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How to Start Google
March 2024
(This is a talk I gave to 14 and 15 year olds about what to do
now if they might want to start a startup later. Lots of
schools think they should tell students something about
startups. This is what I think they should tell them.)
Most of you probably think that when you're released into the
so-called real world you'll eventually have to get some kind
of job. That's not true, and today I'm going to talk about a
trick you can use to avoid ever having to get a job.
The trick is to start your own company. So it's not a trick
for avoiding work, because if you start your own company
you'll work harder than you would if you had an ordinary job.
But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come with
a job, including a boss telling you what to do.
It's more exciting to work on your own project than someone
else's. And you can also get a lot richer. In fact, this is
the standard way to get really rich. If you look at the lists
of the richest people that occasionally get published in the
press, nearly all of them did it by starting their own
companies.
Starting your own company can mean anything from starting a
barber shop to starting Google. I'm here to talk about one
extreme end of that continuum. I'm going to tell you how to
start Google.
The companies at the Google end of the continuum are called
startups when they're young. The reason I know about them is
that my wife Jessica and I started something called Y
Combinator that is basically a startup factory. Since 2005, Y
Combinator has funded over 4000 startups. So we know exactly
what you need to start a startup, because we've helped people
do it for the last 19 years.
You might have thought I was joking when I said I was going to
tell you how to start Google. You might be thinking "How could
we start Google?" But that's effectively what the people who
did start Google were thinking before they started it. If
you'd told Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google,
that the company they were about to start would one day be
worth over a trillion dollars, their heads would have
exploded.
All you can know when you start working on a startup is that
it seems worth pursuing. You can't know whether it will turn
into a company worth billions or one that goes out of
business. So when I say I'm going to tell you how to start
Google, I mean I'm going to tell you how to get to the point
where you can start a company that has as much chance of being
Google as Google had of being Google. [1]
How do you get from where you are now to the point where you
can start a successful startup? You need three things. You
need to be good at some kind of technology, you need an idea
for what you're going to build, and you need cofounders to
start the company with.
How do you get good at technology? And how do you choose which
technology to get good at? Both of those questions turn out to
have the same answer: work on your own projects. Don't try to
guess whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to
be the most valuable technology to know about. No one can
predict that. Just work on whatever interests you the most.
You'll work much harder on something you're interested in than
something you're doing because you think you're supposed to.
If you're not sure what technology to get good at, get good at
programming. That has been the source of the median startup
for the last 30 years, and this is probably not going to
change in the next 10.
Those of you who are taking computer science classes in school
may at this point be thinking, ok, we've got this sorted.
We're already being taught all about programming. But sorry,
this is not enough. You have to be working on your own
projects, not just learning stuff in classes. You can do well
in computer science classes without ever really learning to
program. In fact you can graduate with a degree in computer
science from a top university and still not be any good at
programming. That's why tech companies all make you take a
coding test before they'll hire you, regardless of where you
went to university or how well you did there. They know grades
and exam results prove nothing.
If you really want to learn to program, you have to work on
your own projects. You learn so much faster that way. Imagine
you're writing a game and there's something you want to do in
it, and you don't know how. You're going to figure out how a
lot faster than you'd learn anything in a class.
You don't have to learn programming, though. If you're
wondering what counts as technology, it includes practically
everything you could describe using the words "make" or
"build." So welding would count, or making clothes, or making
videos. Whatever you're most interested in. The critical
distinction is whether you're producing or just consuming. Are
you writing computer games, or just playing them? That's the
cutoff.
Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, spent time when he was a
teenager studying calligraphy -- the sort of beautiful writing
that you see in medieval manuscripts. No one, including him,
thought that this would help him in his career. He was just
doing it because he was interested in it. But it turned out to
help him a lot. The computer that made Apple really big, the
Macintosh, came out at just the moment when computers got
powerful enough to make letters like the ones in printed books
instead of the computery-looking letters you see in 8 bit
games. Apple destroyed everyone else at this, and one reason
was that Steve was one of the few people in the computer
business who really got graphic design.
Don't feel like your projects have to be serious. They can be
as frivolous as you like, so long as you're building things
you're excited about. Probably 90% of programmers start out
building games. They and their friends like to play games. So
they build the kind of things they and their friends want. And
that's exactly what you should be doing at 15 if you want to
start a startup one day.
You don't have to do just one project. In fact it's good to
learn about multiple things. Steve Jobs didn't just learn
calligraphy. He also learned about electronics, which was even
more valuable. Whatever you're interested in. (Do you notice a
theme here?)
So that's the first of the three things you need, to get good
at some kind or kinds of technology. You do it the same way
you get good at the violin or football: practice. If you start
a startup at 22, and you start writing your own programs now,
then by the time you start the company you'll have spent at
least 7 years practicing writing code, and you can get pretty
good at anything after practicing it for 7 years.
Let's suppose you're 22 and you've succeeded: You're now
really good at some technology. How do you get startup ideas?
It might seem like that's the hard part. Even if you are a
good programmer, how do you get the idea to start Google?
Actually it's easy to get startup ideas once you're good at
technology. Once you're good at some technology, when you look
at the world you see dotted outlines around the things that
are missing. You start to be able to see both the things that
are missing from the technology itself, and all the broken
things that could be fixed using it, and each one of these is
a potential startup.
In the town near our house there's a shop with a sign warning
that the door is hard to close. The sign has been there for
several years. To the people in the shop it must seem like
this mysterious natural phenomenon that the door sticks, and
all they can do is put up a sign warning customers about it.
But any carpenter looking at this situation would think "why
don't you just plane off the part that sticks?"
Once you're good at programming, all the missing software in
the world starts to become as obvious as a sticking door to a
carpenter. I'll give you a real world example. Back in the
20th century, American universities used to publish printed
directories with all the students' names and contact info.
When I tell you what these directories were called, you'll
know which startup I'm talking about. They were called
facebooks, because they usually had a picture of each student
next to their name.
So Mark Zuckerberg shows up at Harvard in 2003, and the
university still hasn't gotten the facebook online. Each
individual house has an online facebook, but there isn't one
for the whole university. The university administration has
been diligently having meetings about this, and will probably
have solved the problem in another decade or so. Most of the
students don't consciously notice that anything is wrong. But
Mark is a programmer. He looks at this situation and thinks
"Well, this is stupid. I could write a program to fix this in
one night. Just let people upload their own photos and then
combine the data into a new site for the whole university." So
he does. And almost literally overnight he has thousands of
users.
Of course Facebook was not a startup yet. It was just a...
project. There's that word again. Projects aren't just the
best way to learn about technology. They're also the best
source of startup ideas.
Facebook was not unusual in this respect. Apple and Google
also began as projects. Apple wasn't meant to be a company.
Steve Wozniak just wanted to build his own computer. It only
turned into a company when Steve Jobs said "Hey, I wonder if
we could sell plans for this computer to other people." That's
how Apple started. They weren't even selling computers, just
plans for computers. Can you imagine how lame this company
seemed?
Ditto for Google. Larry and Sergey weren't trying to start a
company at first. They were just trying to make search better.
Before Google, most search engines didn't try to sort the
results they gave you in order of importance. If you searched
for "rugby" they just gave you every web page that contained
the word "rugby." And the web was so small in 1997 that this
actually worked! Kind of. There might only be 20 or 30 pages
with the word "rugby," but the web was growing exponentially,
which meant this way of doing search was becoming
exponentially more broken. Most users just thought, "Wow, I
sure have to look through a lot of search results to find what
I want." Door sticks. But like Mark, Larry and Sergey were
programmers. Like Mark, they looked at this situation and
thought "Well, this is stupid. Some pages about rugby matter
more than others. Let's figure out which those are and show
them first."
It's obvious in retrospect that this was a great idea for a
startup. It wasn't obvious at the time. It's never obvious. If
it was obviously a good idea to start Apple or Google or
Facebook, someone else would have already done it. That's why
the best startups grow out of projects that aren't meant to be
startups. You're not trying to start a company. You're just
following your instincts about what's interesting. And if
you're young and good at technology, then your unconscious
instincts about what's interesting are better than your
conscious ideas about what would be a good company.
So it's critical, if you're a young founder, to build things
for yourself and your friends to use. The biggest mistake
young founders make is to build something for some mysterious
group of other people. But if you can make something that you
and your friends truly want to use -- something your friends
aren't just using out of loyalty to you, but would be really
sad to lose if you shut it down -- then you almost certainly
have the germ of a good startup idea. It may not seem like a
startup to you. It may not be obvious how to make money from
it. But trust me, there's a way.
What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is
something your friends actually want. And those ideas aren't
hard to see once you're good at technology. There are sticking
doors everywhere. [2]
Now for the third and final thing you need: a cofounder, or
cofounders. The optimal startup has two or three founders, so
you need one or two cofounders. How do you find them? Can you
predict what I'm going to say next? It's the same thing:
projects. You find cofounders by working on projects with
them. What you need in a cofounder is someone who's good at
what they do and that you work well with, and the only way to
judge this is to work with them on things.
At this point I'm going to tell you something you might not
want to hear. It really matters to do well in your classes,
even the ones that are just memorization or blathering about
literature, because you need to do well in your classes to get
into a good university. And if you want to start a startup you
should try to get into the best university you can, because
that's where the best cofounders are. It's also where the best
employees are. When Larry and Sergey started Google, they
began by just hiring all the smartest people they knew out of
Stanford, and this was a real advantage for them.
The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where
the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's
pretty much the same as the list of the most selective
universities.
I don't think it's the prestigious names of these universities
that cause more good startups to come out of them. Nor do I
think it's because the quality of the teaching is better.
What's driving this is simply the difficulty of getting in.
You have to be pretty smart and determined to get into MIT or
Cambridge, so if you do manage to get in, you'll find the
other students include a lot of smart and determined people. [
3]
You don't have to start a startup with someone you meet at
university. The founders of Twitch met when they were seven.
The founders of Stripe, Patrick and John Collison, met when
John was born. But universities are the main source of
cofounders. And because they're where the cofounders are,
they're also where the ideas are, because the best ideas grow
out of projects you do with the people who become your
cofounders.
So the list of what you need to do to get from here to
starting a startup is quite short. You need to get good at
technology, and the way to do that is to work on your own
projects. And you need to do as well in school as you can, so
you can get into a good university, because that's where the
cofounders and the ideas are.
That's it, just two things, build stuff and do well in school.
Notes
[1] The rhetorical trick in this sentence is that the
"Google"s refer to different things. What I mean is: a company
that has as much chance of growing as big as Google ultimately
did as Larry and Sergey could have reasonably expected Google
itself would at the time they started it. But I think the
original version is zippier.
[2] Making something for your friends isn't the only source of
startup ideas. It's just the best source for young founders,
who have the least knowledge of what other people want, and
whose own wants are most predictive of future demand anyway.
[3] Strangely enough this is particularly true in countries
like the US where undergraduate admissions are done badly. US
admissions departments make applicants jump through a lot of
arbitrary hoops that have little to do with their intellectual
ability. But the more arbitrary a test, the more it becomes a
test of mere determination and resourcefulness. And those are
the two most important qualities in startup founders. So US
admissions departments are better at selecting founders than
they would be if they were better at selecting students.
Thanks to Carolynn Levy, Jessica Livingston and Harj Taggar
for reading drafts of this.
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