An Ideas Accelerator
I wasn't planning to go to college.
By the end of high school, I'd already spent over a year working at Replit, worked with Deel, and built a large freelance portfolio. I had an opportunity to keep working full-time through a few extraordinary years in which AI would help several companies reach unicorn status.
Instead, I went to Purdue because of a hacker club.
Matthew Stanciu had built a community of makers and hobbyists called Purdue Hackers. It was full of inspired people who stayed up late on Friday nights, going deep on weird hardware, software, art, and whatever they happened to be obsessed with.
I decided to go to Purdue to work on Galactic Empire, with the ambitious goal of turning a college club into something greater. Matthew and I both saw the seeds of something much bigger in it. My job was to figure out how to take it further.
I quickly realized that, with the right support, these were exactly the kinds of people who could become exceptional founders. For the past two years, I've been obsessed with figuring out how to help more of them get there.
Purdue Hackers is the perfect vehicle for this. We started in 2013, when hacker culture was coalescing into meaningful communities. The details have changed from one generation to the next, but the center of our culture has always been the same:
Build cool shit.
Today, people show up and work on whatever they find interesting, surrounded by dozens of other people doing the same.
We've built rituals around showing your work: checkpoints at midnight, building in public, and Commit Overflow. We started giving people small grants to pursue ideas before they'd proven anything. More recently, we've brought in engineers and founders doing extraordinary work at startups we love, including Sentry, Vercel, and Neuralink. Meeting them makes those paths feel closer and more attainable.
Most importantly, we try very hard not to tell people what to build.
My thesis is simple:
- Find ambitious people early.
- Give them resources, role models, and room to experiment in low-risk, high-reward environments.
- Do this years before anyone calls them a founder, and you get to compound the person instead of the company.
They'll build, fail, learn, and try again. Every cycle makes them better.
My bet is that, eventually, the average Purdue Hacker will have better odds of building a unicorn than the average YC founder.
This sounds ridiculous, but I think it's achievable.
YC only starts compounding founders when they apply. We can start years earlier, before these people ever think of themselves as founders, let alone apply to YC.
Reading Paul Graham's essay was surreal. So much of it echoed the conclusions I'd independently spent the last few years reaching, then trying to put into practice at Purdue.
If you haven't read it yet, you should: How Universities Should Prepare Founders
We don't need universities to manufacture more entrepreneurial types. We need more individuals creating environments where unusually curious people can find each other, build things they care about, fail cheaply, learn quickly, and realize much earlier that they're capable of doing something extraordinary.
And we're already seeing this work.
Almost every YC founder who has come out of Purdue was previously a Purdue Hackers member. Today, many of our members are becoming early and founding engineers at ambitious startups rather than simply following Purdue's default pipeline into legacy companies.
We're sending out more founders every year. Soon, I expect more of our members to apply to Y Combinator as they watch their peers get in. Those successes will encourage more people to try.
I strongly believe there is such a thing as a good founder.
They're people who have gone deep on ideas, built something out of love, developed taste, failed, and tried again. I think those people will be dramatically more successful than their peers who start building primarily for money, clout, or the desire to call themselves a founder.
We help people become good founders.
The work now is helping them reach that point sooner, so they can do their best work.
And that's what Purdue Hackers can be.
An ideas accelerator for people.
We'll find the right people early, give their ambition somewhere to compound outside the university's legacy systems, and help them become inevitable.