This link has been bookmarked by 148 people . It was first bookmarked on 28 Mar 2007, by Trevor.
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01 Sep 14
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3. Not determined enough
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oft-quoted
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gung-ho
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3. Not determined enough
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bidding
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coefficient
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pied piper
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impressionable
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scheme
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codifies
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effeminate
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assimilate
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forgo
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bristle
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13. Fear of uncertainty
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vertices
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manors
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patrolling
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the cusp
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impoverished
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outcasts
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03 Oct 12
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You need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder. It's probably the single best predictor of success
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Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they're sales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort
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And acquirers tell me privately that revenue is not what they buy startups for, but their strategic value. Which means, because they made something people want
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All investors, without exception, are more likely to fund you with a cofounder than without.
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In the average Y Combinator startup, I'd guess 70% of the idea is new at the end of the first three months. Sometimes it's 100%.
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We put little weight on the idea. We ask mainly out of politeness
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A need that's narrow but genuine is a better starting point than one that's broad but hypothetical
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There may be one person whose job title is CEO, but till the company has about twelve people no one should be telling anyone what to do. That's too inefficient. Each person should just do what they need to without anyone telling them
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They all just did the right thing
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The angels had convertible debt, so they had first claim on the proceeds of the auction. Y Combinator only got 38 cents on the dollar.
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15 Aug 12
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Not having a cofounder is a real problem. A startup is too much for one person to bear.
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If you're still in school, you're surrounded by potential cofounders. A few years out it gets harder to find them. Not only do you have a smaller pool to draw from, but most already have jobs, and perhaps even families to support. So if you had friends in college you used to scheme about startups with, stay in touch with them as well as you can.
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The real lesson to draw from this is not how to find a cofounder, but that you should start startups when you're young and there are lots of them around.
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In a sense, it's not a problem if you don't have a good idea, because most startups change their idea anyway. In the average Y Combinator startup, I'd guess 70% of the idea is new at the end of the first three months. Sometimes it's 100%.
In fact, we're so sure the founders are more important than the initial idea that we're going to try something new this funding cycle. We're going to let people apply with no idea at all. If you want, you can answer the question on the application form that asks what you're going to do with "We have no idea." If you seem really good we'll accept you anyway. We're confident we can sit down with you and cook up some promising project. -
We put little weight on the idea. We ask mainly out of politeness.
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A lot of people look at the ever-increasing number of startups and think "this can't continue." Implicit in their thinking is a fallacy: that there is some limit on the number of startups there could be. But this is false. No one claims there's any limit on the number of people who can work for salary at 1000-person companies. Why should there be any limit on the number who can work for equity at 5-person companies? [3]
Nearly everyone who works is satisfying some kind of need. Breaking up companies into smaller units doesn't make those needs go away. Existing needs would probably get satisfied more efficiently by a network of startups than by a few giant, hierarchical organizations, but I don't think that would mean less opportunity, because satisfying current needs would lead to more. Certainly this tends to be the case in individuals. Nor is there anything wrong with that. We take for granted things that medieval kings would have considered effeminate luxuries, like whole buildings heated to spring temperatures year round. And if things go well, our descendants will take for granted things we would consider shockingly luxurious. There is no absolute standard for material wealth. Health care is a component of it, and that alone is a black hole. For the foreseeable future, people will want ever more material wealth, so there is no limit to the amount of work available for companies, and for startups in particular. -
Another way to decrease the risk is to join an existing startup instead of starting your own.
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You'll be roughly 1/n^2 founder, where n is your employee number.
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I've come close to starting new startups a couple times, but I always pull back because I don't want four years of my life to be consumed by random schleps. I know this business well enough to know you can't do it half-heartedly.
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Be aware, though, that if you get a regular job, you'll probably end up working there for as long as a startup would take, and you'll find you have much less spare time than you might expect.
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In a good startup, you don't get told what to do very much. There may be one person whose job title is CEO, but till the company has about twelve people no one should be telling anyone what to do. That's too inefficient. Each person should just do what they need to without anyone telling them.
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if you start a startup, it will probably fail. Seriously, though, this is not a bad way to think about the whole experience. Hope for the best, but expect the worst. In the worst case, it will at least be interesting. In the best case you might get rich.
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15 Oct 11
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So here's the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. Find something that's missing in your own life, and supply that need—no matter how specific to you it seems. Steve Wozniak built himself a computer; who knew so many other people would want them?
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That will change if you get a real job after you graduate. Then you'll have to earn your keep. And since most of what big companies do is boring, you're going to have to work on boring stuff. Easy, compared to college, but boring. At first it may seem cool to get paid for doing easy stuff, after paying to do hard stuff in college. But that wears off after a few months. Eventually it gets demoralizing to work on dumb stuff, even if it's easy and you get paid a lot.
And that's not the worst of it. The thing that really sucks about having a regular job is the expectation that you're supposed to be there at certain times. Even Google is afflicted with this, apparently. And what this means, as everyone who's had a regular job can tell you, is that there are going to be times when you have absolutely no desire to work on anything, and you're going to have to go to work anyway and sit in front of your screen and pretend to. To someone who likes work, as most good hackers do, this is torture.
In a startup, you skip all that. There's no concept of office hours in most startups. Work and life just get mixed together. But the good thing about that is that no one minds if you have a life at work. In a startup you can do whatever you want most of the time. If you're a founder, what you want to do most of the time is work. But you never have to pretend to.
If you took a nap in your office in a big company, it would seem unprofessional. But if you're starting a startup and you fall asleep in the middle of the day, your cofounders will just assume you were tired. -
To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job. Actually this tradition is not much more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default way to make a living was by farming. It's a bad plan to treat something only a hundred years old as an axiom. By historical standards, that's something that's changing pretty rapidly.
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06 Oct 11
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11 Sep 11
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16 Feb 11
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11 Nov 10
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01 Nov 10
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The big mystery to me is: why don't more people start startups? If nearly everyone who does it prefers it to a regular job, and a significant percentage get rich, why doesn't everyone want to do this? A lot of people think we get thousands of applications for each funding cycle. In fact we usually only get several hundred.
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The great majority of programmers still go straight from college to cubicle, and stay there.
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Whereas if I encourage people to start startups who shouldn't, I make my own life worse. If I encourage too many people to apply to Y Combinator, it just means more work for me
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I'm going to consider all the reasons you aren't doing it, and show why most (but not all) should be ignored.
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Many are right. The median age worldwide is about 27, so probably a third of the population can truthfully say they're too young.
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We don't look beyond 18 because people younger than that can't legally enter into contracts
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When he was 19, he seemed like he had a 40 year old inside him. There are other 19 year olds who are 12 inside.
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It's conventionally fixed at 21, but different people cross it at greatly varying ages. You're old enough to start a startup if you've crossed this threshold, whatever your age.
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But rebelling presumes inferiority as much as submission. The adult response to "that's a stupid idea," is simply to look the other person in the eye and say "Really? Why do you think so?
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startup founders should be at least 23, and that people should work for another company for a few years before starting their own.
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You need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder. It's probably the single best predictor of success.
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I can think of several we've funded who would have been delighted at first to be bought for $2 million, but are now set on world domination.
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If you're smart enough to worry that you might not be smart enough to start a startup, you probably are.
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But if you think it takes a lot of intelligence to get rich, try spending a couple days in some of the fancier bits of New York or LA.
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ales depends mostly on effort.
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The initial focus should be the product. All you need to know in this phase is how to build things people want. If you succeed, you'll have to think about how to make money from it.
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if users love you, you can always make money from that somehow,
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Not having a cofounder is a real problem. A startup is too much for one person to bear. And though we differ from other investors on a lot of questions, we all agree on this. All investors, without exception, are more likely to fund you with a cofounder than without.
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f you're still in school, you're surrounded by potential cofounders. A few years out it gets harder to find them. Not only do you have a smaller pool to draw from,
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So if you had friends in college you used to scheme about startups with, stay in touch with them as well as you can
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We're going to let people apply with no idea at all. If you want, you can answer the question on the application form that asks what you're going to do with "We have no idea.
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hat there is some limit on the number of startups there could be. But this is false. No one claims there's any limit on the number of people who can work for salary at 1000-person companies.
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here is no absolute standard for material wealth. Health care is a component of it, and that alone is a black hole. For the foreseeable future, people will want ever more material wealth, so there is no limit to the amount of work available for companies, and for startups in particular.
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I'm willing to take responsibility for telling 22 year olds to start startups. So what if they fail? They'll learn a lot, and that job at Microsoft will still be waiting for them if they need it.
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What you can do, if you have a family and want to start a startup, is start a consulting business you can then gradually turn into a product business.
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As with the question of cofounders, the real lesson here is to start startups when you're young.
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For every "serial entrepreneur," there are probably twenty sane ones who think "Start another company? Are you crazy?
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What makes a good startup founder so dangerous is his willingness to endure infinite schleps.
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Like a lot of people, I like to work. And one of the many weird little problems you discover when you get rich is that a lot of the interesting people you'd like to work with are not rich.
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I think this is what drives a lot of serial entrepreneurs, actually.
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It's an excuse to work on something interesting with people I like.
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Be aware, though, that if you get a regular job, you'll probably end up working there for as long as a startup would take, and you'll find you have much less spare time than you might expect.
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f you start a startup, it will probably fail. Seriously, though, this is not a bad way to think about the whole experience.
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Not here. In America, companies, like practically everything else, are disposable.
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If their startup fails, they'll have to get a job, and they know how much jobs suck.
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Then you'll have to earn your keep. And since most of what big companies do is boring, you're going to have to work on boring stuff. Easy, compared to college, but boring.
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Eventually it gets demoralizing to work on dumb stuff, even if it's easy and you get paid a lot.
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To someone who likes work, as most good hackers do, this is torture.
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There's no concept of office hours in most startups. Work and life just get mixed together. But the good thing about that is that no one minds if you have a life at work.
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In almost everything, reward is proportionate to risk. So by protecting their kids from risk, parents are, without realizing it, also protecting them from rewards. If they saw that, they'd want you to take more risks.
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If they want you to be a doctor, odds are it's not just because they want you to help the sick, but also because it's a prestigious and lucrative career
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When I was a kid in the seventies, a doctor was the thing to be.
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Actually this tradition is not much more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default way to make a living was by farming.
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and it now seems to me fairly likely that we're seeing the beginning of a change like the one from farming to manufacturing.
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Leave the people you'd spent your whole life with, to live in a giant city of three or four thousand complete strangers? How would you live? How would you get food, if you didn't grow it?
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They may represent one of those rare, historic shifts in the way wealth is created
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here have only been a handful of these great economic shifts in human history. It would be an amazing hack to make one happen faster
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[4] Thought experiment: If doctors did the same work, but as impoverished outcasts, which parents would still want their kids to be doctors?
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28 Jun 10
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25 Oct 07
Dan DascalescuVery good essay dismissing the common excuses for not starting a startup
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21 Sep 07
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02 Sep 07
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One test adults use is whether you still have the kid flake reflex. When you're a little kid and you're asked to do something hard, you can cry and say "I can't do it" and the adults will probably let you off. As a kid there's a magic button you can press by saying "I'm just a kid" that will get you out of most difficult situations. Whereas adults, by definition, are not allowed to flake. They still do, of course, but when they do they're ruthlessly pruned.
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The adult response to "that's a stupid idea," is simply to look the other person in the eye and say "Really? Why do you think so?"
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You need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder. It's probably the single best predictor of success.
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31 Jul 07
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05 Jul 07
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21 May 07
Adam CroweNote to self
* advice career entrepreneurship business startup inspiration procrastination failure
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15 May 07
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29 Mar 07
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lifesizedY combinator is calmly redifining teh venture capital model for web startups....listen to paul talk on why its stupid not to begin a startup!
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BB BarrenTo almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job. Actually this tradition is not much more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default way to make a living was by farming. It's a bad plan to treat
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28 Mar 07
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edcoxdotnetThis essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.
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