Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes

[vidar]

"It’s like getting a degree at Berkeley. Okay. It’s not Stanford. You can a complicated story about how you had to do it because your parents had a big mortgage or something. But it’s a hard negative signal to get past."

I agree that YCombinator is head and shoulders above its competitors but is Stanford really considered that much better than Berkeley? Honest question.

[seiji]

I read it as a joke just playing to the audience (ongoing good-natured rivalry, etc).

It's like when someone really likes reddit. Okay, it's not HN. They can tell a complicated story about how they like cats and populist rage politics, but it's a hard negative signal to get past.

[dm8]

I believe in terms of entrepreneurial culture on campus, Stanford is slightly ahead of Cal. However, I don't think there is a difference in academic quality. Lot of Stanford CS professors are Berkeley alums and vice versa for Cal.

Stanford definitely has leg up in terms of Startups. Especially the dot com era. At Cal we don't have equivalent of Google or Yahoo. However, Startups are just one dimension of innovation in technology. Berkeley can easily boast some of the groundbreaking research (not just engineering but overall sciences) during last 100 years.

Disclosure: UC Berkeley Alum here.

[MaxGabriel]

Joke aside, Paul Graham found no correlation between college attended and startup success.

http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

[karpathy]

That quote was the highlight of the class :) He's not only playing the audience-- In an earlier class (class 3 or so), Peter Thiel justified his views on Stanford vs. Berkeley based on their track record with creating successful companies. Maybe someone can find the exact quote, but he said that between the two, vast majority of successful companies start at Stanford and that he's only aware of 1 or 2 that started out at Berkeley.

[mukaiji]

The whole Stanford vs. Berkeley... Honestly, if you make anything more of it than the joke it's intended to be, you're wasting time. To be fair, he did joke earlier this quarter about how Stanford is outscoring Berkeley in terms of the value of companies started at each school every year. However, those are jokes. I'm a Stanford student, but I think Berkeley has made incredible contributions outside the field of making-VCs-rich. Fundamental science, counter-culture, and engineering (including tech). I'm sure Thiel thinks so too.

[Simpletoon]

Paul Graham: "$50m companies innovate. Mine did. We basically invented the web app. We were doing complex stuff in LISP when everyone else was doing CGI scripts. And, quite frankly, $50m is no small thing. "

Of course, no one uses CGI now. It's all complex stuff done in LISP. Innovation is amazing, isn't it?

[pchristensen]

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt

That's more advanced stuff than most web apps or frameworks do today. If viaweb had been done now instead of 15 years ago, they probably would have spun off lots of open source projects.

[vmyy99]

You can find notes essays of all of Peter Thiel's startup classes here - http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup

[mukaiji]

Anyone interested in the actual slides?

[YAYERKA]

Yes please! Also could you tell us about the assignments and exams?

[burrisj]

Very much so! Would also love to see what the exams are like.

[DaniFong]

Yes please

[_exec]

Definitely interested.

[mattewing]

One of the more interesting asides here is PGs idea that our society is starting to reflect a power-law distribution. Not sure what he was thinking about specifically, but it certainly seems to be true in terms of wealth these days.

How does a society deal with that for the long-term?