How Can Princeton Expand Entrepreneurship on Campus?

The Princeton University administration has undertaken a great initiative: to expand entrepreneurship on campus. In the process, they are reaching out to students asking for their opinion, so I decided to share my thoughts in an open letter.

I cannot propose a single recommendation because, in my opinion, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to expanding something as broad and vaguely defined as entrepreneurship. So I’m listing several recommendations in order of importance.

Firstly though, I would like to preface this with my Princeton Entrepreneurship Thesis (or E-Thesis, for short) in order to bring forward some of the essential dynamics that govern the process of choosing what to do while at Princeton.

E-Thesis: It impossible for a Princeton student to productively work on a startup during the school year.

The reason for this lies in the incentive framework that exists at Princeton within which students make strategic decisions regarding their future careers. The framework can be summarized in the following two lemmas:

Lemma #1: Time = grades

Due to the intense academic curriculum in conjunction with grade deflation, Princeton students are engaged in a constant competition with each other over a scarce resource that is very difficult to obtain and which is artificially kept at shortage. If you don’t put in enough effort in your classes, someone else will, and you will slide backwards along the curve.

Lemma #2: Grades = $$$

Basically all companies that recruit at Princeton have strict GPA requirements, and even if you make their GPA cutoff, your grades still have a substantial impact on your chances of getting a job. Here, again, your main competition is other Princeton students, especially for the often sought-after finance and consulting jobs. The same thing applies for basically all paths to success available to the Princeton student, including grad school (med/law/biz/PhD), fellowships, prestigious non-profits such as Teach for America, etc.

These two major factors lead to a situation where, early in your Princeton career when you are picking among activities, the most rational thing to do regarding your future career is to maximize your GPA. This is the main metric that seems to matter to your success. Once you start down that path, it becomes circular causation where, once it’s time to apply for jobs, it only makes sense to capitalize on all the effort you have put into your GPA and apply for the most prestigious jobs.

Given these constraints, there is no reason why the Princeton student would choose the risky, uncertain, unpaved, unpopular and even dangerous path of entrepreneurship. Hence the E-Thesis holds. As a Princeton student, it is unreasonable for me to deviate from my class work unless it is utterly necessary to build or maintain my social status, my resume, or my sanity.

Building off of these assumptions, in order to make entrepreneurship — or anything else for that matter — popular among Princeton students, it is necessary to do at least one of the following:

1. Give grades for it,
2. Give $$$ for it,
3. Make it cool,
4. Make it look good on a resume, or
5. Make it fun and refreshing and something you can enjoy with friends.

For example, when Vivian and I were organizing the first HackPrinceton back in 2011, we emphasized 2 and 3, although once it kicked off, 5 became a big factor and 4 ended up being an unintended side effect. To cite another example, Princeton Student Agencies have 2 and 4, and to some extent 5. Most student groups have 4. Most sports and social clubs have 3 and 5.

Don’t get me wrong here — people obviously participate in student groups and extracurricular activities for much purer reasons, such as their passions, their intellectual pursuits, or because they believe in the cause. But essentially all existing activities at Princeton already have at least one of the attributes listed above. Giving myself as an example, if you ask me, I ran E-Club in order to accelerate the startup scene at Princeton; however, if I have to be completely honest, I would have never done it in the first place if it wasn’t for the prestige that it carried and if it didn’t leave an amazing mark on my resume.

Given this framework, here are a few suggestions on how the administration might make entrepreneurship more popular among Princeton students.

The best thing to do is to break the circular causation (in particular, lemma #2) by educating the young Princeton freshmen about the myriad of opportunities that exist in the world of startups. There have been noteworthy efforts in that direction, in particular the Startup Career Fair co-hosted by Career Services and E Club. However, this is merely a first step, and much more needs to be done. Some suggestions:

• Startup job workshops and counseling. Applying for startups is an entirely different animal from the streamlined process of applying to big companies. The whole interview process is different (if it can even be called a “process”).
• Partnerships with venture capital firms and programs like HackNY and the KPCB Fellows that allow students to simultaneously apply to a set of preselected startups. Although the Keller Center does that, it is of relatively limited scope and is far from an attractive alternative to consulting and finance.
• Affirmative action for startups at career fairs. Big companies already have a huge recruiting advantage and they are the only ones visible to the average Princeton student who is too busy to go fishing for startup opportunities. It must be made obvious that working at a startup is at least as promising as working at Goldman.

Startups are always short on cash and cannot afford to make hires that will not add immediate value to the company, even when it comes to internships. Unfortunately, unlike more technical schools like MIT and Carnegie Mellon, the average Princeton underclassman, despite their general intelligence, rarely has the skillset that would allow them to directly contribute to a startup, especially an early stage one. However, every startup can use extra manpower. At the same time, a fantastic way to learn about entrepreneurship is to work at a startup.

The summer after freshman or sophomore year would be the perfect time for an exploratory internship like that, and a stipend from the school would remove the financial barrier. Some schools like University of Waterloo even have joint programs with industry partners. The Keller Center is already doing that to some extent, but it would be great if it is made bigger, more flexible, and more popular.

This option is great because it does not interfere with the students’ demanding class schedules. Also most freshmen tend to waste their summers, so this would be a great way to take advantage of that and to get them excited about entrepreneurship early on.

I won’t turn this into a rant against grade deflation, but after four years in the college entrepreneurship circles, it is pretty clear to me that students at no other school, not even Harvard or Stanford or MIT, have the same obsession with grades as Princeton students. This is directly hurting the startup scene at Princeton. Lemma #1 must be disrupted.

Although shoehorning entrepreneurship into the broken grade-based incentive system is far from ideal, it would definitely make more people think about taking some of the great entrepreneurship classes like EGR 491 and COS 448. If you can’t beat lemma #1, you can at least make entrepreneurship count for grades, however twisted that may sound.

Except for COS 333, there are no classes designed to teach modern software/mobile/web development. There is no class that teaches you about web page design or app design. In a world dominated by technology startups, the Princeton student is largely unequipped to start one unless she has some previous experience or takes some of her precious time to learn Ruby or iOS development, something which is unlikely to happen due to lemmas #1 and #2.

To fix that, E-Club organized student-led seminars — Hack Classes — on HTML, CSS, Python, iOS, deployment, etc, with huge interest from the student body. However, student participation usually drops significantly after week 3, with students complaining they fail to keep up with the material in what for them is essentially an extra class. We have enough validation that those should be taught for credit by faculty members, just like they are at Stanford and MIT.

At other schools, something which has proven to be tremendously successful is having a space where people gather to talk about startups and build cool things. It creates a welcoming social environment that tremendously encourages people to start thinking about creative ideas, teaming up with each other and making things happen. Currently HackPrinceton creates such an atmosphere, but only once a semester. This should be a year-round thing.

The Keller Center has eLab, which is an amazing venue. Unfortunately, due to its location, it is extremely unpopular and is empty most of the time. What is worse, people who come here usually use it as a study hall instead of a hacking space (I plead guilty). In general, due to lemmas #1 and #2, every space on campus tends to converge to a study hall. A convenient centrally located Hack House will quickly be filled with people working on their homework assignments, something which regularly happens at ACM’s Code@Nights and even sometimes at HackPrinceton (for the record, I’ve never seen a student from any other school work on their problem sets during a hackathon).

A version of the summer internship stipend could be extended to programs that pay students to work at startups over smaller breaks such as intersession, fall break, spring break, etc. This could work really well if Princeton partners with a few venture capital firms that would love to place bright promising students at some of their portfolio companies, even if it’s only for a week or two.

Just in general, it would be great if Princeton allocated more support for startup-oriented programs that take place over breaks, such as the Silicon Valley TigerTrek over fall break and Hack Week over intersession. This is a great workaround that at least partially avoids the conflict with class work during the semester.

To finish off, I think a fundamental question that the administration should ask itself is: Do we want students to start companies while at Princeton?

There are arguments for both sides. Some pros:

• The safest time to start a company is while at school. It is also the cheapest.
• The only way to truly learn entrepreneurship is to actually do it. Hence this is an invaluable educational experience that nicely complements the academic curriculum.

And, of course, there are the cons:

• It is a distraction that stands in direct conflict with academic success. In the extreme, it entirely defeats the purpose of the liberal arts education.
• If done improperly, a student might end up less prepared for succeeding in the real world.

It seems like the answer to this question will shape the direction in which the administration should aim to make changes. If the answer is yes, then perhaps removing grade deflation and adding more hands-on classes and programs that encourage side projects is the solution. If the answer is no, then perhaps focusing on internships, career planning, and business classes is the better option.

Originally published on April 1, 2014 by @momchiltomov.