It is great that you are enthusiastic! I recommend seeing if you can find someone who can serve as your mentor and who can give you some advice when you hit whatever bumps your business will encounter. Having the ability to call on someone who has already been tripped up will help immensely.
Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
51–60 of 64 posts
Re: Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are 17 years old and about to drop out of high school...I personally would advise you to at the least, finish school and get into a cool university and experience life outside the comfort zone of your parents' house . There's still a lot to learn, see and experience out there. However, that does not necessarily mean that you completely stop working on your startup. While being committed is important, there is a r…
Honestly curious- have you experienced bringing an idea on the backburner back to life? I've always felt like if immediate action isn't taken and maintained to move an idea forward it dies. I'd love to hear your perspective here, I'm interested.
I've done that a number of times. I have to, because in my life, ideas are constantly jostling for first place, and falling to the side.
I'm blessed with an ability to focus very sharply on one idea and do great things with it, but that blessing is a curse too since while I'm focused, I tend to ignore all the other stuff.
On the other hand, I've also got a bad habit of starting many more things than I can finish. As a result, most of my ideas have been on the backburner for some time. Eventually, they have to become the focus, but being on the backburner doesn't mean they're gone (though some of them certainly do change and evolve and even die while on the backburner... but I don't get too attached to a single idea).
Re: Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
#53Don't drop out of school. You've got all the time in the world, what's the rush? Your early twenties (let alone the time before you're even 20) are there to be enjoyed, not spent hacking away at a start-up 15-hours a day. Here's how it will happen if you start up now. Your first start-up will be an unmitigated disaster. Your second one will be slightly less so, but still fail. Your third will break even. Your fourth…
We will work that much harder to prove doubters wrong. The rush is to learn. If we fail now, oh well. We are that much closer and had a reason and motivation to learn. A startup doesn't mean we can't have fun. A credit crunch has very little effect on our idea.
We will work that much harder to prove doubters wrong.
No one here's doubted your ability to deliver eventually. Just the wisdom of dropping out of school to start a start-up at 17.
A top quality for any entrepreneurs is the ability to judge risk accurately. If you drop out of school now, you probably lack that ability, because you're taking a risk with an unlimited downside potential, and those are never good.
Re: Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
#54Learn to program. Deciding at 17 that you're "nontechnical" is premature optimization, without the optimization. At that age you're not non-anything you don't want to be. And if you're going to be in a world where people make software, there's nothing more valuable you could learn than how that's done, even if it's not what you ultimately spend most of your time on.
I didn't start programming till I was 17. Heavy math focus before that though.
I started when I was 10, but I didn't get seriously into programming (like deciding it was going to be a profession) until I was 23. Also had a heavy math focus, though it was more because I enjoyed math than because I knew I wanted to do something that needed math.
There's plenty of time to try things out in high school and college, and it doesn't make sense to specialize until you have a sense of what's out there and what you might enjoy. The world is much, much broader than it seems in high school.
Re: Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are 17 years old and about to drop out of high school...I personally would advise you to at the least, finish school and get into a cool university and experience life outside the comfort zone of your parents' house . There's still a lot to learn, see and experience out there. However, that does not necessarily mean that you completely stop working on your startup. While being committed is important, there is a r…
Honestly curious- have you experienced bringing an idea on the backburner back to life? I've always felt like if immediate action isn't taken and maintained to move an idea forward it dies. I'd love to hear your perspective here, I'm interested.
I just brought one back a couple weeks ago (http://eve-language.blogspot.com/). I'd started it 3 weeks before my startup, and then let it die to focus on something that might actually make money, and am now bringing it back as a hobby project.
If you're really passionate about something, it's not going to die just because you spend some time on other stuff.
I think the "strike while the anvil is hot" phenomena is largely because of survivorship bias. Most of the time, if you drop an idea after 2 weeks, you're not going to come back to it. But that's because most ideas that are only 2 weeks old aren't very good and should probably be abandoned anyways. While if you've been turning the idea over in your head for 2-3 years (as Eve had been, before I started working on it), another 18 months isn't going to make much difference.
Re: Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
#56Re: Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
#57Can you do independent study to finish high school? Don't drop out and don't do GED. Either will put you in such a low educational caste it may be hard to break out of later in life. Finish, get a real diploma for the reasons everyone has already stated. Think of yourself as a guerrilla warrior and right now you're biding your time and building strength.
It sounds like you aim to be the CEO type. If that's the case, you've got to train yourself to be a CEO. No one is going to do it for you, at least not if you're an entrepreneur. A CEO wears a lot of hats, but mostly a CEO is a salesman, especially in a startup. So learn about that and get good at it, even if it means you take a job selling someone else's crap for a few months just to know what that's like.
Yes, you definitely should learn to program to the point where you can build real things. It's not hard. If it seems hard try a new language or technology, or find a mentor. A CEO needs a pretty good bullshit detector, so having some tech knowledge is critical if you're doing a tech startup.
One final thing: People often emphasize that failure is ok and that is how you learn and find your weaknesses and build strength. All of which is true. But you get to choose your failures, probably more so than your successes. Make sure the projects you pick will teach you valuable things and let you make a lot of contacts. You'd be amazed how many happy coincidences happen when you just happen to have learned some unique thing or you just happen to know so-and-so from the last project you worked on.
Re: Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Despite high school not being easily deferrable he can get a GED instead and go to community college 2) We are not most startups. We may still fail and we accept that. We believe the process has inherent learning value. So we win regardless of financial gain. 3) Due to our youth we will have to prove our competence in other ways. We will work extra hard to make people take us seriously. Age is only a biological nu…
I started up when I was 18, and ended up going to uni when I was in my mid 20s - "these people are so much younger than me!". It was a mistake (for me) not to go when I was 18. But in your heart you know what it is you want to do. You can always change track later. Richard Branson didn't finish high school.
>> Richard Branson didn't finish high school.
Neither did the guy who served me fries this afternoon.
Re: Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know. At 17 I had been programming for 5-6 years, which is pretty normal for most decent coders I know. In my experience, if someone does not have the mindset for coding (anal retentive, OCD, borderline autistic, you know the type ;)), then trying to make them is an excercise in frustration. Maybe better to focus on the things you are good at, such as business development, marketing, sales and whatever else i…
>> (anal retentive, OCD, borderline autistic, you know the type ;)) Being a jackass does not make you a better coder, it just makes you a jackass.
Thin skin much? It was a (possibly lame) attempt at self-deprecating humor.
I was trying to say that not everyone is cut out for coding, and if you haven't had an interest in it (or that type of thing) before, you probably won't be very good at it. I have seen this with a bunch of people who thought they'd get into IT and be millionaires.
Re: Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> (anal retentive, OCD, borderline autistic, you know the type ;)) Being a jackass does not make you a better coder, it just makes you a jackass.
Thin skin much? It was a (possibly lame) attempt at self-deprecating humor. I was trying to say that not everyone is cut out for coding, and if you haven't had an interest in it (or that type of thing) before, you probably won't be very good at it. I have seen this with a bunch of people who thought they'd get into IT and be millionaires.
I know it's hard to tell in type, but I wasn't offended. I know people who fit the stereotype, but I also know gregarious, social, coders.