October 2014(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class atStanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it isapplicable to potential founders at other ages.)One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to giveadvice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell my own kids?" Mykids are little, but I can imagine what I'd tell them about startupsif they were in college, and that's what I'm going to tell you.Startups are very counterintuitive. I'm not sure why. Maybe it'sjust because knowledge about them hasn't permeated our culture yet.But whatever the reason, starting a startup is a task where youcan't always trust your instincts.It's like skiing in that way. When you first try skiing and youwant to slow down, your instinct is to lean back. But if you leanback on skis you fly down the hill out of control. So part oflearning to ski is learning to suppress that impulse. Eventuallyyou get new habits, but at first it takes a conscious effort. Atfirst there's a list of things you're trying to remember as youstart down the hill.Startups are as unnatural as skiing, so there's a similar list forstartups. Here I'm going to give you the first part of it — the thingsto remember if you want to prepare yourself to start a startup.CounterintuitiveThe first item on it is the fact I already mentioned: that startupsare so weird that if you trust your instincts, you'll make a lotof mistakes. If you know nothing more than this, you may at leastpause before making them.When I was running Y Combinator I used to joke that our functionwas to tell founders things they would ignore. It's really true.Batch after batch, the YC partners warn founders about mistakesthey're about to make, and the founders ignore them, and then comeback a year later and say "I wish we'd listened."Why do the founders ignore the partners' advice? Well, that's thething about counterintuitive ideas: they contradict your intuitions.They seem wrong. So of course your first impulse is to disregardthem. And in fact my joking description is not merely the curseof Y Combinator but part of its raison d'etre. If founders' instinctsalready gave them the right answers, they wouldn't need us. Youonly need other people to give you advice that surprises you. That'swhy there are a lot of ski instructors and not many runninginstructors.[1]You can, however, trust your instincts about people. And in factone of the most common mistakes young founders make is not todo that enough. They get involved with people who seem impressive,but about whom they feel some misgivings personally. Later whenthings blow up they say "I knew there was something off about him,but I ignored it because he seemed so impressive."If you're thinking about getting involved with someone — as acofounder, an employee, an investor, or an acquirer — and youhave misgivings about them, trust your gut. If someone seemsslippery, or bogus, or a jerk, don't ignore it.This is one case where it pays to be self-indulgent. Work withpeople you genuinely like, and you've known long enough to be sure.ExpertiseThe second counterintuitive point is that it's not that importantto know a lot about startups. The way to succeed in a startup isnot to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your usersand the problem you're solving for them.Mark Zuckerberg didn't succeed because he was an expert on startups.He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups, because heunderstood his users really well.If you don't know anything about, say, how to raise an angel round,don't feel bad on that account. That sort of thing you can learnwhen you need to, and forget after you've done it.In fact, I worry it's not merely unnecessary to learn in greatdetail about the mechanics of startups, but possibly somewhatdangerous. If I met an undergrad who knew all about convertiblenotes and employee agreements and (God forbid) class FF stock, Iwouldn't think "here is someone who is way ahead of their peers."It would set off alarms. Because another of the characteristicmistakes of young founders is to go through the motions of startinga startup. They make up some plausible-sounding idea, raise moneyat a good valuation, rent a cool office, hire a bunch of people.From the outside that seems like what startups do. But the nextstep after rent a cool office and hire a bunch of people is: graduallyrealize how completely fucked they are, because while imitating allthe outward forms of a startup they have neglected the one thingthat's actually essential: making something people want.GameWe saw this happen so often that we made up a name for it: playinghouse. Eventually I realized why it was happening. The reasonyoung founders go through the motions of starting a startup isbecause that's what they've been trained to do for their whole livesup to that point. Think about what you have to do to get intocollege, for example. Extracurricular activities, check. Even incollege classes most of the work is as artificial as running laps.I'm not attacking the educational system for being this way. Therewill always be a certain amount of fakeness in the work you do whenyou're being taught something, and if you measure their performanceit's inevitable that people will exploit the difference to the pointwhere much of what you're measuring is artifacts of the fakeness.I confess I did it myself in college. I found that in a lot ofclasses there might only be 20 or 30 ideas that were the right shapeto make good exam questions. The way I studied for exams in theseclasses was not (except incidentally) to master the material taughtin the class, but to make a list of potential exam questions andwork out the answers in advance. When I walked into the final, themain thing I'd be feeling was curiosity about which of my questionswould turn up on the exam. It was like a game.It's not surprising that after being trained for their whole livesto play such games, young founders' first impulse on starting astartup is to try to figure out the tricks for winning at this newgame. Since fundraising appears to be the measure of success forstartups (another classic noob mistake), they always want to know what thetricks are for convincing investors. We tell them the best way toconvince investors is to make a startupthat's actually doing well, meaning growing fast, and then simplytell investors so. Then they want to know what the tricks are forgrowing fast. And we have to tell them the best way to do that issimply to make something people want.So many of the conversations YC partners have with young foundersbegin with the founder asking "How do we..." and the partner replying"Just..."Why do the founders always make things so complicated? The reason,I realized, is that they're looking for the trick.So this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember aboutstartups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stopsworking. Gaming the system may continue to work if you go to workfor a big company. Depending on how broken the company is, you cansucceed by sucking up to the right people, giving the impressionof productivity, and so on. [2]But that doesn't work with startups.There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about iswhether your product does what they want. Startups are as impersonalas physics. You have to make something people want, and you prosperonly to the extent you do.The dangerous thing is, faking does work to some degree on investors.If you're super good at sounding like you know what you're talkingabout, you can fool investors for at least one and perhaps even tworounds of funding. But it's not in your interest to. The companyis ultimately doomed. All you're doing is wasting your own timeriding it down.So stop looking for the trick. There are tricks in startups, asthere are in any domain, but they are an order of magnitude lessimportant than solving the real problem. A founder who knows nothingabout fundraising but has made something users love will have aneasier time raising money than one who knows every trick in thebook but has a flat usage graph. And more importantly, the founderwho has made something users love is the one who will go on tosucceed after raising the money.Though in a sense it's bad news in that you're deprived of one ofyour most powerful weapons, I think it's exciting that gaming thesystem stops working when you start a startup. It's exciting thatthere even exist parts of the world where you win by doing goodwork. Imagine how depressing the world would be if it were alllike school and big companies, where you either have to spend a lotof time on bullshit things or lose to people who do.[3]I wouldhave been delighted if I'd realized in college that there were partsof the real world where gaming the system mattered less than others,and a few where it hardly mattered at all. But there are, and thisvariation is one of the most important things to consider whenyou're thinking about your future. How do you win in each type ofwork, and what would you like to win by doing?[4]All-ConsumingThat brings us to our fourth counterintuitive point: startups areall-consuming. If you start a startup, it will take over your lifeto a degree you cannot imagine. And if your startup succeeds, itwill take over your life for a long time: for several years at thevery least, maybe for a decade, maybe for the rest of your workinglife. So there is a real opportunity cost here.Larry Page may seem to have an enviable life, but there are aspectsof it that are unenviable. Basically at 25 he started running asfast as he could and it must seem to him that he hasn't stopped tocatch his breath since. Every day new shit happens in the Googleempire that only the CEO can deal with, and he, as CEO, has to dealwith it. If he goes on vacation for even a week, a whole week'sbacklog of shit accumulates. And he has to bear this uncomplainingly,partly because as the company's daddy he can never show fear orweakness, and partly because billionaires get less than zero sympathyif they talk about having difficult lives. Which has the strangeside effect that the difficulty of being a successful startup founderis concealed from almost everyone except those who've done it.Y Combinator has now funded several companies that can be calledbig successes, and in every single case the founders say the samething. It never gets any easier. The nature of the problems change.You're worrying about construction delays at your London officeinstead of the broken air conditioner in your studio apartment.But the total volume of worry never decreases; if anything itincreases.Starting a successful startup is similar to having kids in thatit's like a button you push that changes your life irrevocably.And while it's truly wonderful having kids, there are a lot ofthings that are easier to do before you have them than after. Manyof which will make you a better parent when you do have kids. Andsince you can delay pushing the button for a while, most people inrich countries do.Yet when it comes to startups, a lot of people seem to think they'resupposed to start them while they're still in college. Are youcrazy? And what are the universities thinking? They go out oftheir way to ensure their students are well supplied with contraceptives,and yet they're setting up entrepreneurship programs and startupincubators left and right.To be fair, the universities have their hand forced here. A lotof incoming students are interested in startups. Universities are,at least de facto, expected to prepare them for their careers. Sostudents who want to start startups hope universities can teachthem about startups. And whether universities can do this or not,there's some pressure to claim they can, lest they lose applicantsto other universities that do.Can universities teach students about startups? Yes and no. Theycan teach students about startups, but as I explained before, thisis not what you need to know. What you need to learn about are theneeds of your own users, and you can't do that until you actuallystart the company.[5]So starting a startup is intrinsicallysomething you can only really learn by doing it. And it's impossibleto do that in college, for the reason I just explained: startupstake over your life. You can't start a startup for real as astudent, because if you start a startup for real you're not a studentanymore. You may be nominally a student for a bit, but you won't evenbe that for long.[6]Given this dichotomy, which of the two paths should you take? Bea real student and not start a startup, or start a real startup andnot be a student? I can answer that one for you. Do not start astartup in college. How to start a startup is just a subset of abigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a good life.And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lotof ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it.Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search. Mostpeople should still be searching breadth-first at 20.You can do things in your early 20s that you can't do as well beforeor after, like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travelsuper cheaply with no sense of a deadline. For unambitious people,this sort of thing is the dreaded "failure to launch," but for theambitious ones it can be an incomparably valuable sort of exploration.If you start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful,you'll never get to do it.[7]Mark Zuckerberg will never get to bum around a foreign country. Hecan do other things most people can't, like charter jets to fly himto foreign countries. But success has taken a lot of the serendipityout of his life. Facebook is running him as much as he's runningFacebook. And while it can be very cool to be in the grip of aproject you consider your life's work, there are advantages toserendipity too, especially early in life. Among other things itgives you more options to choose your life's work from.There's not even a tradeoff here. You're not sacrificing anythingif you forgo starting a startup at 20, because you're more likelyto succeed if you wait. In the unlikely case that you're 20 andone of your side projects takes off like Facebook did, you'll facea choice of running with it or not, and it may be reasonable to runwith it. But the usual way startups take off is for the foundersto make them take off, and it's gratuitouslystupid to do that at 20.TryShould you do it at any age? I realize I've made startups soundpretty hard. If I haven't, let me try again: starting a startupis really hard. What if it's too hard? How can you tell if you'reup to this challenge?The answer is the fifth counterintuitive point: you can't tell. Yourlife so far may have given you some idea what your prospects mightbe if you tried to become a mathematician, or a professional footballplayer. But unless you've had a very strange life you haven't donemuch that was like being a startup founder.Starting a startup will change you a lot. So what you're tryingto estimate is not just what you are, but what you could grow into,and who can do that?For the past 9 years it was my job to predict whether people wouldhave what it took to start successful startups. It was easy totell how smart they were, and most people reading this will be overthat threshold. The hard part was predicting how tough and ambitious they would become. Theremay be no one who has more experience at trying to predict that,so I can tell you how much an expert can know about it, and theanswer is: not much. I learned to keep a completely open mind aboutwhich of the startups in each batch would turn out to be the stars.The founders sometimes think they know. Some arrive feeling surethey will ace Y Combinator just as they've aced every one of the (few,artificial, easy) tests they've faced in life so far. Others arrivewondering how they got in, and hoping YC doesn't discover whatevermistake caused it to accept them. But there is little correlationbetween founders' initial attitudes and how well their companiesdo.I've read that the same is true in the military — that theswaggering recruits are no more likely to turn out to be reallytough than the quiet ones. And probably for the same reason: thatthe tests involved are so different from the ones in their previouslives.If you're absolutely terrified of starting a startup, you probablyshouldn't do it. But if you're merely unsure whether you're up toit, the only way to find out is to try. Just not now.IdeasSo if you want to start a startup one day, what should you do incollege? There are only two things you need initially: an idea andcofounders. And the m.o. for getting both is the same. Which leadsto our sixth and last counterintuitive point: that the way to getstartup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas.I've written a whole essay on this,so I won't repeat it all here. But the short version is that ifyou make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, the ideasyou come up with will not merely be bad, but bad and plausible-sounding,meaning you'll waste a lot of time on them before realizing they'rebad.The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back.Instead of making a conscious effort to think of startup ideas,turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in without anyconscious effort. In fact, so unconsciously that you don't evenrealize at first that they're startup ideas.This is not only possible, it's how Apple, Yahoo, Google, andFacebook all got started. None of these companies were even meantto be companies at first. They were all just side projects. Thebest startups almost have to start as side projects, because greatideas tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would rejectthem as ideas for companies.Ok, so how do you turn your mind into the type that startup ideasform in unconsciously? (1) Learn a lot about things that matter,then (2) work on problems that interest you (3) with people youlike and respect. The third part, incidentally, is how you getcofounders at the same time as the idea.The first time I wrote that paragraph, instead of "learn a lot aboutthings that matter," I wrote "become good at some technology." Butthat prescription, though sufficient, is too narrow. What wasspecial about Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia was not that they wereexperts in technology. They were good at design, and perhaps evenmore importantly, they were good at organizing groups and makingprojects happen. So you don't have to work on technology per se,so long as you work on problems demanding enough to stretch you.What kind of problems are those? That is very hard to answer inthe general case. History is full of examples of young people whowere working on important problems that noone else at the time thought were important, and in particularthat their parents didn't think were important. On the other hand,history is even fuller of examples of parents who thought theirkids were wasting their time and who were right. So how do youknow when you're working on real stuff?[8]I know how I know. Real problems are interesting, and I amself-indulgent in the sense that I always want to work on interestingthings, even if no one else cares about them (in fact, especiallyif no one else cares about them), and find it very hard to makemyself work on boring things, even if they're supposed to beimportant.My life is full of case after case where I worked on something justbecause it seemed interesting, and it turned out later to be usefulin some worldly way. YCombinator itself was something I only did because it seemedinteresting. So I seem to have some sort of internal compass thathelps me out. But I don't know what other people have in theirheads. Maybe if I think more about this I can come up with heuristicsfor recognizing genuinely interesting problems, but for the momentthe best I can offer is the hopelessly question-begging advice thatif you have a taste for genuinely interesting problems, indulgingit energetically is the best way to prepare yourself for a startup.And indeed, probably also the best way to live.[9]But although I can't explain in the general case what counts as aninteresting problem, I can tell you about a large subset of them.If you think of technology as something that's spreading like asort of fractal stain, every moving point on the edge representsan interesting problem. So one guaranteed way to turn your mindinto the type that has good startup ideas is to get yourself to theleading edge of some technology — to cause yourself, as PaulBuchheit put it, to "live in the future." When you reach that point,ideas that will seem to other people uncannily prescient will seemobvious to you. You may not realize they're startup ideas, butyou'll know they're something that ought to exist.For example, back at Harvard in the mid 90s a fellow grad studentof my friends Robert and Trevor wrote his own voice over IP software.He didn't mean it to be a startup, and he never tried to turn itinto one. He just wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan withoutpaying for long distance calls, and since he was an expert onnetworks it seemed obvious to him that the way to do it was turnthe sound into packets and ship it over the Internet. He never didany more with his software than talk to his girlfriend, but thisis exactly the way the best startups get started.So strangely enough the optimal thing to do in college if you wantto be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocationalversion of college focused on "entrepreneurship." It's the classicversion of college as education for its own sake. If you want tostart a startup after college, what you should do in college islearn powerful things. And if you have genuine intellectualcuriosity, that's what you'll naturally tend to do if you justfollow your own inclinations.[10]The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domainexpertise. The way to become Larry Page was to become an experton search. And the way to become an expert on search was to bedriven by genuine curiosity, not some ulterior motive.At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive forcuriosity. And you'll do it best if you introduce the ulteriormotive 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.Notes[1]Some founders listen more than others, and this tends to be apredictor of success. One of the things Iremember about the Airbnbs during YC is how intently they listened.[2]In fact, this is one of the reasons startups are possible. Ifbig companies weren't plagued by internal inefficiencies, they'dbe proportionately more effective, leaving less room for startups.[3]In a startup you have to spend a lot of time on schleps, but this sort of work is merelyunglamorous, not bogus.[4]What should you do if your true calling is gaming the system?Management consulting.[5]The company may not be incorporated, but if you start to getsignificant numbers of users, you've started it, whether you realizeit yet or not.[6]It shouldn't be that surprising that colleges can't teachstudents how to be good startup founders, because they can't teachthem how to be good employees either.The way universities "teach" students how to be employees is tohand off the task to companies via internship programs. But youcouldn't do the equivalent thing for startups, because by definitionif the students did well they would never come back.[7]Charles Darwin was 22 when he received an invitation to travelaboard the HMS Beagle as a naturalist. It was only because he wasotherwise unoccupied, to a degree that alarmed his family, that hecould accept it. And yet if he hadn't we probably would not knowhis name.[8]Parents can sometimes be especially conservative in thisdepartment. There are some whose definition of important problemsincludes only those on the critical path to med school.[9]I did manage to think of a heuristic for detecting whether youhave a taste for interesting ideas: whether you find known boringideas intolerable. Could you endure studying literary theory, orworking in middle management at a large company?[10]In fact, if your goal is to start a startup, you can stickeven more closely to the ideal of a liberal education than pastgenerations have. Back when students focused mainly on getting ajob after college, they thought at least a little about how thecourses they took might look to an employer. And perhaps evenworse, they might shy away from taking a difficult class lest theyget a low grade, which would harm their all-important GPA. Goodnews: users don't care what your GPAwas. And I've never heard of investors caring either. Y Combinatorcertainly never asks what classes you took in college or what gradesyou got in them.Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, PatrickCollison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, andFred Wilson for reading drafts of this.
