-by-numbers approach to success, and it certainly guarantees its devout adherant a substantial degree of material comfort. But at what cost? And is there an end goal? Or is life simply a contest to see who can build the most prestigious obituary?

I, for one, hope and trust that YC is able to sniff out the achievers from the accomplishers, and to select the latter. It is the latter who build great companies. The former make fantastic lawyers, consultants, and bankers.

This seems like a direct callback to PG's "After Credentials" essay ( http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html ), in a good way. What I get from this post is that we might be in the middle of a credentials shift, from the credentials being good guidelines, to the period where attaining them is an end in itself, the period where people are gaming the system.

This is common, it's somewhat frustrating, but I've found that my way to deal with it has been to let others pad their credentials. It's a waste of time for me to worry about, it would be like worrying about the weather day-to-day when the issue is really climate change. i.e. this is a cultural problem that cannot be solved on a micro level.

We really want to build and sell stuff that our team has built, it's not about my ego, it's not about the self, we just want to build cool things that people want to use. I have had some very deep conversations with the person I work with and we relate in the sense that we don't care for this incessant ego-building that goes on in the world and especially around college. It doesn't serve you well in a lot of cases to have a large ego. Of course that's an over simplification, but the egos are rampant at college and I don't want anything to do with it.

Let them pad their credentials, while you go build something great and don't give a shit about that.

"I think there is a fundamental difference between going after an initial idea, then pivoting, vs. jumping into entrepreneurship with no idea at all. With the meme of “team and execution are everything”, it’s easy to forget that ideas still matter."

I tend to agree. When I founded a chapter of a fraternity at my college, I had a really interesting discussion with the alum who helped us and almost all of the state start our chapters about leadership. Something he said during the initiation of our first pledge class (Alpha class) that will always stick with me: even though the Alphas are all great potential leaders, there is such a fundamental difference between them, the first group of followers who joined a group because they desired to be leaders, and us (my founders group), who went out with an idea and created something.

Mr. Lewis's point might have been different, but I think they stream from the same thing. While there may be people out there who have the capacity to create given an idea and others who have many ideas but don't end up creating, the rare combination of the two is what makes an entrepreneur, a true leader. Everyone else is a follower on some level. I might be totally off base and my point is tangential, but these are 3pm musings.

I'd love to get feedback on them, and I'm interested to see PG's response to the article.

I think there is a 3rd question that begs to be asked: Are you building yourself as a skilled professional?

"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four." - Paul Graham http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

When Paul Graham wrote that he was talking in the context of wealth but I think it just as easily applies to skill, knowledge, experience, network, etc.

I think there is a valid argument for frowning upon credential building but I'd be more curious to hear what HN thinks about this idea of building yourself? You could say its just as selfish as credential building but at the same time is it really bad if an accelerator ends up being primarily a talent generator for future generations of startups?

From a societal point of view, I'm a bit troubled. It's an encouraging trend that high talent individuals who would have gone into finance or consulting are considering startups. Should we really be turning them away? That said, I certainly understand your hesitations.

Like in most things, I think there's a healthy "middle way." Solely chasing credentials all of your life isn't wise, but targeting well chosen credentials is a way to unlock hard-to-open doors. Writing a book for a mainstream publisher, for example, was once a great way to make a splash in an industry (less so now, but still).

I think the key is to know, in advance, why you are chasing certain things and to use those "credentials" on a route to something more fulfilling. For better or worse, we carry our histories around with us, and if the choice is between twiddling thumbs and adding another accolade to the collection, it's tempting. Once something genuine comes along, however, you need to jump on it.

The article makes exactly the right realization: Y Combinator is heading in the direction of scholasticism. I wrote an article recently on this topic, which I quote below:

http://www.exratione.com/2012/01/the-future-of-the-venture-c...

The present direction of some incubators is towards the concept of schools, in the older sense of the word. To some eyes present experiments look like an early stage in the development of a new scholastic institution of practical business development. With well tuned entry requirements such an entity might serve as a filter that allows venture investment in all graduates with comparatively little detailed due diligence, trusting to the quality of the school (the filter) to raise the expectation value of these blanket investments. Experiments in this sort of model are already taking place at Y Combinator, and others will no doubt follow. If they see success, expect to see more rapid movement towards formalized schools of practical entrepreneurship, which will orbit established venture funds to act as feeder mechanisms. You might look on this as a structured, industrial manifestation of the informal process of apprenticeship and networking that always existed in the startup community - and either like it or loathe it for exactly that reason, depending on your tastes.

It is worth remembering that while venture capitalists and organized groups of angel investors can enter the space of incubators-as-schools from one side, existing scholastic institutions can just as well enter it from their side. I can't image that the traditional schools will be any good at this if they do try, given long-standing academic hostilities towards the business of being in business, but some of the younger less hidebound institutions might well be successful. Consider the present University of Phoenix, a future Khan Academy, and a range of other entities establishing their own early stage venture funds, or partnering with venture funds to do something new in this space - it isn't so far fetched an idea.

Note that a more scholastic form of incubator is, to my mind, a very different concept from what I'll call Vingean Scholastics. This is the vision put forward by Vernor Vinge in Fast Times at Fairmont High in which building startups is a part of the curriculum for all young people and at least ramen-level economic success is necessary for graduation at a high school level. Building a business, or at the least a short-term economic success, is how the students pay for school and how the schools earn their keep as businesses themselves. In that fictional near future, this is all a part of teaching young adults how to live in a world of constant, enormously rapid change driven by computational technology, in which the idea of holding down a job doing roughly the same sort of thing for five years is laughable, and everyone must know how to be an entrepreneur in order to flow with the pace of change.

But this too will come to pass, I think, with Vingean Scholastic organizations as another sort of filter to build and channel groups of startup founders - with, collectively, a positive expectation value on investment - towards future forms of venture fund.

Lets look at this from the other perspective. That of big companies hiring product teams.

Educating, finding, hiring, training, cultivating and retaining talent is extremely difficult. Companies recruit at colleges, where students have worked hard enough on their credentials to gain admittance and even harder getting good grades and joining clubs and participating in activities. They will identify a few good candidates. They will recruit these candidates, along with every other relevant company. Making offer letters, a few will accept. These will be trained for months, then cultivated for years. Now you've got to get these people to work together in teams, and some of those teams will work out and some will not. Most workers will leave in a few years, some even sooner. Some will grow, advance and go on to become leaders. One will go on to become the company's CEO. The funnel chart on this system is daunting, going from millions of students to one CEO.

On the other hand, Y Combinator will take anyone with a convincing video, the 'right look' (see: Moneyball) and attitude, and gung ho fervor. The program teaches these teammates to work together to build and ship experiments quickly and get real people using them, and then to adapt to new data to conduct new experiments. Upon graduation, the teams get more money to continue conducting experiments as they seek their market. Most are acquired in 'acquihires.' Buying a working team bypasses the lengthy process outlined above. Huge value to the acquirer, and contracts/incentives tie the team up for a few years.

Bottom line: these acquihires are profitable for the acquiring companies, the founders, and Y Combinator. Making the acquihire machine turn does not require an idea, a cohesive team, or much of anything except the ability to successfully complete the training Y Combinator provides. Some companies go on to find a market, the rest get the degree, a bonus and a job.

YC training is boot camp. It is the new Harvard, formed to match post-web realities.

Or something.

* Not asserting Y Combinator discriminates, but any time 3 people in a room make a decision without a lot of hard data on the candidates' performance at that task... bias must enter. This is one checkpoint in a new system.

I agree that the purpose of what you are trying to achieve is important. Some people just care only about the status of getting into an accelerator program but I think the real value lies in building something that has an impact and changes the way we live our life. The problem with people just wanting "the credentials" is like the people who want to just get into a school for its name but don't really care about the value it can provide for them. When people begin to realize that the credentials are just an added value to all that the program provides they will come to the realization that working on an idea that makes an impact for the right reason is far more important than those credentials.

Taking advantage of the system is what humans do; as much it can be despised. I hope the people that are in it for the wrong reasons get weeded out. With all the experience that pg and the team have, it can't be too hard, right?

Well put. The one thing I'd add, that isn't immediately stated in this article, is the importance of MISSION as part of the entrepreneurial process. Product is key, of course, as are opportunity and the skills to capture it. But there are going to be crap days in the entrepreneurial process, and as was stated in the article, the product may pivot. The mission, however -- the passion -- will be the key to reaching all the tomorrows en route to success. Great post!

credentials....

"If you like this post, please upvote it on hacker news"

People with those kinds of janky priorities aren't going to make anything that's meaningful.

Credentialing is an (unavoidable?) product of scaling up angel funding. On the other hand starting my startup, convincing friends to join it, getting to the interview stage at YC and losing a nontrivial amount of my friends money on a stupid idea did make me a more mature person. Your friend might just learn a few things by accident.

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