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I wish I had had that opportunity back in 1985 when I founded my first one, but being outside of the Bay Area (as in 1500 miles away) there were basically no software startups at all, and with no internet/web/ycombinator etc, no way to learn anything except by trying and failing. We did ship our product, do marketing, make some sales but not enough so we had to sell the product and close down. Today I know all things…
Hmm I feel like most founders I know just started companies after college without much experience. While people that want to get experience first seem to never end up starting a company. I think it mostly comes down to risk adversity.
I was under the impression that starting a company in general and 'starting a startup' are not exactly the same thing, though I surely might be wrong about this.
Most startups don't know what they are doing, so first-time starter-uppers get the wrong idea. Instead of moving at a steady pace without burnout, the lesson they can take away from it is that startups are all about heroics and working until 2AM while chugging tequila.
There are a lot of clowns out there with a serious case of Dunning-Kruger who run these companies (usually into the ground).
Hmm I feel like most founders I know just started companies after college without much experience. While people that want to get experience first seem to never end up starting a company. I think it mostly comes down to risk adversity.
Is a "startup" the same as starting a company? If I start a company without ever seeking external funding/accelerating/etc, is my company a "startup" in the same way that "founding a startup" implies? I was under the impression that starting a company in general and 'starting a startup' are not exactly the same thing, though I surely might be wrong about this.
Working in a startup will brand you as a startup person and help you meet VCs which may make it easier to raise. It'll also show you the problems that that particular startup faces and give you n=1 degree of pattern matching. On the flip side, something like YC can give you the same benefit or just shipping a for-profit side project on the side. Additionally, given how poorly run most startups are today, I'd posit that you're actually in more danger of learning the wrong lessons than the right lessons by joining a startup. At the end of the day, the truth is likely to be Peter Thiel's observation that joining the right, highly successful, high growth startup as a very early employee is a great way to learn exactly 1 method of starting a successful company--the way that company did it. But if the startup you join isn't that rocketship, you've only learned how to (or how not to) achieve that particular path of failure or mediocrity.
Not particularly great advice though, because then the challenge becomes identify those startups. And if you could do that reliably, I'd suggest you switch careers into VC instead :)
To my knowledge, only 1 ever took the plunge, the rest all moved on to different jobs when they finished up with us. In every case they told me that an advantage of the new place is that they’d learn some more things they need to know for when they start their own thing.
To be clear I don’t judge their choices at all. Just pointing out that this is a pretty common thing people tell themselves.
By contrast the former employees who have gone on to do their own startup expressed no interest in the topic until one day they were suddenly a founder.