

Ask HN: Does higher education matter for a startup to be successful? - anantzoid

Do people with higher education (say, Masters in Artificial Intelligence) have more chances of their startup being successful? 
Since their product may be better in terms of technology and also the founder would have gained more maturity, experience and contacts in course of his higher education.
We have a huge number of examples like Google, Foursquare where the founders were doing their PhDs.
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alid
Unless a startup's highly technical, I wouldn't solely equate higher education
with success - more than anything it's the behavioural skills of
entrepreneurism, resilience, persuasion and street smarts that will help set
you apart (unfortunately these skills are not focused on enough in formal
education, IMO). It's important to know the ecosystem of the area you're going
into - where the needs are, who the customers are, what the value chain looks
like etc, and typically this would best be gained by work experience rather
than theory.

There's many examples of successful people who never completed or went to
college: e.g. Richard Branson, Henry Ford, David Ogilvy, Pete Cashmore, Walt
Disney etc et al. Richard Branson once noted that the first three months of
running a business teaches you more than three years at business school.

So it's not to say higher education isn't valuable, but 'learning' isn't
confined to the classroom and practice oft trumps theory :)

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Joeboy
People with higher education are likely to be somewhat smart, somewhat capable
of acting on their own initiative and from somewhat well-off backgrounds, all
of which are likely to be somewhat beneficial in a startup. Correlation is not
necessarily causation though.

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michaelpinto
That would depend on the specific nature of the startup. Although on a meta
level I would say that having a high quality colleges and universities
improves the success rates of a geographic location.

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anantzoid
The nature of the startup in this case would be an app or a system as a
service or a product.

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keiferski
It really depends on what the startup is doing. PhDs in Machine learning
(probably) aren't gonna know a thing about sales. General intelligence is
useful, sure, but being a successful entrepreneur isn't about being smart,
it's about finding an opportunity and putting in the hard work to take
advantage of it.

