Y Combinator's Paul Graham Tells Cornell Students: Stay in School

Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator — the accelerator whose portfolio includes OpenAI, Airbnb, DoorDash and Kalshi — told a packed 600-person auditorium at Cornell's Kennedy Hall that dropping out of college to found a startup is the wrong default move. YC has launched more than 5,000 companies with a combined valuation above $1.3 trillion, and its co-founder's core message was that the degree still matters.

Graham, a Cornell '86 graduate who co-founded YC in 2005, said the "latest trend" his firm has noticed is students leaving school to start companies. His pushback was blunt. "You do learn more in a startup, but … you don't get to choose what it is," Graham said. "What you can't do in a startup is learn about things just out of curiosity."

What does the talk change for aspiring founders?

Graham framed the timing question in practical terms. The opportunity to launch a startup "will always be there," he said, while "school has an expiration date like fresh fish." He dismissed the fear of waiting as "nonsense" and added: "Whatever startup idea you have now, you'll have a better one in two years anyway."

For context on scale: YC invests in early-stage startups in exchange for equity, runs them through a three-month program, and ends with founders pitching investors. Sam Altman, now OpenAI's CEO, was in the inaugural 2005 batch. Graham himself made his first millions co-founding Viaweb, an early e-commerce company, before becoming one of Silicon Valley's most widely-read essayists.

Graham opened the Wednesday talk with a joke about being "the first graduate" in artificial intelligence, having designed his own major at Cornell. "I was a philosophy major most of the time here," he said. "But a lot of people thought I was a [computer science] major because I took so many CS classes."

Curiosity as a selection mechanism

Graham argued startup ideas should come from genuine interest, and that money alone is a poor incentive. The best founding experience, he said, sits at the "intersection" of "loving" the work and "making money."

"The only way to discover the very best ideas is to let yourself be drawn along by pure curiosity," Graham said. "Your curiosity is not random. It's doing a lot of selection."

In a rapid-fire Q&A moderated by Provost Kavita Bala, Graham took a question from Jay Patel '26, founder of VigilantAI, about when founders should keep working on failed ideas. Graham stressed understanding why an idea failed and what others "were overlooking," pointing to Dropbox — a YC-backed company that succeeded in syncing user data where competitors failed. "It was a really good answer," said Patel, who interviewed with YC in August and plans to reapply.

Cornell leans into the YC comparison

Bala, who opened and moderated the event titled "How To Turn Yourself Into a Startup Founder," tied the university's strategy directly to Graham's firm. "When we launched Cornell Tech, Cornell's aspiration was to create a Y Combinator kind of atmosphere in New York City to fuel the startup economy in New York," she said. She also cited last month's report from the Cornell Committee on the Future of the American University on educating the "whole person," calling that commitment "more important than ever before."

Prof. Matt Marx, the newly-appointed vice provost for entrepreneurship, innovation and external management, attended and called Graham the tech ecosystem's "thought leader." "I've been a fan for literally three decades," Marx said. "He's the G.O.A.T." Marx built Foundercentral.org, an AI-powered tool under the Entrepreneurship at Cornell program that helps students, alumni, faculty and staff with startups. "This is the kind of culture we're trying to build," Marx said of the site, adding the university is "re-embracing those alumni who love this campus, but maybe feel a little disconnected."

A skeptical minority in the room

Student reactions split. "I think people should be open to dropping out of college," said Bilal Munawar M.Eng. '27, who traveled from Cornell Tech's New York City campus. "There's nothing apart from experience that teaches you how to do things." Wyatt Sell M.Eng. '27 called the talk "inspiring" and anti-"anti-intellectualism." But Orion Hoch '28, a Cornell GeoData team lead among roughly 30 students at a subsequent invitation-only session, left "more on the skeptical side": "You have to be more cognizant [and ask] why does somebody want me to invest in these high-risk, volatile startups?"

Graham closed by equating founder-building with a classic liberal education. "The recipe for turning yourself into a startup founder, the advertised purpose of this talk, is pretty much identical with the traditional ideal of liberal education," he said. "And that is pretty cool when you think about it." For practitioners, the takeaway is a contrarian one in 2025's drop-out culture: the YC playbook rewards curiosity now and the degree first.