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Short answer: The disadvantage is temporary. I went to Carleton College in Minnesota. It does well in liberal arts college rankings, but it's not well-known. In fact, my Y Combinator interview began with pg asking me, "You're Canadian?" (He was thinking of Carleton University.) Going to a school with name rec is certainly a plus. And if you're in the startup world, that goes double for MIT and Stanford—not only do they have outstanding CS and engineering programs, but they also have an extraordinarily entrepreneurial culture. If you tell a venture capitalist that you went to MIT, for instance, that's a strong indicator that you "get it" as an entrepreneur. It's neither necessary nor sufficient to get them to write a check, but it pretty much answers two of the questions every potential investor has: "Is this guy smart?" and "Does this guy understand how startups work?" If you went to a no-name school, you've got to find another way to answer those questions. Just remember: Once you've actually done something, that defines you far more than what school you went to. I didn't lose my shot at Y Combinator because pg hadn't heard of my school; I lost it because my team hadn't built anything before. If we'd been Stanford grad students rather than University of Michigan grad students, maybe that would've helped. But you know what would've helped more? Having ever deployed an app worth using, or developed a popular open-source project, or written a book on a programming language (say, CoffeeScript). In short: "Make something people want." Aspire to do something noteworthy enough that you can introduce yourself as "Hi, I'm the creator of so-and-so." At that point, no one will care which school you went to. |
I'd love to be able to tell people about something that I've made -- but I haven't made anything. I have no idea what to make and no clue where to start.