How not to waste talent
David Reid, Co-Founder of Path Integral, April 19, 2026
As you know, the initial project of Path Integral (PI) is a summer program for undergrads and recent grads that funds and accelerates their very early-stage startups. It’s a replacement for the traditional summer job or internship, except that instead of a salary, we give you seed funding to start your own company with your friends. If that sounds more interesting than polishing slides no one will remember, I encourage you to apply. However, some readers may not be aware of the wider problem we are trying to solve: graduate prospects.
When I arrived in St Andrews as a fresher, my peers were overflowing with ambition and cheeriness. Everywhere I turned, someone was urgently talking about and (in some cases) working on one of humanity’s greatest problems. Future entrepreneurs were sketching plans to build the next Apple. Aspiring physicists were dreaming of winning Nobel Prizes. Budding biologists vowed to find ways to balance the planet’s climate.
Four years on, I now have the empirical data to tell you what they're actually working on. The majority have disappeared into what is best described as the 'Bermuda Triangle of talent': finance, management consulting, and corporate law. This comes at a time when the UK economy is stagnating; at a time when academia is slow and bureaucratic; at a time when the planet continues to warm. Or more simply put, when the world needs them the most.
There are two points to note which makes the current situation all the more tragic: (i) corporate jobs are not evil, and (ii) graduates are not to blame. These industries are key enablers of the rest of society and are amongst the top contributors of tax to government.1 But the incentives are so strong that they are absorbing our brightest minds at a time in history when we can least afford to lose them.
Most elite graduates2 are not motivated purely by greed. No, that’s too simple an analysis. Rather, it is some combination of prestige, optionality, growth, and then yes money. When you ask graduates on, say, the most competitive graduate schemes at the top UK banks, “why did you pursue banking?”, you rarely receive an answer that is grounded in the work itself. Instead, it is a case of it “generating options down the line” and being able to work in a “fast-paced environment with strong learning opportunities”. But life cannot merely consist of hopping from one safe-bet to another.
With such powerful forces at bay, it is not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we really like to work on. Most young people are by definition doomed by the ridiculously incomplete information they are operating on. The ambitious ones who realise this (typically at a subconscious level) end up substituting thought with prestige and money. Hypercompetition has become the strongest signal. Further education and professional qualifications are packaged as a form of thought, but they are a substitute for thought; it’s a substitute for the future. And what may seem like the highly sought-after, low-risk option (fulfilling the immediate desires for money and prestige) is in reality extremely high-risk in the long-term (you live a meaningless life).
Don’t underestimate how hard a problem this is. Most elite graduates are paralysed with choice, with companies selling them lucrative salaries of £40,000+ and the illusion of endless options down the line. These benefits are supposed to buy comfort, perhaps happiness. These jobs often deliver the opposite. Too overworked to realise their own unfulfillment, our brightest minds are given pointless work and minimal power.
My hypothesis is that motivated young people are currently undervalued. So few companies are willing to bet on our best graduates. What does it mean to bet on someone? A good metaphor would be the relationship between a coach and athlete. A good coach will not bench a rookie by default for their whole first season. They will give them a fair shot which, if they show promise, may cause them to be played consistently for the rest of the season. This rarely happens in big companies, and yet people like Michael Jordan exist.3
Startups are a domain where this phenomenon does not and cannot exist. The startup world is as meritocratic as most modern enterprises and institutions are bureaucratic. In big companies, you can outperform your colleagues by 10x but if you don’t know how to make your boss laugh in the coffee room, you won’t get the promotion. In startups, by contrast, high performers can be responsible for millions of dollars in value to society – especially if they’re one of the founders. This is because the only measure of progress is maximally truth-seeking: can you make something people want? For smart and determined people, it turns out this is surprisingly doable. Hard, but doable. Even for young people.4
History is full of examples. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates were both 19 when they started companies that changed the world. Steve Jobs was 21 when he founded Apple. Walt Disney was 21 when he founded Disney. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Elon Musk – they were all no older than 25 when they began the journeys that etched their names into the history books.
All of these founders are incredibly formidable, but ultimately they're not a different species from you or I.
Indeed, everything you see in the world around you was made up by people no smarter than you. And so you can just do things. You can influence it for the better. If history has taught us anything, it’s that power laws matter: a small number of exceptional people can, in fact, change the world, as they once declared as a fresher.
Imagine how different the world and your life would be if someone made it energetically favourable for you to chase your ambitions, straight out of university. You know that your talent would be wasted if you accepted that role in quant finance - we do too. But likely you feel that you’ve not been given an alternative. That’s why we are going all in on pushing grads to take back ground. If we were devoting our energy to solving humanity’s toughest problems instead of completing seven-stage job applications, a whole generation of hackers, mavericks, engineers, scientists and disrupters could be uplifted. Path Integral is designed to be that engine of innovation by diverting talent before it is wasted. So if you are someone who wakes up every day with a burning desire for progress, reach out because we’d like to hear from you.
Footnotes
[1] The UK has a predominantly service-based economy, where financial services play a significant role.
[2] If you graduated from a top-five UK university in your subject, I would call you an ‘elite graduate’.
[3] Even this is understating the situation, since there are far more founders in the world than Michael Jordan-equivalents!
[4] Importantly, there is no upper limit on the number of startups that can be created. The economy is not a zero-sum game.