Entrepreneurial Atmosphere?

sakky
Fri, 13 Jul 2007 19:27:21 +0000

What would be good colleges for a student who says he is looking for colleges with an “entrepreneurial atmosphere”? I think the basic idea is that he is looking for classmates who are more interested in starting new business ventures than in becoming employees of somebody else. Is that more a part of the culture of some colleges than others?



Frankly speaking, I would say that if you want to just start a business, you should just start it straight away. I doubt that you even need to go to college. If you have the idea, if you have the passion, then you should just try to launch your business straight away. If it fails, oh well, you just go back to school.

It’s no coincidence to me that some of the most successful entrepreneurs in history (Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Dell, etc.) are college dropouts. Here is what essayist and entrepreneur Paul Graham had to say about it:

*I can’t imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He’d have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he’d been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.

And yes, while it is probably true that you’ll learn some valuable things by going to work for an existing company for a couple years before starting your own, you’d learn a thing or two running your own company during that time too.

The advice about going to work for someone else would get an even colder reception from the 19 year old Bill Gates. So I’m supposed to finish college, then go work for another company for two years, and then I can start my own? I have to wait till I’m 23? That’s four years. That’s more than twenty percent of my life so far. Plus in four years it will be way too late to make money writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair.

And he’d be right. The Apple II was launched just two years later. In fact, if Bill had finished college and gone to work for another company as we’re suggesting, he might well have gone to work for Apple. And while that would probably have been better for all of us, it wouldn’t have been better for him.
*

Paul Graham;