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A Student's Guide to Startups
_ Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator.
_
October 2006
(This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.)
Till 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?
I'm sure the default will always be to get a job, but starting
a startup could well become as popular as grad school. 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. I wouldn't be surprised if that
situation returns, but with one difference: this time they'll
be starting their own instead of going to work for other
people's.
The most ambitious students will at this point be asking: Why
wait till you graduate? Why not start a startup while you're
in college? In fact, why go to college at all? Why not start a
startup instead?
A year and a half ago I gave a talk where I said that the
average age of the founders of Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft
was 24, and that if grad students could start startups, why
not undergrads? I'm glad I phrased that as a question, because
now I can pretend it wasn't merely a rhetorical one. At the
time I couldn't imagine why there should be any lower limit
for the age of startup founders. Graduation is a bureaucratic
change, not a biological one. And certainly there are
undergrads as competent technically as most grad students. So
why shouldn't undergrads be able to start startups as well as
grad students?
I now realize that something does change at graduation: you
lose a huge excuse for failing. Regardless of how complex your
life is, you'll find that everyone else, including your family
and friends, will discard all the low bits and regard you as
having a single occupation at any given time. If you're in
college and have a summer job writing software, you still read
as a student. Whereas if you graduate and get a job
programming, you'll be instantly regarded by everyone as a
programmer.
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.
For nearly everyone, the opinion of one's peers is the most
powerful motivator of all--more powerful even than the nominal
goal of most startup founders, getting rich. [1] About a month
into each funding cycle we have an event called Prototype Day
where each startup presents to the others what they've got so
far. You might think they wouldn't need any more motivation.
They're working on their cool new idea; they have funding for
the immediate future; and they're playing a game with only two
outcomes: wealth or failure. You'd think that would be
motivation enough. And yet the prospect of a demo pushes most
of them into a rush of activity.
Even if you start a startup explicitly to get rich, the money
you might get seems pretty theoretical most of the time. What
drives you day to day is not wanting to look bad.
You probably can't change that. Even if you could, I don't
think you'd want to; someone who really, truly doesn't care
what his peers think of him is probably a psychopath. So the
best you can do is consider this force like a wind, and set up
your boat accordingly. If you know your peers are going to
push you in some direction, choose good peers, and position
yourself so they push you in a direction you like.
Graduation changes the prevailing winds, and those make a
difference. Starting a startup is so hard that it's a close
call even for the ones that succeed. However high a startup
may be flying now, it probably has a few leaves stuck in the
landing gear from those trees it barely cleared at the end of
the runway. In such a close game, the smallest increase in the
forces against you can be enough to flick you over the edge
into failure.
When we first started Y Combinator we encouraged people to
start startups while they were still in college. That's partly
because Y Combinator began as a kind of summer program. We've
kept the program shape--all of us having dinner together once a
week turns out to be a good idea--but we've decided now that
the party line should be to tell people to wait till they
graduate.
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."
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."
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. It's not as if all the opportunities to start companies
are going to be gone if you don't do it now. Maybe the window
will close on some idea you're working on, but that won't be
the last idea you'll have. For every idea that times out, new
ones become feasible. Historically the opportunities to start
startups have only increased with time.
In that case, you might ask, why not wait longer? Why not go
work for a while, or go to grad school, and then start a
startup? And indeed, that might be a good idea. 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. Why? What advantages does someone in their
mid-twenties have over someone who's 21? And why isn't it
older? What can 25 year olds do that 32 year olds can't? Those
turn out to be questions worth examining.
Plus
If you start a startup soon after college, you'll be a young
founder by present standards, so you should know what the
relative advantages of young founders are. They're not what
you might think. As a young founder your strengths are:
stamina, poverty, rootlessness, colleagues, and ignorance.
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.
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. Nearly
every startup that fails, fails by running out of money. It's
a little misleading to put it this way, because there's
usually some other underlying cause. But regardless of the
source of your problems, a low burn rate gives you more
opportunity to recover from them. And since most startups make
all kinds of mistakes at first, room to recover from mistakes
is a valuable thing to have.
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.
Recent grads can live on practically nothing, and this gives
you an edge over older founders, because the main cost in
software startups is people. The guys with kids and mortgages
are at a real disadvantage. This is one reason I'd bet on the
25 year old over the 32 year old. The 32 year old probably is
a better programmer, but probably also has a much more
expensive life. Whereas a 25 year old has some work experience
(more on that later) but can live as cheaply as an undergrad.
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.
Even more important than living cheaply, though, is thinking
cheaply. One reason the Apple II was so popular was that it
was cheap. The computer itself was cheap, and it used cheap,
off-the-shelf peripherals like a cassette tape recorder for
data storage and a TV as a monitor. And you know why? Because
Woz designed this computer for himself, and he couldn't afford
anything more.
We benefitted from the same phenomenon. Our prices were
daringly low for the time. The top level of service was $300 a
month, which was an order of magnitude below the norm. In
retrospect this was a smart move, but we didn't do it because
we were smart. $300 a month seemed like a lot of money to us.
Like Apple, we created something inexpensive, and therefore
popular, simply because we were poor.
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.
Traditional long distance carriers, for example, didn't even
want to think about VoIP. (It was coming, all the same.) Being
poor helps in this game, because your own personal bias points
in the same direction technology evolves in.
The advantages of rootlessness are similar to those of
poverty. When you're young you're more mobile--not just because
you don't have a house or much stuff, but also because you're
less likely to have serious relationships. This turns out to
be important, because a lot of startups involve someone
moving.
The founders of Kiko, for example, are now en route to the Bay
Area to start their next startup. It's a better place for what
they want to do. And it was easy for them to decide to go,
because neither as far as I know has a serious girlfriend, and
everything they own will fit in one car--or more precisely,
will either fit in one car or is crappy enough that they don't
mind leaving it behind.
They at least were in Boston. What if they'd been in Nebraska,
like Evan Williams was at their age? 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. We fund a dozen startups at a time, and we can't be in
a dozen places at once. But even if we could somehow magically
save people from moving, we wouldn't. 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.
I don't know exactly what's suppressing all the startups in
these towns--probably a hundred subtle little things--but
something must be. [2]
Maybe this will change. Maybe the increasing cheapness of
startups will mean they'll be able to survive anywhere,
instead of only in the most hospitable environments. Maybe
37signals is the pattern for the future. But maybe not.
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. So my guess is that 37signals
is an anomaly. We're looking at a pattern much older than "Web
2.0" here.
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. Usually they begin with a conversation in which
someone mentions that something would be a good idea for a
company, and his friend says, "Yeah, that is a good idea,
let's try it." If you're missing that second person who says
"let's try it," the startup never happens. And that is another
area where undergrads have an edge. They're surrounded by
people willing to say that. At a good college you're
concentrated together with a lot of other ambitious and
technically minded people--probably more concentrated than
you'll ever be again. If your nucleus spits out a neutron,
there's a good chance it will hit another nucleus.
The number one question people ask us at Y Combinator is:
Where can I find a co-founder? That's the biggest problem for
someone starting a startup at 30. When they were in school
they knew a lot of good co-founders, but by 30 they've either
lost touch with them or these people are tied down by jobs
they don't want to leave.
Viaweb was an anomaly in this respect too. Though we were
comparatively old, we weren't tied down by impressive jobs. I
was trying to be an artist, which is not very constraining,
and Robert, though 29, was still in grad school due to a
little interruption in his academic career back in 1988. So
arguably the Worm made Viaweb possible. Otherwise Robert would
have been a junior professor at that age, and he wouldn't have
had time to work on crazy speculative projects with me.
Most of the questions people ask Y Combinator we have some
kind of answer for, but not the co-founder question. There is
no good answer. 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. A lot of startups grow out of
schools for this reason. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, among
others, were all founded by people who met in school. (In
Microsoft's case, it was high school.)
Many students feel they should wait and get a little more
experience before they start a company. All other things being
equal, they should. But all other things are not quite as
equal as they look. Most students don't realize how rich they
are in the scarcest ingredient in startups, co-founders. If
you wait too long, you may find that your friends are now
involved in some project they don't want to abandon. The
better they are, the more likely this is to happen.
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. I don't know if
this works, but it can't hurt to try.
It would be helpful just to realize what an advantage you have
as students. 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. 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.
The other place co-founders meet is at work. Fewer do than at
school, but there are things you can do to improve the odds.
The most important, obviously, is to work somewhere that has a
lot of smart, young people. Another is to work for a company
located in a startup hub. It will be easier to talk a
co-worker into quitting with you in a place where startups are
happening all around you.
You might also want to look at the employment agreement you
sign when you get hired. Most will say that any ideas you
think of while you're employed by the company belong to them.
In practice it's hard for anyone to prove what ideas you had
when, so the line gets drawn at code. If you're going to start
a startup, don't write any of the code while you're still
employed. Or at least discard any code you wrote while still
employed and start over. It's not so much that your employer
will find out and sue you. It won't come to that; investors or
acquirers or (if you're so lucky) underwriters will nail you
first. Between t = 0 and when you buy that yacht, someone is
going to ask if any of your code legally belongs to anyone
else, and you need to be able to say no. [3]
The most overreaching employee agreement I've seen so far is
Amazon's. In addition to the usual clauses about owning your
ideas, you also can't be a founder of a startup that has
another founder who worked at Amazon--even if you didn't know
them or even work there at the same time. I suspect they'd
have a hard time enforcing this, but it's a bad sign they even
try. There are plenty of other places to work; you may as well
choose one that keeps more of your options open.
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.
I realize this seems odd advice. If they make your life so
good that you don't want to leave, why not work there?
Because, in effect, you're probably getting a local maximum.
You need a certain activation energy to start a startup. 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]
The best place to work, if you want to start a startup, is
probably a startup. In addition to being the right sort of
experience, one way or another it will be over quickly. You'll
either end up rich, in which case problem solved, or the
startup will get bought, in which case it it will start to
suck to work there and it will be easy to leave, or most
likely, the thing will blow up and you'll be free again.
Your final advantage, ignorance, may not sound very useful. I
deliberately used a controversial word for it; you might
equally call it innocence. But it seems to be a powerful
force. My Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston is just
about to publish a book of interviews with startup founders,
and I noticed a remarkable pattern in them. One after another
said that if they'd known how hard it would be, they would
have been too intimidated to start.
Ignorance can be useful when it's a counterweight to other
forms of stupidity. It's useful in starting startups because
you're capable of more than you realize. Starting startups is
harder than you expect, but you're also capable of more than
you expect, so they balance out.
Most people look at a company like Apple and think, how could
I ever make such a thing? Apple is an institution, and I'm
just a person. But every institution was at one point just a
handful of people in a room deciding to start something.
Institutions are made up, and made up by people no different
from you.
I'm not saying everyone could start a startup. I'm sure most
people couldn't; I don't know much about the population at
large. When you get to groups I know well, like hackers, I can
say more precisely. At the top schools, I'd guess as many as a
quarter of the CS majors could make it as startup founders if
they wanted.
That "if they wanted" is an important qualification--so
important that it's almost cheating to append it like
that--because once 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. You don't have to be that smart. If you're
not a genius, just start a startup in some unsexy field where
you'll have less competition, like software for human
resources departments. I picked that example at random, but I
feel safe in predicting that whatever they have now, it
wouldn't take genius to do better. There are a lot of people
out there working on boring stuff who are desperately in need
of better software, so however short you think you fall of
Larry and Sergey, you can ratchet down the coolness of the
idea far enough to compensate.
As well as preventing you from being intimidated, ignorance
can sometimes help you discover new ideas. Steve Wozniak put
this very strongly:
All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not
having money and (b) not having done it before, ever.
Every single thing that we came out with that was really
great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.
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. All our ideas about software were
developed in a time when processors were slow, and memories
and disks were tiny. Who knows what obsolete assumptions are
embedded in the conventional wisdom? And the way these
assumptions are going to get fixed is not by explicitly
deallocating them, but by something more akin to garbage
collection. Someone ignorant but smart will come along and
reinvent everything, and in the process simply fail to
reproduce certain existing ideas.
Minus
So much for the advantages of young founders. What about the
disadvantages? I'm going to start with what goes wrong and try
to trace it back to the root causes.
What goes wrong with young founders is that they build stuff
that looks like class projects. It was only recently that we
figured this out ourselves. We noticed a lot of similarities
between the startups that seemed to be falling behind, but we
couldn't figure out how to put it into words. Then finally we
realized what it was: they were building class projects.
But what does that really mean? What's wrong with class
projects? What's the difference between a class project and a
real startup? If we could answer that question it would be
useful not just to would-be startup founders but to students
in general, because we'd be a long way toward explaining the
mystery of the so-called real world.
There seem to be two big things missing in class projects: (1)
an iterative definition of a real problem and (2) intensity.
The first is probably unavoidable. Class projects will
inevitably solve fake problems. For one thing, real problems
are rare and valuable. If a professor wanted to have students
solve real problems, he'd face the same paradox as someone
trying to give an example of whatever "paradigm" might succeed
the Standard Model of physics. There may well be something
that does, but if you could think of an example you'd be
entitled to the Nobel Prize. Similarly, good new problems are
not to be had for the asking.
In technology the difficulty is compounded by the fact that
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. Even if the professor let you change your project
description on the fly, there isn't time enough to do that in
a college class, or a market to supply evolutionary pressures.
So class projects are mostly about implementation, which is
the least of your problems in a startup.
It's not just that in a startup you work on the idea as well
as implementation. The very implementation is different. Its
main purpose is to refine the idea. Often the only value of
most of the stuff you build in the first six months is that it
proves your initial idea was mistaken. And that's extremely
valuable. If you're free of a misconception that everyone else
still shares, you're in a powerful position. 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.
That leads to our second difference: the way class projects
are measured. Professors will tend to judge you by the
distance between the starting point and where you are now. If
someone has achieved a lot, they should get a good grade. 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. That is one of the most distinctive
differences between school and the real world: there is no
reward for putting in a good effort. In fact, the whole
concept of a "good effort" is a fake idea adults invented to
encourage kids. It is not found in nature.
Such lies seem to be helpful to kids. But unfortunately when
you graduate they don't give you a list of all the lies they
told you during your education. You have to get them beaten
out of you by contact with the real world. And this is why so
many jobs want work experience. I couldn't understand that
when I was in college. I knew how to program. In fact, I could
tell I knew how to program better than most people doing it
for a living. So what was this mysterious "work experience"
and why did I need it?
Now I know what it is, and part of the confusion is
grammatical. Describing it as "work experience" implies it's
like experience operating a certain kind of machine, or using
a certain programming language. 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. When
you're a kid and you face some hard test, you can cry and say
"I can't" and they won't make you do it. Of course, no one can
make you do anything in the grownup world either. What they do
instead is fire you. And when motivated by that you find you
can do a lot more than you realized. So one of the things
employers expect from someone with "work experience" is the
elimination of the flake reflex--the ability to get things
done, with no excuses.
The other thing you get from work experience is an
understanding of what work is, and in particular, how
intrinsically horrible it is. Fundamentally the equation is a
brutal one: you have to spend most of your waking hours doing
stuff someone else wants, or starve. There are a few places
where the work is so interesting that this is concealed,
because what other people want done happens to coincide with
what you want to work on. But you only have to imagine what
would happen if they diverged to see the underlying reality.
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.
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.
So the most important advantage 24 year old founders have over
20 year old founders is that they know what they're trying to
avoid. To the average undergrad the idea of getting rich
translates into buying Ferraris, or being admired. 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.
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. And that cures the other half of the class-project
syndrome. After you've been working for a while, you yourself
tend to measure what you've done the same way the market does.
Of course, you don't have to spend years working to learn this
stuff. If you're sufficiently perceptive you can grasp these
things while you're still in school. Sam Altman did. He must
have, because Loopt is no class project. And as his example
suggests, this can be valuable knowledge. At a minimum, if you
get this stuff, you already have most of what you gain from
the "work experience" employers consider so desirable. But of
course if you really get it, you can use this information in a
way that's more valuable to you than that.
Now
So suppose you think you might start a startup at some point,
either when you graduate or a few years after. What should you
do now? For both jobs and grad school, there are ways to
prepare while you're in college. If you want to get a job when
you graduate, you should get summer jobs at places you'd like
to work. If you want to go to grad school, it will help to
work on research projects as an undergrad. What's the
equivalent for startups? How do you keep your options
maximally open?
One thing you can do while you're still in school is to learn
how startups work. Unfortunately that's not easy. Few if any
colleges have classes about startups. There may be business
school classes on entrepreneurship, as they call it over
there, but these are likely to be a waste of time. Business
schools like to talk about startups, but philosophically
they're at the opposite end of the spectrum. Most books on
startups also seem to be useless. I've looked at a few and
none get it right. Books in most fields are written by people
who know the subject from experience, but for startups there's
a unique problem: by definition the founders of successful
startups don't need to write books to make money. As a result
most books on the subject end up being written by people who
don't understand it.
So I'd be skeptical of classes and books. The way to learn
about startups is by watching them in action, preferably by
working at one. How do you do that as an undergrad? Probably
by sneaking in through the back door. Just hang around a lot
and gradually start doing things for them. Most startups are
(or should be) very cautious about hiring. Every hire
increases the burn rate, and bad hires early on are hard to
recover from. However, startups usually have a fairly informal
atmosphere, and there's always a lot that needs to be done. If
you just start doing stuff for them, many will be too busy to
shoo you away. You can thus gradually work your way into their
confidence, and maybe turn it into an official job later, or
not, whichever you prefer. This won't work for all startups,
but it would work for most I've known.
Number two, make the most of the great advantage of school:
the wealth of co-founders. Look at the people around you and
ask yourself which you'd like to work with. When you apply
that test, you may find you get surprising results. You may
find you'd prefer the quiet guy you've mostly ignored to
someone who seems impressive but has an attitude to match. I'm
not suggesting you suck up to people you don't really like
because you think one day they'll be successful. Exactly the
opposite, in fact: you should only start a startup with
someone you like, because a startup will put your friendship
through a stress test. I'm just saying you should think about
who you really admire and hang out with them, instead of
whoever circumstances throw you together with.
Another thing you can do is learn skills that will be useful
to you in a startup. These may be different from the skills
you'd learn to get a job. For example, thinking about getting
a job will make you want to learn programming languages you
think employers want, like Java and C++. Whereas if you start
a startup, you get to pick the language, so you have to think
about which will actually let you get the most done. If you
use that test you might end up learning Ruby or Python
instead.
But the most important skill for a startup founder isn't a
programming technique. It's a knack for understanding users
and figuring out how to give them what they want. I know I
repeat this, but that's because it's so important. And it's a
skill you can learn, though perhaps habit might be a better
word. Get into the habit of thinking of software as having
users. What do those users want? What would make them say wow?
This is particularly valuable for undergrads, because the
concept of users is missing from most college programming
classes. The way you get taught programming in college would
be like teaching writing as grammar, without mentioning that
its purpose is to communicate something to an audience.
Fortunately an audience for software is now only an http
request away. So in addition to the programming you do for
your classes, why not build some kind of website people will
find useful? At the very least it will teach you how to write
software with users. In the best case, it might not just be
preparation for a startup, but the startup itself, like it was
for Yahoo and Google.
Notes
[1] Even the desire to protect one's children seems weaker,
judging from things people have historically done to their
kids rather than risk their community's disapproval. (I assume
we still do things that will be regarded in the future as
barbaric, but historical abuses are easier for us to see.)
[2] Worrying that Y Combinator makes founders move for 3
months also suggests one underestimates how hard it is to
start a startup. You're going to have to put up with much
greater inconveniences than that.
[3] Most employee agreements say that any idea relating to the
company's present or potential future business belongs to
them. Often as not the second clause could include any
possible startup, and anyone doing due diligence for an
investor or acquirer will assume the worst.
To be safe either (a) don't use code written while you were
still employed in your previous job, or (b) get your employer
to renounce, in writing, any claim to the code you write for
your side project. Many will consent to (b) rather than lose a
prized employee. The downside is that you'll have to tell them
exactly what your project does.
[4] Geshke and Warnock only founded Adobe because Xerox
ignored them. If Xerox had used what they built, they would
probably never have left PARC.
Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris for reading
drafts of this, and to Jeff Arnold and the SIPB for inviting
me to speak.
[redditino] Comment on this essay.
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