Not sure what a CS degree is supposed to help with if this guy wants to pursue the "scrappy SV tech startup" world.
He shouldn't be wasting time learning from professors who have never done anything real and have lived in an academic insulated bubble for decades.
Instead he should be building and shipping product after product until something sticks. And spending just as much time on marketing as development, and putting a lot of time and energy into hiring out and training a team to scale up to the next stage.
The degree itself is unimportant, but there are important skills that a CS program teaches, which you can teach yourself, but that degree makes getting interviews a lot easier. Like I said, I've been doing this for a very long time, and worked with many hiring processes.A person without either experience or a recognized degree has a very difficult time getting their foot in the door. I may have misread and thought that the OP was interested in engineering.
For PM's, or management, the skill set and showing that you have it will be different.
He shouldn't be wasting time learning from professors who have never done anything real and have lived in an academic insulated bubble for decades.
Instead he should be building and shipping product after product until something sticks. And spending just as much time on marketing as development, and putting a lot of time and energy into hiring out and training a team to scale up to the next stage.