MIT

“I decided to see if there was some way that I could just go to college in the U.S. The subsequent year, and it was sort of a long story, but I eventually figured out that I could not do it if I did the standard Irish, kind of followed the standard Irish educat…”

“Progress in physics really felt like it had sort of slowed down pretty substantially compared to the, you know, The sort of, the period in which so much of what, you know, we were learning about you know, that, that, that's a broader period of discovery I felt…”

“So for example, Bob Langer at MIT is a prodigious output of PhDs who are very commercially minded. This is a guy who has made hundreds of millions of dollars, created billions of dollars of market value in companies, and attracts postdocs that want to be like …”

“At the moment, that's Kendall Square in Cambridge with Harvard and MIT, and then the Boston area, which has more research hospitals, you know, inch for inch than any other place in the world.”

“In 1939, he was on a three-man team that won the William Lau Putnam Prize, an elite math competition. It was MIT's first time winning this award. His teammate? None other than the future Nobel physicist and outlier Richard Feynman.”

“MIT is a an institution, and that institution is an American institution. And so being very clear about that, I thought was totally the right move for MIT. And you know, I think that YC needs to be a similar, you know, an institution of similar character.”

“We went, my team went back and we looked at where do all the startup founders come out of school-wise, and three schools dominate by far in terms of big outside outcomes. Stanford is number one by far, and then MIT and Harvard.”