Day: September 8, 2025

• Paul Graham is the cofounder of Y Combinator.
• The startup incubator has funded several prominent companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit.
• Graham said students are better off learning new things than founding startups in high school.

Paul Graham, the cofounder of startup incubator Y Combinator, said on Saturday that students should think twice before launching their startups in high school.

“The thing to do now is to learn new things and increase your skill at the things you already know,” Graham wrote in a post on X.

“Startups are rarely the optimal way to do this. The point of a startup is to make something people want, not to learn,” he added.

Representatives for Graham at Y Combinator did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Graham said it probably isn’t the best idea for a high schooler to start their entrepreneurship journey right away, even though they could learn from the experience.

“You will learn things in a startup, of course. But the way to learn the fastest is to work on whatever you’re most curious about, and you don’t have that luxury in a startup. In a startup, you have to work on whatever users want most,” he wrote in a follow-up post on X.

Most prominent startup founders began their ventures after graduating from high school. Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard during their junior and sophomore years, respectively.

Some, like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, earned their bachelor’s degrees before starting their first companies.

Graham has posted career advice on X. In August, Graham said in a series of X posts that the best way to secure one’s job in the age of AI is to focus on honing one’s passions.

“What AI (in its current form) is good at is not so much certain jobs, but a certain way of working. It’s good at scutwork. So that’s the thing to avoid,” Graham wrote.

In his post, Graham said low-level programming jobs “are already disappearing.”

Top programmers, meanwhile, are still “being paid exceptional amounts,” he added.

“So if I had to boil down my advice to one sentence, it would be: Find a kind of work that you’re so interested in that you’ll learn to do it better than AI can,” Graham wrote.