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

I've been doing my startup and have been working in companies on and off on the side and to be honest I have a quite strong opinion towards the point of view that people need to collect experience in a company before starting their company. I think this is really bad. More specifically, every single day that you work at a company

1. The likelihood of you starting a company and the final size of your company decreases, because every day you learn more about what's not possible. Your mind becomes more restricted and corporate experience will certainly not encourage you to invent Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Uber. These ideas can only be done by people who have NO restrictions whatsoever in their minds, who think everything is possible. Corporate life will prevent you from having these ideas and that is why I want to prevent working in a company by all means as long as I can. Which brings us to our second point.

2. You get more used to corporate life, which includes receiving a pay-check, which is mostly not based on how much money you made the company, adapting your personality so that you are good in company politics, so that you look good, so that you get promoted, but that's actually not good for the company. These learnings are very bad for starting a company.

3. You come closer to having kids. I think having kids is probably the biggest factor preventing people from starting companies. Having kids is almost like starting a company, they are your own startup, so having 2 startups is near to impossible.

There is some merit in working at a company, to learn about how politics are weaved into corporate life. This helps you to understand that when you need to sell to a larger company that the person you are selling to care much more about how they look by buying your product than how good your product actually is for his/her company.

This is why working 6 months does have value, which is how long it usually takes to understand how company politics work. However everything more than 6 months will reduce your capability in starting your own startup, every single day.

"e.g. you're mining titanium from the moon using gravity fields, you're desalinating sea water"

The fundamental disconnect here is that while there are some "startups" that actually do novel things, most are more like "build some ruby on rails app that does XYZ thing that has always been done, but do it on computers, and maybe cheaper than the big guy can by just ignoring existing regulations until we get big enough that anyone cares".

And then you wind up with a startup company probably full of 20 year olds who are smart and driven but haven't yet seen the hundreds of ways in which they can paint themselves into a corner with bad software practices which creates this negative feedback loop where everyone is working 80-120 hours spinning their wheels trying to get shit to "just work" whereas if they had more experienced technical talent (say people who have worked on highly scalable software at google or microsoft or whoever for 5 years) who have already "seen some shit", they would likely have much higher quality at a fraction of the development time.

(And while the salaries for experienced folks would have to be higher per employee, they could get by with a lot less of them and still have better code).

Not to speak for the comment you are replying to, but in my experience it likely means that those that worried more about the startup than themselves ended up worse off than those that looked out for there own best interests first.

I really like your introspection. I have read a lot of articles about startups (never started one, not even close). Given you summary here, I would definitely pay to read more of your insights.

Please write more down. I am sure I am not the only one who would wait in line to pay for it.

And do please fix the URL in your profile.

I think the three reasons entrepreneurs so often give the advise to just "go do it" is that a) the biggest barrier they faced to their own success was the psychological barrier to actually committing to taking the plunge and b) the key to their success was in taking an unconventional approach to at least some aspect of their business and c) they no doubt set off in a bunch wrong directions that had to be corrected, and the only way to learn that was to make those mistakes.

The catch is that while by nature we are risk-averse, there is a degree of reflection that would definitely improve your chances of success. While big wins tend to require unconventional approaches, you can't just break rules at random: you need to understand the rules and the reasons behind them better than everyone else. Finally, mistakes are a key part of entrepreneurship, but learning from them is essential, and that second part is harder than successful entrepreneurs appreciate (because to be successful, you've had to put together a pretty impressive track record of learning from mistakes). Experience is key to interpreting events to learn the right lesson.