**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).  
  
  
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](hiring.html) 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](http://ycombinator.com) 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](http://loopt.com), 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](siliconvalley.html) 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](http://my-computer.cruftlabs.com:8080/photos/motorcouch/0067.html).
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](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590597141) 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](http://foundersatwork.com/stevewozniak.html) 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.  
  
[](http://reddit.com) [ Comment](http://reddit.com/info/l1xb/comments) on this
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