If you want to start a startup, what you should do in college is go really deep in what you’re interested in.
This deceptively simple advice comes from Paul Graham, the legendary co-founder of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator that has launched over 4,000 companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe. Speaking with characteristic directness, Graham cuts through the noise of entrepreneurship education to deliver what may be the most counterintuitive guidance for aspiring founders: stop thinking about startups and start thinking about learning.
“If you have genuine intellectual curiosity, that’s what you’ll naturally tend to do if you just follow your own inclinations,” Graham continues. “The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise.”
This insight strikes at the heart of a fundamental misconception about startup success. While business schools teach frameworks and incubators promise networks, Graham argues that the secret ingredient isn’t found in pitch decks or networking events—it’s found in the deep, often obsessive pursuit of knowledge in a specific field.
To illustrate his point, Graham points to one of tech’s most successful entrepreneurs: “Larry Page is Larry Page because he was an expert on search, and the way he became an expert on search was because he was genuinely interested in it, not because of some ulterior motive. At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity, and you’ll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive at the end of the process.”
The Google co-founder didn’t set out to build a trillion-dollar company. He was simply fascinated by the problem of organizing and ranking web pages—a curiosity that led him to develop the PageRank algorithm while pursuing his PhD at Stanford. The startup came later, almost as a byproduct of his genuine intellectual passion.
Graham’s philosophy culminates in what he calls “the ultimate advice for young would-be startup founders. Reduced to two words: just learn.”
This approach flies in the face of today’s entrepreneurship culture, where 20-somethings are encouraged to drop out, move fast, and “fake it till you make it.” Graham’s perspective suggests a more patient path: spend your formative years becoming genuinely expert at something meaningful, and entrepreneurial opportunities will naturally emerge from that expertise. In an era where artificial intelligence is reshaping entire industries and technical complexity is increasing exponentially, his advice feels more relevant than ever—the founders who will build tomorrow’s breakthrough companies aren’t those chasing trends, but those driven by an insatiable curiosity to understand how the world really works.