How Universities Should Prepare Founders
How Universities Should Prepare Founders
大学应如何培养创业者
August 2026 2026年8月
How should universities prepare students to start startups? Y Combinator is in the perfect position to answer this question, because we get them next. We’re like grad school. And because YC has had 20 years to refine its model of what a promising founder looks like, you probably won’t find a better target. 大学应该如何为学生创业做好准备？Y Combinator（YC）处于回答这个问题的绝佳位置，因为学生毕业后往往会来到我们这里。我们就像是研究生院。而且，由于YC在过去20年里不断完善其对“有潜力的创业者”的定义模型，你可能找不到比我们更精准的目标了。
What do the YC partners look for? It’s surprisingly simple. They want people who are good at building things and have a habit of doing it. YC的合伙人看重什么？答案出奇地简单。他们想要的是那些擅长创造事物，并且习惯于动手去做的人。
The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it. And that kind of knowledge comes from studying computer science or mechanical engineering or molecular biology, not management or finance. 创业最难的部分在于产品：知道该造什么，并且有能力造出来。而这种知识来自于学习计算机科学、机械工程或分子生物学，而不是管理学或金融学。
So the way to prepare undergraduates to become successful founders is not to give them some new curriculum focused on “entrepreneurship”. It’s to do what universities already do best — to teach them computer science and mechanical engineering and molecular biology. 因此，培养本科生成为成功创业者的方法，并不是给他们开设一些以“创业”为核心的新课程，而是做好大学本就擅长的事——教给他们计算机科学、机械工程和分子生物学。
Indeed, preparing students to start startups is closer to the ideal of liberal education than preparing them for almost any other kind of career. Startups succeed or fail based on how much customers like the product. Customers don’t care what the founders studied in college. So founders are free to study whatever they want, as long as they get good at building things. 事实上，培养学生创业比培养他们从事其他任何职业，都更接近博雅教育的理想。创业的成败取决于客户对产品的喜爱程度。客户并不关心创始人大学学的是什么。因此，只要创始人擅长创造事物，他们可以自由地学习任何他们想学的东西。
But building should be understood in a very broad sense. It doesn’t mean all would-be founders have to study some form of engineering. Almost any kind of expertise that could be described as building or creating could be useful. It was useful to Steve Jobs to have studied calligraphy, for example; it was one of the reasons Apple dominated desktop publishing. So while math and science and engineering and design tend to be good bets, I would not want to draw a sharp line around them, because I can imagine other forms of building that could be useful. And of course you don’t have to major in something to be good at it. Mark Zuckerberg was good at programming, but he was a psychology major, not a CS major. 但“创造”应该被理解为一种非常广泛的概念。这并不意味着所有未来的创业者都必须学习某种工程学。几乎任何可以被描述为“构建”或“创造”的专业知识都可能是有用的。例如，史蒂夫·乔布斯学习书法对他很有帮助；这也是苹果公司能够主导桌面出版行业的原因之一。因此，虽然数学、科学、工程和设计通常是稳妥的选择，但我不想给它们画上一条明确的界限，因为我可以想象其他形式的创造也同样有用。当然，你不需要主修某门学科才能精通它。马克·扎克伯格擅长编程，但他主修的是心理学，而不是计算机科学。
The best way to describe what would-be founders should study is that they should seek out powerful ideas. But smart people are naturally attracted to powerful ideas anyway. So as long as departments teaching powerful ideas exist, the sort of people who’d make good founders will find them. 描述未来创业者应该学习什么，最好的方式是：他们应该去寻找那些具有强大影响力的思想。但聪明人天生就会被强大的思想所吸引。因此，只要那些传授强大思想的院系存在，那些能成为优秀创业者的人自然会找到它们。
In fact there are only two things universities need to change to be perfect at preparing founders: they need to make students feel that starting a startup is something they can do, and they need to encourage them to work on their own projects. 事实上，大学若想在培养创业者方面做到完美，只需改变两点：一是让学生觉得创业是他们力所能及的事，二是鼓励他们去开展自己的项目。
At the moment, the belief that it’s possible to start a startup is very unevenly distributed. YC now gets so many applications that our application data is a reasonable proxy for interest in startups at different universities, and Harvard alumni, for example, apply at about twice the rate of Yale and Princeton alumni. Presumably Harvard students aren’t that different from Yale and Princeton students; the reason Harvard students go on to start more startups is just that it’s more customary there. Which in turn implies that merely by making their students feel that starting a startup is a viable option, Yale and Princeton could at least double the number who do. 目前，关于“创业是可行的”这一信念在各校间的分布非常不均衡。YC现在收到的申请数量非常多，我们的申请数据可以作为衡量不同大学对创业兴趣的合理指标。例如，哈佛校友的申请率大约是耶鲁和普林斯顿校友的两倍。可以推测，哈佛学生与耶鲁、普林斯顿的学生并没有太大区别；哈佛学生创业更多，仅仅是因为在那里创业更像是一种惯例。这反过来意味着，耶鲁和普林斯顿只需让学生意识到创业是一个可行的选择，就能将创业人数至少翻一番。
Once a university has a culture of starting startups, you don’t have to convince students that it’s a viable option. New students learn that from older ones. But at a university that doesn’t have much of a startup culture yet, there are things you can do to help this realization along. The most effective is probably to show students examples of people who’ve done it. 一旦一所大学形成了创业文化，你就不必费力去说服学生这是一个可行的选择。新生会从老生那里学到这一点。但在尚未形成浓厚创业文化的大学里，你可以采取一些措施来促进这种认知。最有效的方法或许就是向学生展示那些已经成功创业的人的案例。
Until you’ve seen some founders in real life, you tend to think that starting startups is something done by other people. Seeing them pops that bubble. In fact seeing founders in real life is doubly inspiring: they seem impressive, but they also seem human. Especially when they talk about the early years, when they were clueless and made lots of mistakes. So strangely enough seeing founders in real life makes being one seem simultaneously both desirable and accessible. It makes students think “I want to be like that, and I could.” 在现实生活中见到创业者之前，你往往会认为创业是“别人”做的事。亲眼见到他们会打破这种幻觉。事实上，在现实中见到创业者具有双重激励作用：他们看起来令人钦佩，但同时也显得很真实。尤其是当他们谈论起早期那些毫无头绪、犯下许多错误的岁月时。所以，奇怪的是，在现实中见到创业者，会让人觉得创业既令人向往又触手可及。这会让学生产生一种想法：“我想成为那样的人，而且我也能做到。”
How inspiring founders are to students is a function roughly of how rich and famous they are divided by how much older they are than the students. So it’s not essential to bring famous billionaires to campus. Founders in their mid twenties who are 3 years into a startup with a valuation of a couple hundred million will do as well; they may only be a twentieth as rich and famous, but they’re twenty times easier for students to identify with. 创业者对学生的激励程度，大致上取决于他们的财富和名望除以他们比学生年长的岁数。因此，没必要非得把著名的亿万富翁请到校园里。那些二十多岁、创业三年且估值数亿的创始人同样有效；他们可能只有前者的二十分之一富有和出名，但学生们却能比前者容易二十倍地产生共鸣。
It’s obvious why universities that want their students to start startups need to make them believe it’s a viable option. But why is it so important for students to work on their own projects? 对于那些希望学生创业的大学来说，让学生相信创业是一个可行的选择，其重要性显而易见。但为什么让学生开展自己的项目如此重要呢？
There are four reasons. The first is simply that it’s a great way, possibly the best way, to understand a subject really deeply. The excitement of creating something new is a much more powerful motivator than the fear of doing badly on an exam. 原因有四。首先，这是深入理解一门学科的绝佳方式，甚至可能是最好的方式。创造新事物的兴奋感，远比担心考试考砸的恐惧感更能激发动力。
Second, working on projects together is the best way for cofounders to discover one another. The most successful startups tend to have multiple founders, and the only way to tell for sure if someone will be good to work with is to work with them. Apple and Microsoft were just the last of many projects their founders had worked on together. 其次，共同开展项目是联合创始人发现彼此的最佳途径。最成功的创业公司往往拥有多位创始人，而确定某人是否适合共事的唯一方法就是与他们共事。苹果和微软只是其创始人们共同参与过的众多项目中的最后一个。
Third, a startup is a project, so starting one will feel natural to someone who’s used to working on projects of their own. It won’t seem weird that there’s no teacher or boss telling them what to do. They’re used to telling themselves. 第三，创业本身就是一个项目，因此对于习惯于独立开展项目的人来说，创业会显得非常自然。没有老师或老板告诉他们该做什么，这并不会让他们感到奇怪。因为他们早已习惯了自己指挥自己。
Fourth, and perhaps most surprisingly, random side projects are where the best startup ideas come from. The best startup ideas tend to seem so implausible at first that anyone consciously looking for startup ideas would reject them. Who’d expect to start a huge company by creating a student directory? So the way to discover the best startup ideas is not to look for startup ideas. 第四，或许最令人惊讶的是，最好的创业点子往往源于随意的副业项目。最好的创业点子起初往往看起来非常不可思议，以至于任何刻意寻找创业点子的人都会拒绝它们。谁能想到创建一个学生名录就能创办一家大公司呢？所以，发现最佳创业点子的方法，并不是去刻意寻找创业点子。