A VC argues that starting a company right out of college can work if you have conviction or can attract talent. Formal credentials and experience are often overrated. Clem at Hugging Face and founders who entered venture without prior VC experience prove the point, though highly technical domains like semiconductor tape-outs are exceptions.
Chapters
I had a question about if you had any advice for undergrads if they want to become an entrepreneur. Should they go get a PhD, or should they go into industry, or do you think they can just start one just right out of college?
I think you can start out of college. I mean, I think there are people, of course, that have done remarkable things that didn't even go to college, right? It really is, do you have deep conviction in something, and do you feel like you have a unique capability, or you can attract people that have a unique capability to go and do it? But degrees, I mean, I can tell you I don't care where somebody went to school. I don't care if they went to college. I mean, all those things are somewhat predictive of like what they might be able to do. But really, it's like, you know, you can tell the people that at 6 or 7 years old were running circles around their parents. You know, they were just like really clever. And the great definition of an entrepreneur is somebody that does more than anybody thinks possible with less than anybody thinks possible. So that cleverness, you know, the can-do-it-ness is way more important than any of the bona fides. Now, if you're doing something in semiconductors and you're doing a tape out of a chip, like we want to know, okay, you actually know what you're talking about, because if you're wrong, it's going to be really, really expensive. But some of the people we've backed had no experience doing whatever they're doing. You know, Clem at Hugging Face had no experience doing anything in open systems for AI before. And so some of the greatest entrepreneurs just went and did it. And then post facto, you know, we all look at these wonderful narratives, but most of the time they had no experience. You know, we started a venture fund as entrepreneurs. We had no experience in venture. So I really believe that experience is very overrated.
