The other day, I had a call with a VC — let’s call him R. After a warm intro by a friend, I came into it thinking it was just a regular introductory call, but it soon turned into more of an interview. He dove into his life story, describing how statistically special his origin was while elucidating his goal to create as many statistically special unicorns as possible. He trashed YC’s mere “~5%” unicorn rate, explaining how there must be a more systematic way to identify billion-dollar companies.
R began to grill me about my own life story, asking what made me special — and if there was any statistical evidence to prove that. I was a bit taken aback, and I mustered some so-so bullshit about my past experiences. But he cut me off pretty quickly and said that was “the wrong answer.” After a bit of back-and-forth of this (and barely being able to muster a response from my end), the call ended with him saying he “had another meeting to get to.”
I sent him a thank you email in the morning, though he never got back to me.
Realistically, even after a few weeks of sitting on the idea, I still don’t know how I’d respond differently. I could only turn to resume items as an example of “exceptionality.” Of course, I could list all the numbers from the clubs I helped run or internships I held — but ultimately I found myself relying heavily on pedigree. In high school, I did ISEF and won scholarships and got into Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, etc. I participate in selective VC-sponsored fellowships, reserved for only a few kids every year. I have a prestigious Summer Analyst job lined up at Lazard. But I questioned whether this was inherent to my own abilities or if it was more about how I’ve been able to position myself.
I realize that I’ve started to fit a sort of mold. I remember seeing this meme on Twitter a month or so ago and laughing — only to realize the irony.
My genius quant friend (who we will call Y) once asked me what the point of all these “merit badges” were. As an Eagle Scout myself, I felt a bit belittled but replied, “It’s a positive signal. It’s a great way to meet like-minded, ambitious students…”
He cut me off and said that realistically, you could do all of these things already if you were inherently smart enough.
Now, I don’t want to make it seem like I “escaped the matrix” or something. Realistically, I think that most people know these things deep down, but it still feels safe and “productive” to win awards and be recognized by others. I used to think that if everyone around you told you that your idea was good, it was bound to succeed. After all, who was there to say otherwise? But after working on many different projects, I realize that achieving a sort of “consensus” is cheap. I think back to Airbnb as a great example of this. The thought of opening your home to a stranger, even today, sounds a bit unnerving. But as the story goes (and after many rejections), their value-creation thesis rang true.
I think this extends even more to the individual. If everyone else says that you are good, who is there to say otherwise? If you have continuously built a resume and a track record, you seem like a safe bet to keep producing.
But it’s begun to bug me that I may be chasing more of the idea of being an entrepreneur rather than the reality. Looking around, I realize that my most effective entrepreneur friends often did not have “startups” as their main goal from the get-go. Rather, they specialized in some sort of industry or built up niche skill sets to which they were fully committed. This often manifested as building many projects (software or hardware) or doing significant research from a young age. I think it becomes obvious when these are the individuals who ship products quickly and focus on action over contemplation.
And despite the crypto and now AI/ML hype of the last two years, I wonder if there is a lack of new technological infrastructure in which students particularly have alpha. Maybe Web3 works, given its nascency. But our current darling, AI, is hard to innovate unless you are in research, especially compared to incumbent engineers who have been working in the machine learning space for several years.
Students are impatient and want to see results fast. I see many consumer products, social media platforms, etc. But realistically, do we really need more and more social media apps or recruiting tools? Where are the students working on hard problems, like curing cancer or dementia? Genuinely, I am not sure if the issue is that they aren’t being recognized or if there are not enough of them. Or does it just not make any financial sense for investors?
I see a few issues in particular:
Commodification of risk
Decades ago, it was for only the most daring. Now, there are many more structured pathways. This is not a bad thing for the students, but makes it too easy to give up or treat working on the startup too lightly. The Thiel Fellowship is an interesting microcosm of this effect over time. Originally, it was meant for extremely daring ideas, as evidenced by the ambitious concepts of early cohorts. At a random VC dinner I went to a few months ago, I spoke to one Thiel Fellow from Dylan Field’s cohort. He had been working on an advanced biotech project, whose concept was way ahead of its time. Yet realistically the $100K could only go so far, and investors shuddered at the thought they wouldn’t be able to make a return. Hence, he had to shutter the startup. In the most recent Thiel Fellowship cohort, most founders had already raised significant venture capital while working on high-margin SaaS products.
Lack of student-centric technical innovation
If everyone is chasing startups, who is going to do the research to build the underlying infrastructure?
One thing that I appreciate about Harvard/MIT is its academic culture. Historically, you have seen products like E-ink, CRISPR, and others emerge into startups out of labs, with biotech being the main focus today. The West Coast has also seen a lot of enterprise software, which makes sense given Silicon Valley’s influence in the web boom. Of course, the latter is a lot faster for a student to achieve.
My friend Y would joke though that a lot of the ideas you see now were probably at the bottom of the brainstorm pile about 10 years ago. React JS was introduced in 2013. TensorFlow in 2015. The iPhone — which more-or-less kickstarted the mobile revolution — was launched 16 years ago. A lot of the platforms and tools we still use today are very mature. Much of the “newness” that arose from these tools has been exhausted over time. For example, making the next Snapchat is no easy task. Look at BeReal — its usage rate has declined significantly since its peak — all while never making a dollar. Social apps were the bread and butter for college students, which makes a lot of sense because being in college is like one big market of young, smart people looking to meet each other. But what else can you do as a college student today that is as “fast” and low-barrier? GPT wrappers are swallowed up every day by incumbents. And many crypto projects have questionable value propositions (a founder friend of mine once put it best while we were eating at Chipotle: if you went up to a group of teens and asked them whether they wanted to “own” their Instagram data or have an AI do their homework for them, it would be a no brainer).
Massification of startup culture
My friend Shivam, reading an outline of this paper noted how inherently, startups are not meant to be built for the masses. Like Thiel notes in Zero to One, there are several power laws at play.
As a student though you are shielded from reality. As a graduate, you see your friends making a lot of money in big tech, quant, Wall St, etc while “u r broke sleeping on a couch in sf.” The massification of startup culture has introduced significant noise, selling students on the dream that they can become rich and famous as a founder. Maybe students flock to this allure.
Perhaps the biggest lie students tell themselves is that they care about “impact.” If you isolated only “impact” vs. money, it would be stunning to see who actually picks impact. How many Ivy League graduates go work in nonprofits? How many instead work in Big Tech/Quant/Finance/etc.? With the cost of higher education itself, most students already treat college as a financial investment rather than solely a place of learning. Even for founders, their goal is ultimately to make money: they’re business owners at the end of the day. Realistically, most college students I’ve met care more about making money (or getting clout) than making an impact, and it feeds into this idea that genuinely mission-driven founders are few and far between.
I frankly don’t have any solutions in mind for these observations. I admit I am not an expert, and most of my evidence is anecdotal. I hate to only diagnose and not solve, but regardless, I do feel that working internships, doing research, and generally trying to build value over pedigree are safe bets to become a good founder. As for myself, I decided to take a gap semester to figure things out, build more skills, and work on a lot of different projects. I hope to update this journey as I go.
I wrote most of this article on my phone while on the airplane to Korea. Apologies for any errors in advance. Thanks to Shivam Siddaiya and my friend Y (who likes to remain mysteriously anonymous) for reading drafts of this article.
