<p>Whats the best route to take in undergrad to become a successfuly entrepreneur?</p>
<p>Also, if you have any recommendations for schools, that would be great also!</p>
<p>Depends - do you want to get into technology? Some background in engineering (EE + CE are excellent choices) or a computer science degree. Freelance work on the side will help, too (webdesign, part-time programmer, writer, consultant, etc).</p>
<p>The best thing you can do is read biographies of those that are successful (self-made might be the best choice). See what they did / didn't do. Take note of their accomplishments, failures, and learn all you can about them. Try to "mimick" them in the future, but obviously, if you want to succeed, surpass them.</p>
<p>just to add to undefined, because what he already said was excellent. But the CEO and CFO of Waxie Enterprise (yes I know them very well) told me that if you want to be an entrepreneur, it's always best to be an engineer. If you think about it, it makes sense. ^__^V</p>
<p>Isn't USC's (California) entrepreneurship program (I'm not sure it's a "program", but something like that) one of the best in the nation?</p>
<p>To be overly cliche, major in the field that you would like to work in after college. Most successful small-businesspersons worked in the same field as their small-business. This gives you the opportunity to see how an established business in a certain industry works and some new approaches to industry problems. You have to love the work you're doing as a small business owner to really succeed.</p>
<p>right,and another reason to do so is for the internships. The biggest success factor for an entrepreneur is experience - learning the mistakes others are making before you make them yourself. Major in the field you'd like to be in and get relevant internships so you can see how businesses in that field are run, identify their mistakes, and get out before you have a career there =)</p>
<p>babson, hands down.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Whats the best route to take in undergrad to become a successfuly entrepreneur?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Actually, I am going to take a different, perhaps 'irresponsible' take (although I don't think it's irresponsible for reasons I will discuss below). </p>
<p>What I will say is that if you want to be an entrepreneur, then just do it. Now. Forget about worrying about what you ought to study in college. You should probably still go to college, if only to just ensure that you reserve your spot there (i.e. you can matriculate and then withdraw, which in most schools, allows you to return at a later date without having to reappy).</p>
<p>Here's why I think that what I am saying is not controversial. To quote from Bhide's *The Orgin and Evolution of New Businesses<a href="2000">/i</a>:</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>"As Michael Dell, who dropped out of college to start Dell Computers, explained: "The opportunity looked so attractive, I couldn't stay in school. The risk was small. I could lose a year of college." </p>
<p>"How could [Microsoft founders] Gates and Allen have known which other programmers were working on a BASIC or how capable they were? They had to trust their abilities to produce a working BASIC first; if they had been wrong, they would have wasted just a few months of labor." *</p>
<p>Or consider this quote by Paul Graham:</p>
<p>*
"I can't imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He'd have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he'd been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.
...The advice about going to work for someone else would get an even colder reception from the 19 year old Bill Gates. So I'm supposed to finish college, then go work for another company for two years, and then I can start my own? I have to wait till I'm 23? That's four years. That's more than twenty percent of my life so far. Plus in four years it will be way too late to make money writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair.</p>
<p>And he'd be right. The Apple II was launched just two years later. In fact, if Bill had finished college and gone to work for another company as we're suggesting, he might well have gone to work for Apple. And while that would probably have been better for all of us, it wouldn't have been better for him." *</p>
<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html</a></p>
<p>The truth of the matter is that if you want to be an entrepreneur, then you should probably just put college aside and just do it. If you fail, so what? Then you can think about going back to school. Sure, you may have lost a few years of time, and some money. But you're young, so you have plenty of time to recover, and the experience and knowledge you would get in even a failed venture will pay dividends for the rest of your life. If nothing else, you would be a far far more focused college student.</p>
<p>"Babson, hands down"-</p>
<p>Why, just because rankings tell you so? :) I've never understood "entrepreneurship" rankings. The best VCs hire from the top tier schools. The best minds (with whom you could collaborate) are likely to be in top tier schools -- many MIT and Stanford grads go on to be in the entrepreneurship business in one way or another. The rankings that Babson seems to top seem to be tailormade, much like those "international management" rankings that make Thunderbird shine (as though other MBAs were not international).</p>