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09 Apr 07

Why to Not Not Start a Startup

www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html - Preview

So I'm going to list all the components of people's reluctance to
start startups, and explain which are real.
There's a reason we have a distinct word "adult" for people over a
certain age. There is a threshold you cross.
35 more annotations...
- 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.
- So, paradoxically,
  if you're too inexperienced to start a startup, what you should do
  is start one. That's a way more efficient cure for inexperience
  than a normal job.
- There's no better time to take risks than when you're
  young. Sure, you'll probably fail. But even failure will get you
  to the ultimate goal faster than getting a job.
- You need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder.
  It's probably the single best predictor of success.
- I'd say the test is whether you're sufficiently
  driven to work on your own projects.
- most companies do more mundane stuff where
  the decisive factor is effort, not brains.
- You
  don't need to know anything about business to start a startup. 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. But this is so easy
  you can pick it up on the fly.
- if users love you, you can always make money from that somehow
- The most valuable truths are the ones most people don't believe.
- So when you find an idea you
  know is good but most people disagree with, you should not
  merely ignore their objections, but push aggressively in that
  direction.
- Not having a cofounder is a real problem. A startup is too much
  for one person to bear.
- If there's no one where you
  live who wants to start a startup with you, move where there are
  people who do. If no one wants to work with you on your current
  idea, switch to an idea people want to work on.
- In a sense, it's not a problem if you don't have a good idea, because
  most startups change their idea anyway.
- the founders are more important than the
  initial idea
- The kind of question
  on the application form that we really care about is the one where
  we ask what cool things you've made. If what you've made is version
  one of a promising startup, so much the better, but the main thing
  we care about is whether you're good at making things. Being lead
  developer of a popular open source project counts almost as much.
- 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.
- fallacy: that there is some limit on the number of startups there
  could be.
- This one is real. I wouldn't advise anyone with a family to start
  a startup.
- 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.
- Another way to decrease the risk is to join an existing startup
  instead of starting your own.
- If you start a startup that succeeds, it's going to consume at least
  three or four years. (If it fails, you'll be done a lot quicker.)
  So you shouldn't do it if you're not ready for commitments on that
  scale.
- I'm told there are people who need structure in their lives. This
  seems to be a nice way of saying they need someone to tell them
  what to do.
- So if it seems risky to you to start a startup,
  think how risky it once seemed to your ancestors to live as we do
  now.
- If you're one of these people, you probably shouldn't start a
  startup. In fact, you probably shouldn't even go to work for one.
  In a good startup, you don't get told what to do very much.
- It's exciting to think we may be on the cusp of another shift like
  the one from farming to manufacturing.
- How do you tell if you're independent-minded enough to start a
  startup? If you'd bristle at the suggestion that you aren't, then
  you probably are.
- Well, if you're troubled by uncertainty, I can solve that problem
  for you: 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.
- No one will blame you if the startup tanks, so long as you made a
  serious effort.
- 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.
- Eventually it gets demoralizing
  to work on dumb stuff, even if it's easy and you get paid a lot.
- The thing that really sucks about
  having a regular job is the expectation that you're supposed to be
  there at certain times.
- parents tend to be more conservative for their kids
  than they would be for themselves.
- 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.
- Even if your only goal is to please them, the way to do
  that is not simply to give them what they ask for. Instead think
  about why they're asking for something, and see if there's a better
  way to give them what they need.
- 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.

07 Apr 07

basic css layouts; a min height solution: 
min-height:500px; /* for modern browsers */ 
height:auto !important; /* for modern browsers */
height:500px; /* for IE5.x and IE6 */

- sambody on 2007-04-07