{"id":380,"date":"2025-07-11T02:58:02","date_gmt":"2025-07-11T02:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/380\/"},"modified":"2025-07-11T02:58:02","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T02:58:02","slug":"tech-ceo-garry-tan-slams-college-entrepreneurship-programs-for-teaching-you-to-lie-he-warns-gen-z-students-that-it-could-land-them-in-jail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/380\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech CEO Garry Tan slams college entrepreneurship programs for ‘teaching you to lie’\u2014he warns Gen Z students that it could land them in jail"},"content":{"rendered":"

FTX\u2019s Sam Bankman-Fried<\/a> and Theranos\u2019s Elizabeth Holmes<\/a> may be the latest names added to business history\u2014but not for their successes; rather, for their high-profile fraud scandals.<\/p>\n

However, one startup accelerator CEO has voiced his concern that some college entrepreneurship programs are encouraging students to idolize the two fraudsters\u2019 \u201cfake it till you make it\u201d mindset, and that it could have \u201cdangerous\u201d implications for many young people.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not going to name them, but in full transparency, we\u2019re worried about them because what we\u2019re coming to understand is they are teaching you to lie,\u201d Y Combinator president and CEO Garry Tan<\/a> told a group of students during a live podcast recording at YC\u2019s AI Startup School<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a waste of time,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd you\u2019re gonna go to jail.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Tan admitted it can be tempting to follow others\u2019 example and cut ethical corners in today\u2019s competitive business environment, the real secret to finding success in tech entrepreneurship today starts with carving your own legitimate path.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u200b\u200bIn a world where there\u2019s less money, where there\u2019s fewer and fewer jobs<\/a>, I kind of get it. It\u2019s very zero-sum,\u201d Tan said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But he quickly added the caveat: \u201cYou don\u2019t have to play by those old rules anymore. You don\u2019t have to lie to investors. You don\u2019t have to fake it till you make it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fortune reached out to Y Combinator for further comment.<\/p>\n

Startups don\u2019t follow a syllabus<\/p>\n

One of the biggest challenges for young entrepreneurs is breaking out of the structured schooling mindset\u2014and realizing that a startup is an open book.<\/p>\n

Jared Friedman, YC\u2019s managing director of software and a cofounder of Scribd<\/a>, said a failure to teach this is a major flaw of many academic programs.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnytime you try to bottle up entrepreneurship and teach it as a college course, what you end up with is basically a cheap facsimile,\u201d Friedman said during the live recording of the Lightcone Podcast<\/a>. \u201cThey teach you to follow a particular method or a particular practice, and that\u2019s just not what startups are actually like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Take social media, for example: Even in just the past five years, its power to propel a brand and launch a product has grown exponentially\u2014yet some college programs have still not caught on. It\u2019s one instance of how traditional teaching can become obsolete by the time students enter the real world.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a problem that\u2019s not exclusive to business programs; the curriculum in many computer science departments<\/a> is \u201cquite outdated,\u201d with many schools still not promoting AI use in the classroom, warned Diana Hu, a general partner at YC, who was also on the podcast with Tan.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re quite literally prohibiting the students from learning the tools that they are going to need in the future,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Business leaders are worried about what colleges are teaching<\/p>\n

The Y Combinator team is not alone in their skepticism about whether colleges are teaching the necessary skills for students to succeed\u2014especially at a time when the price of attending university<\/a> continues to skyrocket.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today. I think that there\u2019s a big issue on that, and all the student debt issues are\u2026really big,\u201d said Meta<\/a> CEO Mark Zuckerberg<\/a> in an appearance on the This Past Weekend<\/a> podcast with Theo Von earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla<\/a> and SpaceX<\/a>, has gone so far to call college \u201coverrated.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the value of a college education is somewhat overweighted,\u201d Musk said in a video he later reposted on X<\/a>. \u201cToo many people spend four years, accumulate a ton of debt, and often don\u2019t have useful skills that they can apply afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n

And because some young people have already caught on\u2014and begun exploring alternative education pathways\u2014many companies like JPMorgan Chase<\/a> and IBM<\/a> have scaled back their degree requirements<\/a> on job postings. Michael Bush<\/a>, the CEO of Great Place to Work, predicts this trend will only continue to grow.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlmost everyone is realizing that they\u2019re missing out on great talent by having a degree requirement,\u201d he previously told Fortune. \u201cThat snowball is just growing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FTX\u2019s Sam Bankman-Fried and Theranos\u2019s Elizabeth Holmes may be the latest names added to business history\u2014but not for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":381,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[523,28,524,525,526,527,158,153,232,528,529],"class_list":{"0":"post-380","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-building-your-career","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-career-advice","11":"tag-careers","12":"tag-education","13":"tag-entrepreneurs","14":"tag-entrepreneurship","15":"tag-gen-z","16":"tag-schools","17":"tag-start-ups","18":"tag-y-combinator"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}