I told this exact thing to my gf few days ago and somehow she was mad at me for it

I completely agree. From my experience in Academia, what happens is, that university departments simply don't know better. They scramble together a course or program they think its needed, and shape it from THEIR perspective of what it should include.

Its like now, when every SaaS company scrambles a way to put AI into their product, just because they think they need to.

> Also, although PG disdains finance and management, many large problems are better addressed through people with skills in these areas IMO

I find this view from pg very narrow minded, and borderline ignorant. He is shaping his essay as in the role of higher education and academia is only to produce startup founders. Which is not, it is a way of a state investing into a labor force that is needed. As long as there are large corporate multinationals, there will be a need for finance, economics and yes, even management. Are a lot of that studies fugazi? Sure they are, but so are a lot of startups.

If everyone coming out of academia would be startup-like, corporations and other businesses simply wouldnt have the workforce for their machinery, and then some big shoot CEO would write blogs how Universities Should Prepare White Collars.

And indeed, reading period produced two trillion dollar companies, but this is statistical anomaly. You could just as well argue, that it keps economy afloat by educating up-coming workforce, but thats harder to prove.

> This is shockingly vapid and wishy-washy even for PG

He has been like this for a while now. His last few essays are simply advertisement for a startup accelerator. Conveniently, he also owns one of them.

30 years ago you needed PG / YC to have a startup. Hardware was expensive, bandwidth wasn't ubiquitous, there wasn't a massive breadth of libraries and lessons online of what to do and not do.

None of that is true today. And though its is possible to build another unicorn there is not a really good reason to do that any more.

Learning about taxes, business structures (CoOp's any one), HR (how not to get sued, how BAD hr means the IRS comes to get you), reading a cap table, reading a contract, accounting are all skills that a solid tech team needs to "build a business". Marketing, Customer acquisition, Customer retention, Customer Service are all places where most recent grads might not have the skills to "do the needful"

LLM's have compressed the early build out stage. The tech portion, getting from zero to one is now partly trivial. If you are going to build out a niche business that does 1-10 million ARR now is the time. Thats not a product at a scale the at PG and other VC's are really interested in, but it is possible to run a project that size with a very small multi-talented team. They need all those other non technical skills to make it happen.

> 30 years ago you needed PG / YC to have a startup.

What's a "startup"? For the most part, you're just building a small business. You deal with local bureaucracies, learn about accounting, hire first employees, struggle to find customers. People have been doing this for ages without VCs. And 99% of startups never progress past that stage.

The only thing that VC funding changes is that it lets you grow faster than justified. This can turn you into the next Google, but most often, it puts you on a completely unsustainable path where you only have two outs: writing the project off or offloading it to a FOMO buyer for more than it's worth. The VC ecosystem is exceedingly good at that second part.

Exactly. Competent at getting votes (and taking them away from competition) and incompetent at leading and being in power.

What is the alternative that you are proposing? When I read something like this all that comes across is a strident desire for totalitarianism.

The alternative in this case is fewer politicians. European countries don't need another layer of politicians on top of their local institutions.

The alternative to this is being also competent at leading.

Can i already subscribe? I hope you decide to do it!

You don't have to censor, but you don't have to pay either

Not paying is a form of censorship.

While laughing at the stereotype of French being on the street all the time

I do respect the French. They've proven, time and time again, that if you fuck with the people, heads will roll...

Meanwhile, I draw a three day suspension every time I post the word "guillotine" on Reddit.

What if you are not from the northern US?

They grow fine in pretty much all of Europe, and most of South America - you may need to find a mountain to grow them on if very close to the equator. I imagine most of the rest of the world fair similarly.

Perhaps there are other plants you can grow where ever you are?

I agree with you, also about the strawberry analogy. I was quite surprised to read that author is 22 years old. So many young smart people around!