Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 55 posts

Re: Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

#41

Post by jacquesm »

ptn wrote: post #40
jacquesm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do it full-time or on the side? What's worth doing is worth doing well, consider your college education over and done with when you start down this path. A startup is time consuming, the first year is the hardest, it takes usually about three years to become established, though of course that changes from case to case. > what kind of advice should I not listen to? You should weigh every advice you get (including th…

> Better change that or you will not be doing well. That's the number one challenge you face I think. This is a very serious problem indeed. Please read http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1209303

Ok, I did, left you a message there.

Re: Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

#42

Post by alexitosrv »

portman wrote: post #16

>> What advice would you give college students about starting a business? You are not as experienced as you think you are. I wish someone I respected had told me this when I was a college student. In college, I thought I was super-awesome. I thought I was already a leader. I thought I was qualified to manage a 100-person company. I thought I didn't have much else to learn; I just wanted to start a company so I could…

You are not alone, I'm the same boat here. The thing is the experience is something that you don't get until just after of needing it.

Re: Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

#43

Post by iworkforthem »

- Why start your own business? Why start early? So that you won't have to work some stupid boss and complain all for the rest of your life. We all make mistake along the way. Better to learn from any mistakes early.

- How to be a domain expert? Got to love the subject, and be really really really good at it.

- How do you know if you have the right Idea? There is not right idea, just a solution to solve a problem.

- Why it will be the hardest thing you will ever do? f!

- How do you bootstrap? Try to be a bit creative here alright.

- How do you find investors? See above.

Re: Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

#45

Post by ahi »

- Why start your own business? Why start early? Have you seen the job market? Most of the job offers you will get (if they get any) will be low pay and low responsibility, essentially digging yourself a hole at the beginning of your careers. Even if unsuccessful, starting your own business builds experience and skills making yourself more marketable in a few years when the job market is better.

Re: Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

#46

Post by atiw »

shaddi wrote: post #22

As a current college student, I'd recommend they try their hand at starting a student organization that does something entreprenurial (a microfinance organization, or a group providing tech services to the poor, for example). I suppose I don't have the experience to compare it to launching a startup, but from what I've understood about startups there are a lot of similarities: - You are the one in charge, you have to…

THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

Saying that doing a student organisation is a nice thing because it's cost of failure is 0, is not a very good logic.

In fact, it is the risk factor that mostly forces us to go above and beyond when everyone else is giving up. Persistence is the key, and a good way of achieving that could having limited high risk, so that you don't quit during tough times.

Sooner or later, there comes a point, when you have to make a lot of tough decisions, which mostly comes down to giving up versus fighting and finding your way out somehow.

Oh, and I totally agree that you probably should try and keep your actual money investment close to 0, and maximise your time investment. But, I also think you can build a business with minimum money involved, and by that I mean less than 500 bucks.

I am assuming a tech startup, where the main investment required is your time and code, and you can at least get a "proof of concept" working...which can be used to raise money and/or make sure it is the right idea.

Last, but not the least, if you know you are going to do a startup, or are at least curious if you can do it, you owe it to yourself to see it through. To go ahead and build it, or at least fail trying to build it.

The biggest upside to this startegy is that you only "learn" doing a student organisation. Whereas you actually succeed building a startup.

I don't intend to be rude, but this kind of sounds like you want to do a college degree right after high school, and you are confused, and you decide to go do a assosciate degree or something, to get the "feel" of a real college degree.

I repeat. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

Re: Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

#47

Post by shaddi »

atiw wrote: post #46
shaddi wrote: post #22

As a current college student, I'd recommend they try their hand at starting a student organization that does something entreprenurial (a microfinance organization, or a group providing tech services to the poor, for example). I suppose I don't have the experience to compare it to launching a startup, but from what I've understood about startups there are a lot of similarities: - You are the one in charge, you have to…

THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING. Saying that doing a student organisation is a nice thing because it's cost of failure is 0, is not a very good logic. In fact, it is the risk factor that mostly forces us to go above and beyond when everyone else is giving up. Persistence is the key, and a good way of achieving that could having limited high risk, so that you don't quit during tough times. Sooner or later, there comes a p…

Right, they are not the same thing: they do share similarities, however. I must not have made my point clearly. My own experience has to do with starting a group that has a non-trivial operating budget (O(10k), decent for a student org), customers, technology that we developed for our projects, and funded by grants for which we are required to show demonstrable progress. There are a few groups like this at my university, so I figure it is a relatively common setup. We actually considered launching it as a for-profit business, but realized none of us had the time to get fully behind that. When I say cost of failure is 0, I mean to say you're not going to be out a substantial amount of your own investment if things go bad. And you are still working towards something you consider valuable (a degree) during the whole process, so it's not a total waste of time. But there are certainly social costs for just walking away from something you start, especially if you make a big deal out it to begin with.

I understand what you're getting at -- they are not the same thing. But I do think that some of the leadership aspects are similar, insofar as starting any organization (student, startup, community, or otherwise) requires certain common skills. If you can't/don't want to drop your studies to go do your Startup, then this might be a means to exercise a similar skill (sub)set in the meantime.

Re: Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

#48

Post by aptimpropriety »

portman wrote: post #16

>> What advice would you give college students about starting a business? You are not as experienced as you think you are. I wish someone I respected had told me this when I was a college student. In college, I thought I was super-awesome. I thought I was already a leader. I thought I was qualified to manage a 100-person company. I thought I didn't have much else to learn; I just wanted to start a company so I could…

(Still a college student, but what I've been told...)

-Use the resources available to you as a result of your undergrad status. Free multi-thousand dollar industry reports, free legal advice from law experts/professors, free tech advice from tech departments, etc -On-campus tech transfer offices offer further advantages

Re: Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

#49

Post by marcamillion »

Cash flow is king.

People always talk about 'cash is king', but more importantly...'cash flow' is really king.

If you get them to focus on generating cash flow early, then from there you can lead into getting a prototype/lean product into early customer's hands early.

You can be 'profitable' and still go bankrupt.

Re: Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business?

#50

Post by InclinedPlane »

The single most important thing I'd tell new college graduates is to not buy a new car. Time and time again I've seen so many people acquire moderately paying entry level employment and then immediately go and yoke themselves to a huge debt that will deeply affect their finances for the next several years. Better to go without a car for a while, if practical, and then buy used. If possible pay cash, but in any event avoid anything that takes more than a year or so to pay off if you have to borrow money.
Post reply on HN