Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes may be the latest names added to business history—but it’s not for their successes, rather their high-profile fraud scandals.
However, one startup accelerator CEO has voiced his concern that some college entrepreneurship programs are encouraging students to idolize the two fraudsters’ ‘fake it till you make it’ mindset, and that it could have “dangerous” implications for many young people.
“We’re not going to name them, but in full transparency, we’re worried about them because what we’re coming to understand is they are teaching you to lie,” Y Combinator President and CEO Garry Tan told a group of students during a live podcast recording at YC’s AI Startup School.
“That’s a waste of time,” he added. “And you’re gonna go to jail.”
While Tan admitted it can be tempting to follow others and cut ethical corners in today’s competitive business environment, the real secret to finding success in tech entrepreneurship today starts with carving your own legitimate path.
“In a world where there’s less money, where there’s fewer and fewer jobs, I kind of get it. It’s very zero-sum,” Tan said.
But he quickly added the caveat: “You don’t have to play by those old rules anymore. You don’t have to lie to investors. You don’t have to fake it till you make it.”
Fortune reached out to Y Combinator for further comment.
Startups don’t follow a syllabus
One of the biggest challenges for young entrepreneurs is breaking out of the structured schooling mindset—and realizing a startup is an open book.
Jared Friedman, YC’s managing director of software and former cofounder of Scribd, said a failure to teach this is a major flaw of many academic programs.
“Anytime you try to bottle up entrepreneurship and teach it as a college course, what you end up with is basically a cheap facsimile,” Friedman said during the live recording of the Lightcone Podcast. “They teach you to follow a particular method or a particular practice, and that’s just not what startups are actually like.”
Take social media, for example: Even in just the past five years, its power to propel a brand and launch a product has grown exponentially—yet some college programs have still not caught on. It’s one instance of how traditional teaching can become obsolete by the time students enter the real world.
It’s a problem that’s not exclusive to business programs; the curriculum in many computer science departments is “quite outdated,” with many schools still not promoting AI use in the classroom, warned Diana Hu, a general partner at YC, who was also on the podcast with Tan.
“They’re quite literally prohibiting the students from learning the tools that they are going to need in the future,” she added.
Business leaders are worried about what colleges are teaching
The Y Combinator team is not alone in their skepticism about whether colleges are teaching the necessary skills for students to succeed—especially at a time when the price of attending university continues to skyrocket.
“I’m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today. I think that there’s a big issue on that, and all the student debt issues are… really big,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an appearance on the This Past Weekend podcast with Theo Von earlier this year.
Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has gone so far to call college “overrated.”
“I think the value of a college education is somewhat overweighted,” Musk said in a video he later reposted on X. “Too many people spend four years, accumulate a ton of debt and often don’t have useful skills that they can apply afterwards.”
And because some young people have already caught on—and begun exploring alternative education pathways—many companies like JPMorgan Chase and IBM have scaled back their degree requirements on job postings. Michael Bush, the CEO of Great Place to Work, predicts this trend will only continue to grow.
“Almost everyone is realizing that they’re missing out on great talent by having a degree requirement,” he previously told Fortune. “That snowball is just growing.”
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