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If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

philosophyforprogrammers.blogspot.com

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Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#41

Post by findjashua »

lukasm wrote: post #12

I pretty sure in one of the essays PG says you should finish collage and go work for 2-3 years (or maybe it wasn't him) I think there is no simple answer. Try defaulting to work for a few years, but if you are hacking a project while you are studying and you are convinced that you are on to something, take a year break to try it.

work for 2-3 years, yes; college, maybe later.

If I could write a note to my high-school counterpart, it'd say 'learn javascript, screw college, start working right after school'.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#42

Post by hellodevnull »

The general idea is the same in education and almost every other aspect of life: learning enough, then applied practice. You do a programming language tutorial then work on your own programs to really grasp it. If you skip the first step you'll make needless mistakes and pick up bad habits, if you skip the second you'll rarely be of much use in the real world.

Here, working at another company can be considered the first step in learning about building businesses, and I'm sure it's beneficial, but in startups I've found you can quickly learn and practice whatever you're intending or supposed to do. Let me give an example form personal experience. At one point in my life I had never sold anything before and probably would have been a lot better if I had worked in another company and observed the sales department, however, when my time came, I had to start contacting customers. I spent a while reading about sales then just went for it. I improved a lot in a short space of time... now I consider this an accelerated experience gain because I researched exactly what I needed for a particular task and applied it to a problem. In the same way I'd only learn about some particular aspect of programming because I've discovered it's what I need.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#44

Post by gfodor »

lutusp wrote: post #29
gdonelli wrote: post #18

According to the author: - 18% success rate for time founders - 20% success rate after that Implying previous experience almost doesn't matter that much... so just trying 5 times should assure 1 success. In that view, starting your company as soon as you can would still be the best way to get to your first success faster.

> According to the author: - 18% success rate for time founders - 20% success rate after that ... so just trying 5 times should assure 1 success. Not according to the Binomial theorem. For a success probability of .2 per independent trial and a binary outcome (i.e. success or failure, no intermediate states): Trials Probability of >= 1 successes ------------------------------------- 1 .20 2 .36 3 .38 4 .48 5 .67 10 .…

These aren't independent events. The OP may be right, but for the wrong reasons.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#45

Post by gfodor »

michaelochurch wrote: post #36

These venture-funded startups make a mockery of the concept. After all, if you're a true entrepreneur, are you really going to waste 6 months of your life asking a fucking venture capitalist for permission to be a founder? The VC-funded game is just the same private-sector social climbing that a previous generation called "the corporate ladder". The real problem, the 9500-pound chain-smoking and belching elephant in…

That's just, like, your opinion man. You seem to be focusing on the glitzy veneer of the Sand Hill VCs and ignoring the fact that new capital intensive businesses almost always involve seed investment, be it from friends and family, or venture capitalists.

In either case, it's almost always a good idea to use other peoples' money instead of your own. Particularly in environments like the current one where you can get money without giving up ridiculous amounts of equity. You're undermining your ability to have a few failures to learn from if you put all of your personal assets on the line in one venture.

If your main complaint isn't VCs per se, but access to VCs, then sure, that's a fair argument. But arguing that somehow we'd be better of if people were risking massive amounts of their personal capital on their startups (vs what we have now where the risk is split between them and others who can afford it) seems wrong. Even the founders who do have money aren't so dumb as to turn away VCs out of pride of being a "true entrepreneur" if the terms are favorable.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#46

Post by andyidsinga »

you can definitely learn more by working with/for someone else than by simply striking out on your own (too early) IF those people actually care about mentoring and have the ability to communicate their knowledge and experiences.

Sometimes working on your own ideas vs someone elses is very appealing regardless of how efficient the learning might be. So, sometimes I have to remind myself and others -- doing this is not just about efficiency.

I chuckle at the "Academics joke that "a month in the lab can save you an hour in the library." line in the post. What immediately came to my mind was something Click and Clack said : "reality often astonishes theory" ..which is why spending time in the dirty reality of building and experimenting (or even reproducing something you found in the library) is the yin to the library's yang.

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#47

Post by andyidsinga »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #27
gdonelli wrote: post #18

According to the author: - 18% success rate for time founders - 20% success rate after that Implying previous experience almost doesn't matter that much... so just trying 5 times should assure 1 success. In that view, starting your company as soon as you can would still be the best way to get to your first success faster.

Interesting. I am on my sixth startup. The first one, in Los Angeles, shut down, but the product was sold to another company and became the core product in the next company over 10 years, and that company eventually sold for hundreds of millions in cash. (Nothing for me.) I learnt a lot of painful but good lessons. The second company was a consulting company, in London UK, with some friends. We did well, but it was s…

Totally agree about the learning in consulting - you're always working on your customers _actual_ need ...even if that need ends up not being viable or meaningful in the larger market

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#48

Post by elyrly »

kvee wrote: post #26
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #6

It kind of drives me nuts that I've read a lot of this research elsewhere, and all of my experiences have either flew in the face of them, or there were major asterisks. It makes me wonder, who were the people being studied, because I can see all of this being true in the general population, and you can even see it in most of the valley. There is something about the results that I don't trust, much like the way that…

I think it has something to do with the idea that 3% of YC applicants have a 100% chance of getting an interview. If you follow PG's ethos perfectly maybe you choose to work at a great startup that is going to succeed and then you start your own. Work at Justin.tv, and then start Twitch/ZeroCater

place/time and a sprinkle of luck

Re: If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

#49

Post by god_bless_texas »

I would agree that if you don't intend to utterly disrupt some industry, that some experience working in another company can be helpful.

I would argue that as much good knowledge may be gained that the equal number of bad habits may be learned and turn you into an "inside the box thinker".

Working in a hardware startup is a great example of this duality, however. Old engineers know that planning, testing, and quality debugging lead to a great product and that no amount of research can beat a good test program. Young engineers are willing to try stuff because they don't know what they don't know. Some huge innovations have come from younguns trying stuff that "shouldn't" work, and become industry shaping product innovations.

Who's right in the end? Both have been.

Last, I think I am pretty sick of people saying "what the formula is". Just shut up, because there isn't one!

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