【文章标题】：How Universities Should Prepare Founders 【文章标题】：大学应如何培养创始人
【文章正文】： | August 2026 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. 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. 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. [1] | 2026年8月 大学应该如何培养学生去创办初创公司？Y Combinator 处于回答这个问题的绝佳位置，因为学生接下来就会来到我们这里。我们就像研究生院。而且，由于 YC 花了 20 年时间完善其对有前途的创始人应具备什么素质的模型，你大概找不到比这更好的目标了。YC 的合伙人看重什么？答案简单得令人惊讶。他们想要擅长构建东西并且有构建习惯的人。初创公司最难的部分是产品：知道该构建什么，并且有能力把它构建出来。而这种知识来自学习计算机科学、机械工程或分子生物学，而不是管理学或金融学。[1]
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. [2] 因此，培养本科生成为成功创始人的方法，不是给他们开设一些专注于“创业学”的新课程，而是去做大学已经最擅长的事情——教他们计算机科学、机械工程和分子生物学。[2]
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. 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. 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. [3] 事实上，培养学生创办初创公司，比培养他们从事几乎任何其他职业都更接近自由教育的理想。初创公司成败取决于客户有多喜欢产品。客户并不在乎创始人在大学里学了什么。因此，创始人可以自由学习任何他们想学的东西，只要他们变得擅长构建东西。但“构建”应该从非常宽泛的意义上来理解。这并不意味着所有想成为创始人的人都必须学习某种形式的工程学。几乎任何可以被描述为构建或创造的专业知识都可能有用。例如，史蒂夫·乔布斯学过书法就很有用；这是苹果主导桌面出版的原因之一。因此，虽然数学、科学、工程和设计往往是好的选择，但我不想在它们周围划出清晰的界限，因为我可以想象其他形式的构建也可能有用。当然，你不一定要主修某门学科才能擅长它。马克·扎克伯格擅长编程，但他是心理学专业，不是计算机科学专业。描述想成为创始人的人应该学什么的最好方式是：他们应该寻找强大的思想。但聪明人本来就会自然地被强大的思想所吸引。所以，只要教授强大思想的院系存在，那些能成为优秀创始人的人就会找到它们。[3]
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. 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. 事实上，大学要想在培养创始人方面做到完美，只需要改变两件事：它们需要让学生觉得创办初创公司是他们可以做到的事情，并且需要鼓励学生去做自己的项目。目前，认为创办初创公司是可能的这种信念分布得非常不均衡。YC 现在收到如此多的申请，以至于我们的申请数据可以合理地代表不同大学对初创公司的兴趣程度。例如，哈佛校友申请的比例大约是耶鲁和普林斯顿校友的两倍。大概哈佛的学生与耶鲁和普林斯顿的学生并没有那么大的不同；哈佛学生后来创办更多初创公司的原因只是在那里这更成为一种惯例。这反过来意味着，仅仅通过让学生觉得创办初创公司是一个可行的选择，耶鲁和普林斯顿至少就能使创办初创公司的人数翻倍。
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. 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.” 一旦一所大学有了创办初创公司的文化，你就不必说服学生这是一个可行的选择。新生会从学长学姐那里学到这一点。但是，在一所还没有多少初创公司文化的大学里，你可以做一些事情来帮助这种认识的形成。最有效的可能是向学生展示已经做到这一点的人的例子。在你在现实生活中见过一些创始人之前，你往往会认为创办初创公司是别人做的事情。见到他们就会打破这种幻想。事实上，在现实生活中见到创始人具有双重鼓舞作用：他们看起来令人印象深刻，但他们也显得很有人情味。尤其是当他们谈论早期岁月，那时他们毫无头绪，犯了很多错误。所以奇怪的是，在现实生活中见到创始人，会让成为创始人这件事同时显得既令人向往又触手可及。它让学生想：“我想成为那样的人，而且我能做到。”
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. 创始人对学生的鼓舞程度，大致是他们富有和出名的程度除以他们比学生大多少岁的函数。因此，并不一定要把著名的亿万富翁请到校园里来。二十五六岁、创业三年、公司估值几亿美元的创始人也能起到同样好的效果；他们的财富和名气可能只有前者的二十分之一，但学生认同他们的容易程度却是前者的二十倍。
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? 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 为什么希望学生创办初创公司的大学需要让他们相信这是一个可行的选择，原因很明显。但为什么让学生做自己的项目如此重要呢？有四个原因。第一个原因很简单：这是深入理解一门学科的好方法，可能是最好的方法。那种兴奋感