This link has been bookmarked by 48 people . It was first bookmarked on 05 Oct 2006, by Daniel Jomphe.
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26 May 15
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The problem with starting a startup while you're still in school is that there's a built-in escape hatch.
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08 Dec 14
Jordan GoldmanTill recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup. But how common will that be?
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20 Nov 14
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apocryphal
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at large
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process
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iterative
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knack
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07 Jul 14
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03 Jun 14
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The problem with starting a startup while you're still in school is that there's a built-in escape hatch. If you start a startup in the summer between your junior and senior year, it reads to everyone as a summer job. So if it goes nowhere, big deal; you return to school in the fall with all the other seniors; no one regards you as a failure, because your occupation is student, and you didn't fail at that. Whereas if you start a startup just one year later, after you graduate, as long as you're not accepted to grad school in the fall the startup reads to everyone as your occupation. You're now a startup founder, so you have to do well at that.
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If I had to pick the sweet spot for startup founders, based on who we're most excited to see applications from, I'd say it's probably the mid-twenties.
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As far as I can tell these are universal. I can't think of any successful startups whose founders worked 9 to 5. And it's particularly necessary for younger founders to work long hours because they're probably not as efficient as they'll be later.
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even if it would be a net win for you to leave.
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nce you get over a certain threshold of intelligence, which most CS majors at top schools are past, the deciding factor in whether you succeed as a founder is how much you want to.
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There seem to be two big things missing in class projects: (1) an iterative definition of a real problem and (2) intensity.
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13 Dec 13
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19 Feb 13
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If it can work to start a startup during college, why do we tell people not to? For the same reason that the probably apocryphal violinist, whenever he was asked to judge someone's playing, would always say they didn't have enough talent to make it as a pro. Succeeding as a musician takes determination as well as talent, so this answer works out to be the right advice for everyone. The ones who are uncertain believe it and give up, and the ones who are sufficiently determined think "screw that, I'll succeed anyway."
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As a young founder your strengths are: stamina, poverty, rootlessness, colleagues, and ignorance.
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Robert Morris and I were 29 and 30 respectively when we started Viaweb, but fortunately we still lived like 23 year olds. We both had roughly zero assets. I would have loved to have a mortgage, since that would have meant I had a house. But in retrospect having nothing turned out to be convenient. I wasn't tied down and I was used to living cheaply.
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A lot of startups have that form: someone comes along and makes something for a tenth or a hundredth of what it used to cost, and the existing players can't follow because they don't even want to think about a world in which that's possible
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Being poor helps in this game, because your own personal bias points in the same direction technology evolves in.
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Someone wrote recently that the drawback of Y Combinator was that you had to move to participate. It couldn't be any other way. The kind of conversations we have with founders, we have to have in person.
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We wouldn't be doing founders a favor by letting them stay in Nebraska. Places that aren't startup hubs are toxic to startups. You can tell that from indirect evidence. You can tell how hard it must be to start a startup in Houston or Chicago or Miami from the microscopically small number, per capita, that succeed there.
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Historically there have always been certain towns that were centers for certain industries, and if you weren't in one of them you were at a disadvantage.
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Perhaps the reason more startups per capita happen in the Bay Area than Miami is simply that there are more founder-type people there. Successful startups are almost never started by one person.
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Co-founders really should be people you already know. And by far the best place to meet them is school. You have a large sample of smart people; you get to compare how they all perform on identical tasks; and everyone's life is pretty fluid.
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Some of your classmates are probably going to be successful startup founders; at a great technical university, that is a near certainty. So which ones? If I were you I'd look for the people who are not just smart, but incurable builders. <!-- It seems like the best founders are the people who can't stop making things. So l--> Look for the people who keep starting projects, and finish at least some of them. That's what we look for.
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Speaking of cool places to work, there is of course Google. But I notice something slightly frightening about Google: zero startups come out of there. In that respect it's a black hole. People seem to like working at Google too much to leave. So if you hope to start a startup one day, the evidence so far suggests you shouldn't work there.
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So an employer who's fairly pleasant to work for can lull you into staying indefinitely, even if it would be a net win for you to leave. [4]
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There seem to be two big things missing in class projects: (1) an iterative definition of a real problem and (2) intensity.
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real startups tend to discover the problem they're solving by a process of evolution. Someone has an idea for something; they build it; and in doing so (and probably only by doing so) they realize the problem they should be solving is another one.
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But you're not thinking that way about a class project. Proving your initial plan was mistaken would just get you a bad grade. Instead of building stuff to throw away, you tend to want every line of code to go toward that final goal of showing you did a lot of work.
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But really what work experience refers to is not some specific expertise, but the elimination of certain habits left over from childhood.
One of the defining qualities of kids is that they flake. -
It's not so much that adults lie to kids about this as never explain it. They never explain what the deal is with money. You know from an early age that you'll have some sort of job, because everyone asks what you're going to "be" when you grow up. What they don't tell you is that as a kid you're sitting on the shoulders of someone else who's treading water, and that starting working means you get thrown into the water on your own, and have to start treading water yourself or sink. "Being" something is incidental; the immediate problem is not to drown.
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The relationship between work and money tends to dawn on you only gradually. At least it did for me. One's first thought tends to be simply "This sucks. I'm in debt. Plus I have to get up on monday and go to work." Gradually you realize that these two things are as tightly connected as only a market can make them.
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To someone who has learned from experience about the relationship between money and work, it translates to something way more important: it means you get to opt out of the brutal equation that governs the lives of 99.9% of people. Getting rich means you can stop treading water.
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14 May 12
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One way to mitigate this problem might be to actively plan your startup while you're getting those n years of experience. Sure, go off and get jobs or go to grad school or whatever, but get together regularly to scheme, so the idea of starting a startup stays alive in everyone's brain
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22 Jun 11
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13 Apr 11
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The importance of stamina shouldn't be surprising. If you've heard anything about startups you've probably heard about the long hours. As far as I can tell these are universal. I can't think of any successful startups whose founders worked 9 to 5. And it's particularly necessary for younger founders to work long hours because they're probably not as efficient as they'll be later.
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Your second advantage, poverty, might not sound like an advantage, but it is a huge one. Poverty implies you can live cheaply, and this is critically important for startups
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Most startups end up doing something different than they planned. The way the successful ones find something that works is by trying things that don't. So the worst thing you can do in a startup is to have a rigid, pre-ordained plan and then start spending a lot of money to implement it. Better to operate cheaply and give your ideas time to evolve.
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If I were you I'd look for the people who are not just smart, but incurable builders. <!-- It seems like the best founders are the people who can't stop making things. So l--> Look for the people who keep starting projects, and finish at least some of them. That's what we look for. Above all else, above academic credentials and even the idea you apply with, we look for people who build things.
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Starting startups is harder than you expect, but you're also capable of more than you expect, so they balance out.
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When you know nothing, you have to reinvent stuff for yourself, and if you're smart your reinventions may be better than what preceded them. This is especially true in fields where the rules change
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But customers will judge you from the other direction: the distance remaining between where you are now and the features they need. The market doesn't give a shit how hard you worked. Users just want your software to do what they need, and you get a zero otherwise
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Someone who gets this will work much harder at making a startup succeed—with the proverbial energy of a drowning man, in fact. But understanding the relationship between money and work also changes the way you work. You don't get money just for working, but for doing things other people want. Someone who's figured that out will automatically focus more on the user
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30 Dec 08
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09 May 08
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Does that mean you can't start a startup in college? Not at all. Sam Altman, the co-founder of Loopt, had just finished his sophomore year when we funded them, and Loopt is probably the most promising of all the startups we've funded so far. But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking "Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19."
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Sam Altman, the founder of Loopt, had just finished his sophomore year when we funded him, and Loopt is probably the most promising of all the startups we've funded so far. But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking "Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19."
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03 Jan 08
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22 Jan 07
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15 Nov 06
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05 Nov 06
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13 Oct 06
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10 Oct 06
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09 Oct 06
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07 Oct 06
Bruno MartinsAn essay by Paul Graham.
PaulGraham article business entrepreneur entrepreneurship essay howto startup student tips
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05 Oct 06
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In the late 90s my professor friends used to complain that they couldn't get grad students, because all the undergrads were going to work for startups
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So our official policy now is only to fund undergrads we can't talk out of it. And frankly, if you're not certain, you should wait.
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