A year ago, YC went from running 2 batches / year to 4 batches / year. We did this because we wanted to give founders more flexibility to do YC at the right time for them. It seems to have worked - a lot of founders have told us that they were only able to do YC because the new schedule fit their timeline.
Early Decision was driven by the same motivation. We talked to a lot of college students, and we learned that most graduating seniors interview for their after-graduation job in the fall of their senior year. For the ones who are interested in doing their own startup, this creates a bit of a dilemma. If they don't interview for jobs in the fall in order to apply to YC later, they're risking that they might be left without any options.
We created Early Decision so that they can apply to YC at the same time they're doing recruiting for regular jobs, the fall of their senior year. If they get into YC, they can confidently turn down their other job offers without worrying they'll be left without anything.
Note: this isn't really a new idea. We've quietly done this from time to time since 2018, but we didn't create a dedicated flow in the application software for it, so most people didn't realize it was an option. Hopefully by productizing and popularizing it, we'll make it easier for college seniors to start companies.
-graduate and work 100 hour+ weeks as investment banking associates.
-join other people's startups where they work crazy hours
-work hellish hours in PhDs/med school/law school
Yes, being a founder is hard and can be absolute hell at times. But so are some of the "normal" things ambitious students already do post-graduation.
It's not like YC is saying you either do an internship with free lunches, corporate yoga classes and kombucha on tap or you dive into the trenches of being a YC founder.
At any rate, for most of the HN crowd who work a fairly routine IT or an office job, 80+ hours sustained for months and months might seem impossible, but join the military, work on a ship, work on a farm, work the oil fields, work in investment banking, work in a film crew which threatened to go on strike in 2021 for having 98 hour work weeks for months on end... and you find that while it's not common, it certainly happens in various fields.
Many of the people in our YC batch were doing this for the duration of the batch. My cofounder and I both have families and managed to make a similar schedule work (with more peaks and valleys).
The last few weeks have been a crunch where I’ve been getting a lot closer to a true 140ish. That is unsustainable and I’ve had to go into it knowing that the price is future productivity.
But as a student with no commitments, 100hrs a week feels like the norm in YC startups right now.
The thing is those kids still have massive cognitive gifts - I’m not going to use a loaded word like talented or whatever - and have worked very hard in the past. It’s just that the journey to the thing they want to do no longer rewards hours.
Paul Graham is like the Mr. Beast of seed investing. He wants to make the best SEED STAGE INVESTMENTS in the world, to mock a Mr. Beast PowerPoint. He doesn’t want to get the kids with the highest potential, or the kids who work the hardest. They are very sincere and supportive - I mean, who the hell in your life is willing to risk $525,000 on an idea with no traction?? - but they are not out to anoint a category of kids as the “ambitious” ones versus the unambitious ones. You can be ambitious about being a writer and find success and wind up writing very little!
But nobody's closing that option, are they? YC is simply offering another path.
There are different kinds of ambitions of course. Not all of them are about money, some are about creative fulfillment or family or whatever. That's totally true.
But it's not like anyone's yanking those people out of their kombucha-on-tap associate job and forcing them into YC.
One commonly repeated piece of advice that almost all successful authors state is to write a lot, a lot, a lot. Like just practice writing, it doesn't have to be good.
I hear this often said about many other creative endeavors as well, including painting, cooking, game development/design, etc... It often seems like really good artisans just pull greatness out of thin air, but that's because we often only see the successes, not the failures, but I am reminded that even the best writers, poets, and artists in general spend a great amount of time just creating content that no one will ever see.
In the last year alone, I've had to bow out of co-founding two promising startups with good biz co-founders, because first-year MBA students wanted to finish their degree before they sought funding.
Two ways funding could help:
1. I couldn't afford to work over a year as a technical cofounder, executing in full-time startup mode like usually needs to be done, with no income. While they were part-time, and getting an MBA and networking out of it during this period. Even ramen lifestyle funding would've made this closer to an equitable balance of contribution and risk among the cofounders.
2. There's also the concern that MBA programs seem to push students to have a hypothetical startup, so there's always a chance that the MBA student won't be fully committed to actually do the startup once they graduate. Maybe accepted funding could make this a firmer commitment. (Even if there's no contractual obligation to pursue the startup, I'd guess that new MBA graduates don't want to burn bridges in the small world of investors, so would take the commitment fairly seriously.)
But if the follow-through doesn't happen, then the whole thing was probably a huge waste for non-MBA-student co-founders. (Unless those co-founders weren't really committed themselves.)
I'm tempted to think that YC knows better than I do here, but my experience suggests this is a bad idea. The worst managers I've had were inexperienced, and someone who's 22 won't know when they need someone experienced, or how to talk to customers. Many of them may be too nervous to act, and since they can apply under the safety of also applying for jobs they may not be as motivated. I suspect this is just a ploy to get more Stanford grads to apply but I'm not sure it's the best way to go about it.
1. it's a short commitment - only 3 months. more time-bound opportunities should be available to kids coming out of school. too many people go straight to big finance/law/tech/etc and get stuck because they don't want to give up the salary or safety.
2. get access to a network that is very difficult to get access to otherwis
3. better status boost than most other things you could be doing. There are likely better status signals about someone's abilities/intellect than YC, but i'm guessing they are few for people in the valley.
4. Get to work on something you are interested in
5. learn a lot very quickly.
6. gives you a lot of optionality
yes, YC is trying to make money but they do seem intent on developing talent and this is a good avenue for that.
Seems like a bad signal for YC though - if you aren't committed enough to quit school or at the very least reject job offers and do your startup anyway - feels like you might not be committed enough to do what it takes?
But if anyone does, YC knows how to pick founders with the right mindset.
Maybe you could offer that as a “waitlist” option.
That being said, I can see this being useful to a lot of kids. Certainly beats going to grad school for someone who wants to start a company. Keep in mind that a 500K SAFE doesn't force a founder to go big or zero-out.
There's many founders in the country who are just as driven and motivated, but have real-world situations that cannot allow uprooting themselves for several months, two very common ones:
- new parents
- disabled family members, or are themselves physically disabled
The discourse on Hacker News has frequently chastised companies demanding RTO, and some of the companies in your portfolio are remote-first (or remote-only), why does YC make the same kind of RTO demand with batches?
But I think it would be a better analogy to compare YC to a university, rather than to a company. It's true that many companies operate remotely very effectively. But essentially zero universities have stayed remote since the early days of the pandemic.
This is not true. I know several people at different institutions - decent schools - that have most or (in one case) all of their courses (at Queens) via remote delivery.
Plus if rich fucks can't buy a building to put their name on that kids will walk through they won't donate money.
You make it sound like it's a decision based on school administrators putting learning first.
Moreover, for better or worse, the all day every day work culture typical of venture-backed startups isn't really compatible with being a new parent etc. anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmFoNXkQTt8
YC is so early on some of these deals that the primary gauge is team - which means personality of founders. Very hard to measure remotely.
I'm in a group, not as big or famous, that does early checks. We're 95% remote. IME, it's so hard to make those judgement calls through web-cam.
Agreed that founder focus is a big factor and that life gets in the way (of deals). However, if you don't like YC conditions there are 100s of other places to (attempt a) raise.
> Asset Value = Equities + Liabilities
> /? startupschool pricing: https://www.google.com/search?q=startupschool+pricing
/? site:startupschool.org pricing: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:startupschool.org+prici...
> Startup School > Curriculum > Ctrl-F pricing: https://www.startupschool.org/curriculum
YC Library: https://www.ycombinator.com/library
/? YC Library : pricing: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/search?query=Pricing
Life is short. Play long term games with long term people. While a batch bakes in a season, a cap table rests like a boulder in a hillside. If you’re smart there are better ways to find a lever with which to move the world.
Consider incentives. Don’t accept a hammer when you need a bulldozer. Don’t ask which paths exist: find where you want to be, ask what needs to be done. Do it.
I regret that decision.
Truth is that it is incredibly difficult to build startup without any good industry knowledge.
Then at mid 30s get hired as Dir/VP of engineering in smaller Series A startup.
You will have higher chance to retire early and/or afford yourself to work on things you like later on.
Something ironic I found when I was on my last job search (and applying to some YC startups) was that, despite startups often being critical of big tech, when describing their past experience, the founders (and their teams) never failed to ‘name drop’ the brand-name companies they’ve worked for.
Additionally, I think the reason a lot of founders threw my resume in the trash was because they couldn’t recognize the no-name startups I’ve worked at… Luckily I’m at a household name company now and even non-tech people recognize the company I work at.
I understand its provocative statement - your play is the risk free life route - perfect for many many people but not everyone. Certainly not people who want to build things that go into the wild.
I learned more at Microsoft than any of the startups I worked at. I shipped product to more users than at any startup I worked at.
I understand its provocative statement…
Meh, more of an example of “begging the question” than anything else.
Your chances of success is lower than YC's chances of success because they invest to many companies in parallel, but you can only work for 1 company
People who want to go that route and feel strongly about it should give it a shot with their eyes open.
Acrely — AI for HVAC administration
Aden — AI for ERP operations
AgentHub — AI for agent simulation and evaluation
Agentin AI — AI for enterprise agents
AgentMail — AI for agent email infrastructure
AlphaWatch AI — AI for financial search
Alter — AI for secure agent workflow access control
Altur — AI for debt collection voice agents
Ambral — AI for account management
Anytrace — AI for support engineering
April — AI for voice executive assistants
AutoComputer — AI for robotic desktop automation
Autosana — AI for mobile QA
Autotab — AI for knowledge work
Avent — AI for industrial commerce
b-12 — AI for chemical intelligence
Bluebirds — AI for outbound targeting
burnt — AI for food supply chain operations
Cactus — AI for smartphone model deployment
Candytrail — AI for sales funnel automation
CareSwift — AI for ambulance operations
Certus AI — AI for restaurant phone lines
Clarm — AI for search and agent building
Clodo — AI for real estate CRMs
Closera — AI for commercial real estate employees
Clueso — AI for instructional content generation
cocreate — AI for video editing
Comena — AI for order automation in distribution
ContextFort — AI for construction drawing reviews
Convexia — AI for pharma drug discovery
Credal.ai — AI for enterprise workflow assistants
CTGT — AI for preventing hallucinations
Cyberdesk — AI for legacy desktop automation
datafruit — AI for DevOps engineering
Daymi — AI for personal clones
DeepAware AI — AI for data center efficiency
Defog.ai — AI for natural-language data queries
Design Arena — AI for design benchmarks
Doe — AI for autonomous private equity workforce
Double – Coding Copilot — AI for coding assistance
EffiGov — AI for local government call centers
Eloquent AI — AI for complex financial workflows
F4 — AI for compliance in engineering drawings
Finto — AI for enterprise accounting
Flai — AI for dealership customer acquisition
Floot — AI for app building
Fluidize — AI for scientific experiments
Flywheel AI — AI for excavator autonomy
Freya — AI for financial services voice agents
Frizzle — AI for teacher grading
Galini — AI guardrails as a service
Gaus — AI for retail investors
Ghostship — AI for UX bug detection
Golpo — AI for video generation from documents
Halluminate — AI for training computer use
HealthKey — AI for clinical trial matching
Hera — AI for motion design
Humoniq — AI for BPO in travel and transport
Hyprnote — AI for enterprise notetaking
Imprezia — AI for ad networks
Induction Labs — AI for computer use automation
iollo — AI for multimodal biological data
Iron Grid — AI for hardware insurance
IronLedger.ai — AI for property accounting
Janet AI — AI for project management (AI-native Jira)
Kernel — AI for web agent browsing infrastructure
Kestroll — AI for media asset management
Keystone — AI for software engineering
Knowlify — AI for explainer video creation
Kyber — AI for regulatory notice drafting
Lanesurf — AI for freight booking voice automation
Lantern — AI for Postgres application development
Lark — AI for billing operations
Latent — AI for medical language models
Lemma — AI for consumer brand insights
Linkana — AI for supplier onboarding reviews
Liva AI — AI for video and voice data labeling
Locata — AI for healthcare referral management
Lopus AI — AI for deal intelligence
Lotas — AI for data science IDEs
Louiza Labs — AI for synthetic biology data
Luminai — AI for business process automation
Magnetic — AI for tax preparation
MangoDesk — AI for evaluation data
Maven Bio — AI for BioPharma insights
Meteor — AI for web browsing (AI-native browser)
Mimos — AI for regulated firm visibility in search
Minimal AI — AI for e-commerce customer support
Mobile Operator — AI for mobile QA
Mohi — AI for workflow clarity
Monarcha — AI for GIS platforms
moonrepo — AI for developer workflow tooling
Motives — AI for consumer research
Nautilus — AI for car wash optimization
NOSO LABS — AI for field technician support
Nottelabs — AI for enterprise web agents
Novaflow — AI for biology lab analytics
Nozomio — AI for contextual coding agents
Oki — AI for company intelligence
Okibi — AI for agent building
Omnara — AI for agent command centers
OnDeck AI — AI for video analysis
Onyx — AI for generative platform development
Opennote — AI for note-based tutoring
Opslane — AI for ETL data pipelines
Orange Slice — AI for sales lead generation
Outlit — AI for quoting and proposals
Outrove — AI for Salesforce
Pally — AI for relationship management
Paloma — AI for billing CRMs
Parachute — AI for clinical evaluation and deployment
PARES AI — AI for commercial real estate brokers
People.ai — AI for enterprise growth insights
Perspectives Health — AI for clinic EMRs
Pharmie AI — AI for pharmacy technicians
Phases — AI for clinical trial automation
Pingo AI — AI for language learning companions
Pleom — AI for conversational interaction
Qualify.bot — AI for commercial lending phone agents
Reacher — AI for creator collaboration marketing
Ridecell — AI for fleet operations
Risely AI — AI for campus administration
Risotto — AI for IT helpdesk automation
Riverbank Security — AI for offensive security
Saphira AI — AI for certification automation
Sendbird — AI for omnichannel agents
Sentinel — AI for on-call engineering
Serafis — AI for institutional investor knowledge graphs
Sigmantic AI — AI for HDL design
Sira — AI for HR management of hourly teams
Socratix AI — AI for fraud and risk teams
Solva — AI for insurance
Spotlight Realty — AI for real estate brokerage
StackAI — AI for low-code agent platforms
stagewise — AI for frontend coding agents
Stellon Labs — AI for edge device models
Stockline — AI for food wholesaler ERP
Stormy AI — AI for influencer marketing
Synthetic Society — AI for simulating real users
SynthioLabs — AI for medical expertise in pharma
Tailor — AI for retail ERP automation
Tecto AI — AI for governance of AI employees
Tesora — AI for procurement analysis
Trace — AI for workflow automation
TraceRoot.AI — AI for automated bug fixing
truthsystems — AI for regulated governance layers
Uplift AI — AI for underserved voice languages
Veles — AI for dynamic sales pricing
Veritus Agent — AI for loan servicing and collections
Verne Robotics — AI for robotic arms
VoiceOS — AI for voice interviews
VoxOps AI — AI for regulated industry calls
Vulcan Technologies — AI for regulatory drafting
Waydev — AI for engineering leadership insights
Wayline — AI for property management voice automation
Wedge — AI for healthcare trust layers
Workflow86 — AI for workflow automation
ZeroEval — AI for agent evaluation and optimization
I'm not sure what this is supposed to show, other than that YC funds a lot of startups and a lot of them are working in AI, which is what you'd expect during any major tech wave.
In fact, YC funds so many startups that your list is actually misleadingly short, unless you meant to argue that AI startups are a low percentage.
Looking up the founders is fascinating too. So many of them seem to have graduated and immediately started trailing what appear to be a string of back-to-back failed businesses, rarely with more than a year of staying power per attempt. It's hard to tell if that's "failing quickly" (desirable) or "frantically trying to get-rich-quick" (undesirable and what I run into in Melbourne most often).
Specifically, the one described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287474.
Kiko the Monkey
There is no need to rush to get into YC, and it would help to get actual experience in a job before setting out to build a whole company.
Hard to buy that "here's another option" is predatory.
The idea that someone fresh out of college should start and run a business is deeply concerning. These are kids who have just (hopefully) learned about ethics and what it takes to run a business, yet you expect them to be responsible stewards of their users' data, to comply with laws and regulations, while you throw $500,000 at them, give them minimal guidance, sell them fantasies about infinite riches, and skim whatever you can from the top.
Yes, I'm aware that Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and others, started their businesses before even finishing college. But a) these are outliers, and b) when someone refers to users of their products as "dumb fucks", do we really want to put them in charge of running a company?
Execs universally love working with people who maximize proactivity and strong opinions. The opposite of what you think.
The amount of wheels you won't have to reinvent if you work at another company are astronomical. From engineering practices to sales to management, there's a lot you don't want to innovate on. Starting a company is really hard, and it's even harder if you've never seen first-hand how a functional company works. Your future employees will thank you.
You can go an entire career without seeing how a functional company works.
having worked at a few dysfunctional companies, there's value in it. you learn to spot red flag decisions and the kinds of people that tend to cause organizations to explode from within. a Lot of the success at my current company can be attributed to decisions I've made that came from experience at failed startups where we did the opposite.
There’s a lot of focus in the media and in accelerators on the 22 year old with a dream, but it’s nice to have a real adult in charge when the stakes are high.
Not to mention, if you have no work experience, you have no idea what problems are worth solving. So you end up with junk startup ideas from the latest fad / hype cycle.
But a senior partner at a law firm knows the pain points of being a lawyer and they can now start a company to fix them.
And a senior quant at a hedge fund might have some good ideas for automating tedious back office processes.
Still, I think you need to be well connected, or already profitable for VC fundraising.
Otherwise your just another programmer with hacked together prototype.
I do think many college grads generally don’t understand how business works though because they just haven’t experienced it yet. School is a totally different beast.
You'd be surprised how many times you can "iterate and fail quickly" only to end up at an established practice some other shop has been doing for years. It is important however to understand the why behind the decisions as otherwise you're no better than just figuring it out yourself
Personally I would caveat that they be a small company. Large companies are a very different beast. What it takes to get ahead and succeed at there is often very different from a startup, in ways that don’t become obvious until you’ve worked at a startup.
Rather than learning which wheels not to re-invent, you have one data point and reflexes that you’d need to deprogram.
Working at the company I most highly respect and would want to emulate (Stripe), I don’t think the skills would have been at all the right ones. (Admittedly I was in a highly toxic and political org.)
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Jared's description about why YC is doing this now seems clear. If you know more or better, you're welcome to make a substantive argument. But please don't use this site for shallow putdowns—it's not what it's for.
Post Paul Graham YC: reserve your YC spot now. There’s no downside!
Edit: I think I understand the problem now. PG's actual advice has always been "finish college before starting a startup". Somehow somewhere that got distorted into "don't start a company in your 20s", which is certainly not what PG has been saying (the average graduation age is somewhere around 23). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372572 quotes a representative passage, and if you read that essay you'll see that he's mostly saying "don't start a startup at 20".
(Edit: I deleted my last sentence which was irritable.)
While you're correct that the comment you're responding to is a bit sloppy in summarizing what PG said ("20s" instead of "early 20s"), its basic point still makes sense.
YC is not the Church of Paul Graham, so I don't see any need to dive into Pauline exegesis and attempt to reconcile YC's current admissions process with everything PG has ever said. YC can do what it likes, and people can note what may or may not have changed since PG was in charge of it.
I've been lurking on HN since 2008 and can't remember a time where i got the vibe from pg to be like "live your life" instead of "start a company now and apply". Can you point to some specific essay you had in mind?
"Given this dichotomy, which of the two paths should you take? Be a real student and not start a startup, or start a real startup and not be a student? I can answer that one for you. Do not start a startup in college. How to start a startup is just a subset of a bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a good life. And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lot of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it. Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search. Most people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.
You can do things in your early 20s that you can't do as well before or after, like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travel super cheaply with no sense of a deadline. For unambitious people, this sort of thing is the dreaded "failure to launch," but for the ambitious ones it can be an incomparably valuable sort of exploration. If you start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful, you'll never get to do it. [7]"
You misspelled narcissistic psychopath.
The Best of Gavin Belson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30WTWkFe910
The Best of Russ Hanneman:
This early decision thing is functionally going to move a few pipeline kids from the corporate world to the startup world, which probably isn’t a terrible outcome. But it also reflects how YC has become a marker of institutional pipeline success for a lot of people.
the better question is: how do these two investors differentiate themselves?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGy5SGTuAGI&t=217s
A company I'm funding, we call it The Lady.
I press the button, and The Lady tells Aspen when it's time for bed, time to take a bath, when his fucking mother's here to pick him up.
I get to be his friend, and she's the bad guy.
I've disrupted fatherhood!
--
Another good example of expressing and exersiging values, how easy to construct appealing narrative regardless of underlying subject and something else what I can't pinpoint at this stage...
Not that everyone should always be consistent, but you guys could not have picked a worse example to seize on.
Your hobbies and interests should actually just be work and producing profit. Don’t spend the weekend taking a hike with your friends, you gotta get building.
The people doing that work are a probabilistic financial instrument to the VC system. The founders who fall for this trap instead of living a balanced life are just lowering the cost basis for the VC investors by giving away free labor.
In reality, you can build a startup while maintaining a work-life balance, but if everyone did that then VC firms would have to delay the purchase of their owners’ fifth yacht by a couple of months.
The only people who have the time and energy for the toxic startup founder lifestyle of thing are students and young people who haven’t yet established families and their optimism and interest is being exploited.
Wanting to finish school is a negative signal. Also
> Also we know that many students spend a lot of time in Fall or during their final year applying for jobs or internships. Early Decision gives students another option: apply to YC and bet on yourself.
So now YC is an alternative to searching and apply for jobs? I think if you're marginal on trying to find a corporate job or starting something, then you should prob find a corp job. Objectively starting a startup is worse, you work harder, lower odds of success, more stress, less money, etc. You have to be a little crazy and hardheaded to make it work
Finally everything that YC does to increase it's applicant pool so they still maintain exclusivity. If you have 2% acceptance rate, why are you trying to maximize the top of the funnel? You should discourage people to apply.
No. This sounds like VC trash advice and very bad career advice.
Startup chances of success are <5%, and many of the factors are beyond your control. A degree is still relevant in being able to easily get interviews and secure jobs, in the >95% case that you do not succeed on the first try.
I'd only recommend dropping out if you see mad traction and revenue and you are on a trajectory to be famous enough that people won't care if you don't have a degree. If you're still a "nobody", it's a really, really bad idea.
It's telling how many people are afraid to watch that show and detest it because it's just so spot on accurate, and they cringe when they see themselves in its characters and their own lives in its plots.
As if all of your education (and probably side-projects, life decisions) is meant to lead to YC.
It's a one-year early decision, like pretty much every other early decision program.
This is evident in how disappointed certain people are when they’re rejected from YC. Their startup is merely a vehicle to get into the club.
All things have a life cycle. Despite what yc wants you to believe, it will come and go. Perhaps it’s becoming a prestige institution in the hopes to increase its longevity.
That being said, belonging to a group is a central component of being a human as we are highly social animals. So it’s not wrong to want to belong to a group and then being sad when you are rejected. It requires a lot of maturity and stoicism to cut your own path. This is somewhat ironic since traditionally founding your own company is considered cutting your own path but I think yc and others have made it much less so. There is a formula now to follow which is why there is now an in group and an out group. Cutting your own path by definition does not include a set formula.
Eventually, PE started recruiting earlier and earlier to the point where they were hiring college graduates for two years in the future who hadn't even started their IB role. Obviously, these people don't even know what they like doing, and you have no idea if they are any good at their job.
The end result was Jamie Dimon of JPM slamming his fist on the table to knock it off. This has led other banks to follow suit and major PE firms to commit to stop recruiting this early. At least for now.
But it seems that something similar is now happening on the VC side.
If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.
I also feel like highly intelligent people might quite reasonably decide for themselves that they shouldn't have to take on that kind of risk to get what they want out of life.
YC startups are a bit above average, but still most startups fail.
If you care about building wealth, taking a stable engineering position straight out of college and working hard is a great path
I know, I know...there are examples! And yes, there are, but statistically, they won't be you. You're playing the lottery, only it's a lottery that steals your youth and gives you psychological problems.
If your only goal is to get rich, then don't do a startup. You have to have some more fundamental reason, or the agony will beat you.
Its an outdated take to think people arent doing this
I am 30, I am rich by most measures of wealth and probably in the minds of most college grads. I worked in various big tech companies (incl stints in FAANG) after graduating with my BS in CS. A lot of my peers did do startups, and they had varying degrees of success. But almost everyone who went to big tech has set up their next generation for success at this point
Many will enter, few will win lmao
FWIW, to me entrepreneurship is an amazing path, but starting a company right out of college?? There’s a LOT of skills to develop. Have someone to copy. Make sure you draw enough salary. Keep an identity outside of your company (networking!) so you can pick yourself up if (when) it crashes.
And I concur - in this AI hypecycle more than ever it seems to be about how can peacock the best. Its neck and neck with the crypto hypecycle a few years ago for the incidence rate of vaporware and snake oil. Sure there are some legit founders building meaningful product but they seem to be a small minority.
