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Before the Startup

paulgraham.com

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Re: Before the Startup

#21

Post by projectileboy »

adamzerner wrote: post #17

Nice to hear from pg again. I love his writing. He has useful points, and says them well. HOWEVER... There's a lot of prescribing of advice, but not too much explaining why it's good advice. Usually there's a few sentences of explanations, but the topic could be discussed in much more depth. I'd like to hear a more complete explanation from pg.

While I certainly can't speak for PG, I would imagine that the advice is simply derived empirically, and so doesn't really demand a great deal of elaboration.

Re: Before the Startup

#23

Post by staunch »

TheUnPedant wrote: post #9

> Yet when it comes to startups, a lot of people seem to think they're supposed to start them while they're still in college. Is PG seriously implying he doesn't know where college students got the idea that they should be founding startups instead, after spending the last ten years telling them to?

I think he's been iffy on that question for at least years. I remember a talk where he disagreed with an audience member who was suggesting people should always drop out.

Re: Before the Startup

#24

Post by DodgyEggplant »

TheUnPedant wrote: post #9

> Yet when it comes to startups, a lot of people seem to think they're supposed to start them while they're still in college. Is PG seriously implying he doesn't know where college students got the idea that they should be founding startups instead, after spending the last ten years telling them to?

Everybody should adjust to facts and experience. PG points to an important issue that this is an important period in life where you are old enough to to do things kids can't, yet young enough without the daily responsibilities which will patiently wait for you for the next decades. The startup can wait after these unique years

Re: Before the Startup

#25

Post by aresant »

nl wrote: post #5

one guaranteed way to turn your mind into the type that has good startup ideas is to get yourself to the leading edge of some technology—to cause yourself, as Paul Buchheit put it, to "live in the future." When you reach that point, ideas that will seem to other people uncannily prescient will seem obvious to you. You may not realize they're startup ideas, but you'll know they're something that ought to exist. I thin…

Thank you for putting that quote into context for me - have always enjoyed it, never saw quite so good an example.

In Southern California right now we're living this with regard to Oculus / Virtual Reality.

Oculus being born here / the dev conference happening in LA / and the amount of devs that are playing w/the tech logcally feels like one of those times where we get exposed to Bay Area "newness" of a product.

And as a result, get to invent and problem-solve before the general population even has the consumer tech (which they'll probably first see in bestbuy via gear vr soon).

Re: Before the Startup

#26

Post by dkural »

"So strangely enough the optimal thing do to in college if you want to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational version of college focused on "entrepreneurship." It's the classic version of college as education for its own sake. If you want to start a startup after college, what you should do in college is learn powerful things. And if you have genuine intellectual curiosity, that's what you'll naturally tend to do if you just follow your own inclinations. [10]

The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. The way to become Larry Page was to become an expert on search. And the way to become an expert on search was to be driven by genuine curiosity, not some ulterior motive.

At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity. And you'll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive toward the end of the process.

So here is the ultimate advice for young would-be startup founders, boiled down to two words: just learn."

This is my favorite part. Elon Musk does it this way even after his first few companies. He goes and learns a bunch of stuff to the cutting edge.

Re: Before the Startup

#27

Post by jforman »

"So starting a startup is intrinsically something you can only really learn by doing it"

This makes absolutely no sense coming from somebody who built an empire giving advice to budding entrepreneurs.

Re: Before the Startup

#28

Post by startupfounder »

"The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. The way to become Larry Page was to become an expert on search. And the way to become an expert on search was to be driven by genuine curiosity, not some ulterior motive.

At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity. And you'll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive toward the end of the process.

So here is the ultimate advice for young would-be startup founders, boiled down to two words: just learn."

It's not about the money, it's not about how old you are, it's not about giving up, it's not about tricks or hacks and it's not about the obvious path.

For me it's about the curiosity of genuinely wanting to understand how the world generates, transports and consumes energy and how I can remove the barriers and inefficiencies of transitioning our global society towards using clean energy more efficiently and cost effectively so we can mitigate the effects of climate change.

Re: Before the Startup

#29

Post by ar7hur »

jforman wrote: post #27

"So starting a startup is intrinsically something you can only really learn by doing it" This makes absolutely no sense coming from somebody who built an empire giving advice to budding entrepreneurs.

No, PG built that not by giving advice to founders, but by selecting them.

Re: Before the Startup

#30

Post by sjg007 »

apsec112 wrote: post #14
TheUnPedant wrote: post #9

> Yet when it comes to startups, a lot of people seem to think they're supposed to start them while they're still in college. Is PG seriously implying he doesn't know where college students got the idea that they should be founding startups instead, after spending the last ten years telling them to?

"The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads? (...) The less it costs to start a company, the less you need the permission of investors to do it. So a lot of people will be able to start companies now who never coul…

So if you exclude 20 and 21, you are still in your early twenties and you just graduated from college.
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