alt Hacker News> Startups succeed or fail based on how much customers like the product.
This is in theory. In practice, a worse product with more money and louder marketing easily wins against a better product nobody knows about. I'm sure Paul perfectly understands it.
There are other idealizations I won't comment on, but the whole piece reads like an attempt to nurture an application pipeline for YC rather than the genuine writing I liked in earlier Paul's essays.
Here is an alternative point of view: get your degree and work for a few years. Then go back to university to learn business basics (finance, marketing, management). Start a company in your late 30s, when you know your subject area well and you have an idea how to steer finance/marketing (marketing is much harder that it might seem). Bootstrap or take as little investment as possible until you get PMF. Then scale up without giving away (much) equity.
It worked well for me. It can surely work well for others.
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the most pragmatic approach indeed!
This is a common approach (very close to the norm for the most successful startups and companies I have worked with in my career), but I strongly disagree with this: "go back to university to learn business basics (finance, marketing, management)".
You will learn all of that on the job by the time you make it to Principal Engineer, Senior Sales Engineer, Staff Product Manager, or Enterprise AE in the American/Israeli/Indian and Chinese startup and BigTech scenes and especially in Enterprise SaaS, Cybersecurity, Hardware, AI/MLOps, Infra, and other high domain expertise but high revenue and exit potential heavy segments.
Also, a plurality of VCs in the segments I mentioned above tend to have learnt on the job and later switched to VC after successful exits and/or head-hunting.
If you do consider going back to school - only do a graduate research driven CS, EE, CE, or ECE degree program like Stanford, UIUC, CMU, GT (their online program is as good as on-campus with the right courses), UT Austin (their online program is as good as on-campus), and a handful of others.