Venture-driven junior recruitment could be a simple solution to an obvious problem of confusion and misdirection, for countless talented undergrads. Especially nowadays, with so many 22 year olds graduating not only jobless, but clueless as well, what …

You should also factor in the economic forces at the time. Especially now, with reduced VC capital as you are reporting, there will be less start ups.

Today's graduates have been burden with school debt that previous generations only acquired when they bought a house. This debt will be the biggest factor slowing down the creation of new start ups and innovation.

It boils down to this: you can't afford to start a company with a big school debt. You probably can't afford to join a start up either if the start up doesn't have enough VC to pay you enough to pay off your loans.

And even if people get together and start a new company with no salaries on a shoestring, the parents and friends off these people will pressure them to get “real” jobs. Never mind that 10 years ago doing this would have been a cause of pride: with a huge debt that you must pay each month the same family and friend network that would have been supportive of you now will nag you to get a paying job and stop fooling around with a time wasting project; time that you should look for a real job.

As corroboration, it is a rather misguiding system we live in. Even VCs tend to view professionals with “Ivy League” academic and professional backgrounds more favorably. One can't really fault enterprising professionals for choosing however staid but well-reputed “McKinsey” career tracks.

Recruiters everywhere seem to view these labels act as credit ratings on a stream of cash flows that “Corporate America” (which here includes VCs) is investing in. “Better the credit rating agency and rating, lower the risk.” This in return is proving to be counterproductive (for VCs) as these very “less risky” human assets are not risky enough to produce needle-moving innovation!

It's what we measure as success that will define the quality and quantity of success. E.g. not VC returns but innovation and contribution to society (which could include wealth generation) could be a better guiding metric?

1. What’s tech anyway? Students don’t include VC and startup careers in their consideration set because they are simply unaware that such opportunities exist. At Penn we have 4 undergraduate schools (liberal arts, business, engineering, and nursing). During “recruiting season,” at least at the first 3 schools, bulge-bracket banks and consulting firms would be wooing everyone and their mother at multiple info sessions each night. Yet Google wasn’t even heard of on campus until 2 years after its IPO. Facebook didn’t even recruit at Penn when it launched its University Recruiting efforts in Fall ‘08. It’s hard not to fall into lemming behavior when tech careers, never mind tech startups, are very much under the radar in students’ eyes.
2. Education is expensive and someone has to pay. Per Azeem’s point, financial concerns are key in considering how to launch life post-college. Especially in the current economy, a lot of recent grads I know selected their jobs not for happiness or growth opportunities but for immediate financial rewards to fulfill loan repayments. This is also true for many MBA grads who need to justify that $150k dent to their wallets. Yes, options are valuable in incentivizing behavior and building the next Google but you can’t quantify them with an NPV.
3. The financial discrepancy adds up over time. Just as in pricing a product for market where it’s harder to start low and rack up prices than to start high and lower prices, once you are on the “fast track” to [“x” #]-figure salaries plus a reasonable sense of job security, it’s hard to just abandon ship and launch a startup career, especially further down the line.
4. People don’t like uncertainty. A prominent Bay Area CEO and Wharton alum came to recruit on campus last spring and was greeted with this question: “Can I go to business school or get a promotion after 2 years at your company?” Startups don’t offer analyst or associate programs where you get your ticket punched on your way to that MBA or retirement at age 40 (plus, you probably would never retire if you are doing something you truly enjoy). But for high achievers who have been raised to hit all the milestones at the right times, it’s hard to get in the mind set of “fail fast so you can learn faster” or just be comfortable with not knowing where you will be a year from now. Giff Constable writes about this today: http://giffconstable.com/2010/02/youve-got-to-r…
5. Information is asymmetric. VCs don’t hire much out of undergrad except for a few sourcing roles and startups often don’t have the resources to recruit the way large companies do. This is not to say that startups don’t need talent but rather that students need to work harder to make themselves available to startup employers. If you are a young person eager to join a startup, you would probably have greater success if you reach out directly. No job boards. No Career Services resume drops. Be proactive and demonstrate how the startup will be well served with you on board. Or at least build a presence and set up a Twitter or blog to make yourself accessible. Fred Wilson will be speaking on this topic of social recruiting next month: http://www.meetup.com/NYCRecruiting/calendar/12…
(And from his blog: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/11/social-recruiti…)
6. On the brighter side of things, I am glad to know per Boris’s comment that more schools are creating new incubators and clubs to foster student interest in tech entrepreneurship. My alma mater already has Weiss Tech House and just launched WIMI and IMG this year. If you are a startup or VC reading this, I hope you will reach out to these groups and introduce yourselves to hungry talent.

Point is if you go to these schools you want certainty in life (or at least a nice backup plan if everything else fails) and startup does not offer this.

And if it could then it would defeat the purpose I assume

But, in my experience it's never 'so what' when it doesn't work. Time, passion, focus, other's commitment, and other's money takes a toll.

Your able to streamline the process and share the risk but when you go from 100% belief to selling the furniture, it's something. Happens to us all. We get smarter. We move on. But no one likes to not succeed if you are an entrepreneur.

I put the last line on my office wall.

but i am doing that with one foot in the reality of today and on in the hope
for a better tomorrow

many, maybe even most people aren't interested in building the next big anything. They want to settle down, have a family, buy a house, and live in the suburbs. Even the brilliant ones. Some people don't see this as a problem. Some of us think it's just lame.

It's just too risky. Even if you're brilliant, it doesn't mean you'll succeed (and you may not even /know/ you're brilliant.) If you fail, you may have no more health care. The function your theoretical startup provides may get outsourced before you bring it to market, and you've just invested years of your life for no return. Unemployment pays very little, and in the “New Economy” you may be looking for work for a long time (less than those who aren't as brilliant, sure, but longer than you feel comfortable with or have the wherewithal to survive.) You want people taking more risks? Make it so that failing doesn't hurt so damned much – universal health care and a guaranteed income would go a longggg way. Who wants to take risks when you're one job loss or company failure away from the street?

The first is the biological pioneering spirit within us as human beings to attempt to the do the impossible. That how I view any startup that requires massive up front costs in pursuit of a greater dream. Without that push or that internal compass within us, we wouldn't be reaching out into the universe, maybe have people one day who will try to figure out how to mine asteroids or take science into a whole new frontier, the kind of forces that today excite people like Steve Jurvetson.

The second is magnetic, the physics of which bring us together to create something bigger than ourselves, to participate in our own small way in that which has begun to take on a life of its own. Google was born of that kind of force, because it found a way to become a magnet for some of the best talent out there, it created a cultural garden of inquiry – which at even a smaller scale operates in places such as the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics:

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/

Squeezed between all of this is the chemistry of our civilization, the relationships, the emotional hormone, the catalytic evolution that makes us assume that this stuff should be standard, that we should all have equal access to this chemistry, that there should be no such thing as Power Law, that human involvement can bring about equality and a consciousness that says that the present moment is equally valuable, equally something that we need to spend time on or with – because it is the element of our own given life.

In all the poetry and art we can generate or think, whether it is the embryo of a startup try to make its full way to completeness that is a viable business, or a force which has come into being that dominates its space in time, what this tells me is that at the end of the day it comes down to the science we can relate to.

When Stephen Baker writes about the Numerati, it qualifies something that I sense is different about this age rather than former ages. We had a renaissance of art, we know what that looks like, we know who gravitated to its highest value. We are getting so far ahead here that the thinking we do takes on a life of its own, as Thorsten Reil discovered after the 20th generation of simulations:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/stuntb…

The question I am left asking myself (and it is my question)

What does it mean to consider this age as a renaissance of science?

In that question exists a potential cultural shift, around which revolves the biology of startup's, the physics of big entities (whether it is Google or the Olympic Movement) and the chemistry of human beings.

I believe that until we change our thinking and make our own thinking our own unit of discovery, until we engage that form of science which is exploration – we are stuck with the poetic, the superstitious, the mythical, the branded life, the mysterious guru and elevated leader.

We are focused on following today because we are focused on the art – the cave man knew art – we never lost as human beings that sense of wonder or imagination, but what we have to win isn't a sense of art but the practical wisdom of science.

This cultural shift won't happen because we repeat what we see but test what works. What works is evident in the smaller group of startups who survive the entrepreneurial journey – but while I am not sure that this is what Chris Dixon had in mind – I am sure that I am only standing on the starting line of my own question.

All I can really do is bring all of this contemplation back down to a single unit of reality. In my case it is simply DISQUS. What then makes DISQUS different from comments of the past?

I think it is because when we have learned something, we can edit our own comment.

OR

We can simply build of other people's comments in the form of art that is argument or conversation or point making and forget that the science we have at the closest disposal is our individual sense of inquiry.

Everything I have said above I deem a personal hypothesis and at all not all to be deemed as a fact. I should therefore only disprove my own thinking here for there is no path I am exploring here but my own discovery, there is no navigation I am steering here except my own learning.

IMHO all paths are for followers but there is no path for an explorer (whether mighty or humbly small like me) and in thinking about my own thinking, the accumulated change of that way of life I would consider as a key element in the renaissance of science.

[Em]

One of the special qualities of Silicon Valley is that it's OK to start a company (or join a start-up) because failure is OK. You are not ostracized. I've seen exceptional people fail repeatedly and still get opportunities to come back and achieve stunning success. There's no place like that on the planet in terms of the culture and ecosystem conducive to entrepreneurs.

Yet there is a downside to all this. It's not just the wasted investment dollars but the wasted lives. I've seen too many people goto startups because that's the thing to do around here. I spend a lot of time helping to recruit people to our companies. I also advise a lot of people about career paths. If I sense that the fit is not good, I steer people away from start-ups, even though, perhaps it's against my best interest as a VC. Not everyone should be at start-ups. Certainly, for the right person, it's the greatest thing in the world; but it's not for most people.

@glennkelman recently wrote a post about some MBAs visiting him to learn about being an entrepreneur. He had a great thought that he did not share with the students: “I wanted to tell them that the whole reason to start a company is to be yourself, not to imitate someone else, especially not me.”

If “being yourself” means being an entrepreneur, go for it. For sure, the world needs more people who pursue their passions and dreams. It may or may not be at a start-up.

I think there is an assumption embedded in here that, holding talent, intelligence, and ambition constant, people's risk profile is evenly distributed. Which I think isn't true. I think there are many more people who would prefer a steady paycheck and a job at Google (with the promise of “20% time”, real or not), than those willing to live day by day not knowing if they can afford to pay rent next month.

You gotta be a little crazy to be an entrepreneur, IMO.

I agree we don't want posers. Increasing the number of entrepreneurs does not mean increasing the number of posers, if done right.

But people close to entrepreneurs like you, Y Combinator etc have the power to grow the base of entrepreneurs.

As a McKinseyite who has decided to leave the Firm to start a company, I can assure you that the “death” you speak about can be reincarnated.

Why is this?

I don't know if this is the top reason, but I do know that our business schools do not teach commercialization at the level it needs to be taught at. Mostly because there is no research money for business schools for commercialization. Big business funds our business schools so that is where the research goes. Are there any VC's that fund an entrepreneurial chair? All of the companies mention above pour lots of money into business schools to make sure grads are trained for their business.

In my alma matter, Haskayne School of Business, even though they have a new venture development program, you walk through the building and see who the funders are by the names of the rooms, lots of oil companies and banks.

I propose that an important solution to more innovation would be to start funding some serious research into commercialization.