Y Combinator vs. Graduate School

After your YC startup fails, you have 2 less years of your life and "failed startup" on your resume. After graduate school, you have letters after your name that makes it easier to get jobs.<p>Just sayin', this article is very fanboish. Startups are for people that want to do startups, not for people that want to "do something" after college. In many cases, starting a startup can be a bad decisions. (And in some, like Google, it can be pretty good.)

If you're "repeating the works of the greats" in grad school, you're doing it wrong. That's what undergrad is for, and maybe a masters, but getting a PhD is supposed to be all about producing something new. By the end you should be <i>the</i> world expert in your (admittedly narrow) area, and have produced published scientific results that were previously not known to the field.<p>Overall though, they're two totally different things, and if you don't know which of the two is more appealing to you, you don't have a very good idea of what you want to do. Do you want to advance the current state of scientific knowledge? Or do you want to produce products and services that people will find useful? The two occasionally overlap, but in general they're fairly different occupations.

If you're paying to go to grad school, you're doing it wrong.

Far be it from me to suggest that YC is not good for people, but...<p><i>After school, you get a job. After YC, you create jobs.</i><p>Not necessarily.<p><i>You repeat the works of the greats in school. YC expects you to do original work.</i><p>There is value in standing upon the shoulders of giants.<p><i>"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -George Santayana</i>

Two years of industry experience can be a wonderful thing, too. Ideally your job will teach you all the bits of professionalism that your schooling left out (a short list from mine: SQL, SVN, and how to obsessively document <i>everything</i>), and you'll probably get good exposure to an industry. If you want ideas of things which need fixing, work for a living; you'll end up with more than you could ever use.

<p><pre><code> “Y Combinator” is a generic term</code></pre> Well that is interesting. Why shouldn't YC be a xerox or kleenex brand? PG seems consistently annoyed with naming and labels applied to YC, but I don't think he'd mind a generalization of the name.

Agreed contingent on two points of concern:<p>1. Did you gain enough practical/technical knowledge before or during undergrad to attack a given problem with a profitable solution?<p>2. Can you convince an investor of point #1?

Most people don't go to grad school to start companies.