What specifically? That's a long essay that was only published last week.

Quite a long discussion of how important the "best" universities are to starting a startup. Nothing YC-specific.

> And if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are. It's also where the best employees are. When Larry and Sergey started Google, they began by just hiring all the smartest people they knew out of Stanford, and this was a real advantage for them.

> The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much the same as the list of the most selective universities.

> I don't think it's the prestigious names of these universities that cause more good startups to come out of them. Nor do I think it's because the quality of the teaching is better. What's driving this is simply the difficulty of getting in. You have to be pretty smart and determined to get into MIT or Cambridge, so if you do manage to get in, you'll find the other students include a lot of smart and determined people.

> You don't have to start a startup with someone you meet at university... but universities are the main source of cofounders. And because they're where the cofounders are, they're also where the ideas are, because the best ideas grow out of projects you do with the people who become your cofounders.

> So the list of what you need to do to get from here to starting a startup is quite short. You need to get good at technology, and the way to do that is to work on your own projects. And you need to do as well in school as you can, so you can get into a good university, because that's where the cofounders and the ideas are.

> When Larry and Sergey started Google, they began by just hiring all the smartest people they knew out of Stanford...

I worked for a large tech company as an intern in the late 90's, which is where I learned smartest doesn't always equal best. There were two of us interns in the org, one on the east coast and one on the west coast. I was in grad school at a regionally known engineering school, whereas my west coast counterpart was a grad at Stanford.

They were one of the smartest people I've ever met and worked with, and were basically a walking encyclopedia of CS knowledge, all the way down to level 1 of the OSI model. They were also entirely unable to execute on anything. There was no ability to plan and schedule work or to stay focused on the job itself.

One of us got a raise and asked to come back next summer and the other got walked from the building by security (a first, apparently) before the summer ended.

Yes, it's anecdata, and over my career I've worked with many other people from "top" institutions. As a whole, I haven't been any more or less impressed with them than any other Engineers I've worked with or hired.

All this says is that elite universities have a higher density of good people. Which is totally true. If you want to maximize your chances of meeting good people that's a concrete thing to aim for.

I learned a long time ago, that HN and YCombinator were never for me. We were too poor and never part of the elite SV venture capitalism scene, no matter how sharp or crazy the idea.

We were never part of that 'scene'. Hell, I even tried to enter the VC scene locally. It was all about blatant lying and redoing Uber than actual innovative and crazy ideas. I even had a 'mentor' say that I should just lie about hockey stick growth, cause that's what everyone does.

It's not that hard to see the emperor is dearlng no clothes. But damn, don't say that if you want to deal with SV folks.

> It's not that hard to see the emperor is dearlng no clothes.

Well the business model assumes 90%+ of companies fail. They're only looking for a small number of big winners. And because of the fast moving nature of the space, things like numbers can be fuzzy and aren't really too important until the later stages. So there's just less diligence in general and understandably that creates room for some fraud. That doesn't mean the model is a scam.

The issue is that too much money got pumped into the space in recent years when it really wasn't needed.

>I learned a long time ago, that HN and YCombinator were never for me.

It's not you personally and don't take it too hard on yourself. A vast majority of people on this planet won't fit the "founder personality" and thus won't make it.

It's more interesting to bootstrap your own company and if push comes to shove you can look for incubators in your own city and apply for it.