The returnee student returns with a monthly salary of 3,000, and the idol of the parents in the chicken baby circle turns to Lei Jun, a self-made entrepreneurial pioneer

Letsight

2024-04-17 09:00Published in Beijing

Recently, the wind direction of the chicken baby circle has changed, and the idol of the chicken baby's parents has changed from the "second generation" with background and resources to the self-made reader Lei Jun.

Since the official release of Xiaomi Auto, Lei Jun, who is at the helm, has achieved financial freedom at the age of 38 and spent 10 years to build the legendary experience of the world's top 500 companies.

Nowadays, the employment situation of Ivy League students working as study abroad agents, Harvard graduates taking public examinations, and returnees returning from prestigious schools with a monthly salary of 3,000 makes people wonder about the meaning of studying abroad.

On the other hand, the myth of the founder of OpenAI and the founder of Pika dropping out of school to start a business is yearning.

Is the halo of a prestigious school the key to entrepreneurial success? Is the dropout model worth emulating? How should our children prepare for entrepreneurship?

01

The university with the largest number of entrepreneurs in the United States

According to incomplete statistics, more than 30% of American college students start their own businesses, most of them think that entrepreneurship is not terrible, and more than 90% of college students think that entrepreneurship is a respectable job.

Crunchbase, the nation's largest startup database, has released a list of the universities with the highest number of startups in the United States, revealing the universities with the strongest entrepreneurial atmosphere in the United States.

The list counts the graduate schools of startup founders who raised more than $1 million in 2022-2023, and this list does not include the number of business school entrepreneurs, and a total of 36 schools are on the list.

At the top of the list is Stanford University, which ranks first with 472 founders, and is the well-deserved "king of entrepreneurship" among American universities.

Throughout the history of the school, entrepreneurship can be said to be the gene flowing in Stanford's blood, and the Silicon Valley it gave birth to has stepped out of half the sky of the technology world, such as Google, HP, Linked in, Yahoo, OpenAI, etc.

In second place is the polytechnic giant MIT, which runs the Martin Trust Center, which is actually an entrepreneurship center, providing students with a variety of entrepreneurial skills and consulting support.

UCB and Harvard are third and fourth, and the top 10 schools also include Cornell University, Penn, CMU, Columbia, Yale, and USC.

In the entire list, the public and private sectors are equally divided in the world, and the graduates of the strong science and engineering schools perform the best.

It is worth mentioning that this list does not include the number of entrepreneurs in business schools, so most of the schools on the list are entrepreneurs in the direction of technology.

Crunchbase also separately counted the business schools of alumni of startups that raised more than $1 million during the 2022-2023 period.

Harvard University ranked first with 241 students, followed by Stanford and Penn in second and third place, followed by MIT, Columbia, Chiga, NYU, UCLA, Northwestern University, and UCB.

The two lists are obviously different, and almost all of the schools on the list are old and prestigious schools and top business schools.

It can be seen that in terms of the number of entrepreneurs, the number of entrepreneurs in business schools is far more than the number of entrepreneurs in non-business schools, because most business school graduates are more inclined to join finance, banking, consulting and other industries.

Most of the entrepreneurs in non-business schools are in the field of science and engineering, which is also in line with the current trend of technology becoming an important productive force.

In the context of the Internet, big data and artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship in the field of science and technology is more likely to succeed, so it has also created entrepreneurial myths.

After all, more than ten years ago, Lei Jun once said: Standing on the tuyere, pigs can fly to the sky.

02

The Myth of Entrepreneurship for Dropouts

Most of the entrepreneurial bigwigs have a unique label, that is, dropouts.

Dropping out of school to start a business has become the norm for tech bigwigs, and this label has also added a touch of mystery to their entrepreneurial experience.

PayPal's founder, Peter Thiel, once ran an educational experiment that the New York Times described at the time as "one of the most unusual experiments today."

The experiment, known as the "Thiel Fellowship," selects 20 dropouts under the age of 20 each year, gives them $100,000 in start-up capital, and provides them with entrepreneurial mentorship to track their progress and compare whether they are more successful in college.

In 2023, according to Bloomberg, the program recruited a total of 271 participants and incubated 11 "unicorn" companies with a total value of more than $27.1 million.

Among the entrepreneurial geniuses who came out of the project, the most familiar is Zuckerberg, the founder of the social giant "Facebook".

In 2017, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was invited to be a commencement speaker at Harvard University, he also quipped to Gates: "They know we didn't graduate, right?"

Gates said very nonchalantly, "Oh, that's the best part, they're actually going to give you a degree." Sure enough, 12 years later, Zuckerberg received an honorary doctorate of laws from Harvard University.

Bill Gates, a senior, was once called "the most successful dropout" by the "Harvard Crimson".

Nowadays, many juniors have followed the footsteps of their predecessors and chose to drop out of school in studying and starting a business.

For example, Musk dropped out of school the second day after entering Stanford, Sam Altman, the father of ChatGPT, dropped out of school to found the company during his sophomore year, and Guo Wenjing, a "Harvard girl", founded Pika after dropping out of Stanford with a doctorate in computer science...

Alexandr Wang, a Chinese-American boy known as the "next Musk", dropped out of school at the age of 18 when he entered MIT as a freshman and founded Scale AI and served as CEO, becoming the world's youngest self-made billionaire.

More than half of those at the top of tech today are dropouts, does that mean a college education is useless?

On the contrary, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and others have said that the thinking and knowledge that a university education brings to them are irreplaceable.

The model of dropping out of school and starting a business is not suitable for every child, and it is even less advisable to give up college in order to start a business.

You know, they don't choose to drop out of school to start a business because they can't study, but they feel that studying step by step will delay starting a business, so they choose to drop out of school.

Before dropping out of school, some of them were keenly aware of the changes of the times and the rise of technology, and some had been immersed in the field of programming for many years.

Dropping out of school is just the surface, the deeper reason is that they have accumulated skills over the years and are driven by their dreams.

03

Graham gives middle school students three axes to entrepreneurship

The old version of entrepreneurship tells the story of a middle-aged man who has been in a certain field for decades, accumulating and starting a business, while the entrepreneurial script of the new era is often the story of young people starting a business.

The "2018 China Returnee Employment and Entrepreneurship Survey Report" mentioned the trend of "young age of entrepreneurship".

A large number of young people have just graduated and started their own business, and some students are ready to start their own business even in middle school...

Paul Graham, the godfather of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and a venture capitalist, gave a lecture on entrepreneurship to middle school students, the world is changing, entrepreneurship is no longer exclusive to college students, and junior high school students can be prepared for entrepreneurship.

In the lecture, Graham believes that there are 3 things that a child needs to prepare before the age of 18.

First, become a craftsman and be proficient in a skill.

Whether it's programming, editing, design, etc., as long as you're interested, you can learn it, and there are no special restrictions on this technology, but it must be an active creative activity, not a passive consumption activity.

For example, if you like to design video games, it's considered a skill, but you just like to play games, which doesn't count.

Graham argues that once people have technology, the way they see the world changes. In other words, with a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail.

In his book "The Hacker and the Painter", he mentions that a great design comes from the designer's small impulse.

If the designer feels that something is a bit ugly, he will improve and correct it based on his professional vision, and a new great design will be born if he changes it.

Second, find an idea to start a business

If you're already particularly proficient in your skills, you can find a matching question for your skills.

Graham suggests that small projects can be started, and many business opportunities may initially be too small to support a company, but today's mega-corporations grow from small projects.

For example, Facebook originated from designing an online address book for a school, Apple originated from saving itself a computer, Google originated from sorting search engine search results...

The discovery of chance is not the first nail in front of you that tells you that a hammer is needed here. It's that you have a hammer in your hand before you realize that there is a nail here.

Third, find a partner

Based on Graham's experience investing in more than 4,000 startups, he believes that the best startups generally have 2-3 founders.

But finding a partner who can share the same ideals is not an easy task, and Graham's advice to middle school students is to work hard to get into a good university first.

Because the best colleges have the brightest minds, it's easier to meet the best co-founders and the best employees.

When Larry and Sergey started Google, for example, they recruited all the brightest people they knew from Stanford University.

If there's one more thing to add to Graham's three-plank axe, it's this: learn to embrace failure.

Some people have used "nine deaths and one life" to describe entrepreneurship, and many people dare not take the first step because they are afraid of failure.

But failure is a compulsory course for entrepreneurship, just as in the most successful Silicon Valley, there is also a saying that "the most successful one is Silicon Valley".

William P. Barnett, a professor of strategy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, was once asked what he thought of such a high failure rate for Silicon Valley startups.

He replied that if Silicon Valley's failure rate dropped, then I would be worried, because that would mean that Silicon Valley's innovation dynamism and capacity had declined.

A good entrepreneurial atmosphere does not mark the so-called "losers" with failure and shame, on the contrary, those entrepreneurs who have failed in the past will even get more favor from venture capital institutions than first-time entrepreneurs.

Because they use a growth mindset to look at entrepreneurship, failure is experience, and if you apply that experience to the next startup, then the probability of success will be higher.

Ray Dario, the godfather of hedge funds in the United States and known as the "Jobs of the investment world", summed it up in his book "Principles": pain + reflection = progress.

This is also the most basic truth that young entrepreneurs in the future need to understand.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•