- housing in the bay area is substantially more expensive now, so you need to already be pretty qualified in your role to justify your cost
- this partially goes against Paul Buchheit's old point that startups allow you to do work you'd otherwise be unqualified to do
- because startups work on building (rather than maintaining) products, the tech skills that startups want are different from the tech skills engineers in big companies are using
- universities aren't really making up the difference
Options:
- YC makes its own university for engineers/scientists
This goes along Alan Kay's point about not relying on vendors. If there's a particular skillset that YC cos want early engineers to have and people don't have it (at the scale YC collectively wants), it may make sense to teach it.
- Kyle Vogt from Cruise Automation (specifically interested in how he became such a good engineer), he hardly has any interviews that talk about this
- Nothing really public from Helion Energy, could be interesting
- What did founders do in the early days to develop technical chops while remaining frugal? This seems to be more than just learning syntax and really worth discussing.
- If great companies start as projects, have an entire discussion about that and what shape those take (if it's just a side project, do you do user interviews? Etc.)
- How to pick growth metrics in hard tech startups
- President of University of Waterloo or Eric from Pebble and what about the school creates such great engineers/founders and how Americans can emulate that
- FarmLogs Founders: Jesse Vollmar and Brad Koch
- A discussion on blending strategy with acting quickly and developing really great, original ideas (and how they evolve from small projects)
- Anything with Qasar again, that guy is the real deal
- "The best founders may be working on things that seem small but get them done extraordinarily quickly" - discussion on this