Paul Graham: Universities Don't Need Entrepreneurship Classes, Just Teach CS Well
ycombinator · x · 2026-08-25
Paul Graham's new essay asks how universities should prepare students to start startups. Drawing on 20 years of YC data, he says partners look for one simple thing: people who are good at building things and habitually do so.
The hard part of startups is the product—knowing what to build and being able to build it—which comes from studying CS, mechanical engineering, or molecular biology, not management or finance. So the best preparation is not a new "entrepreneurship" curriculum but universities doing what they already do: teaching hard disciplines well.
He argues preparing founders is closer to the ideal of liberal education than almost any career: customers don't care what founders majored in, so students can study anything as long as they get good at building—understood broadly, citing how Steve Jobs's calligraphy study helped Apple dominate desktop publishing.
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