October 2006(This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.)Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or goto grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option:to start your own startup. But how common will that be?I'm sure the default will always be to get a job, but starting astartup could well become as popular as grad school. In the late90s my professor friends used to complain that they couldn't getgrad students, because all the undergrads were going to work forstartups. I wouldn't be surprised if that situation returns, butwith one difference: this time they'll be starting their owninstead of going to work for other people's.The most ambitious students will at this point be asking: Why waittill you graduate? Why not start a startup while you're in college?In fact, why go to college at all? Why not start a startup instead?A year and a half ago I gave a talk where I said that the average age of the founders ofYahoo, Google, and Microsoft was 24, and that if grad students couldstart startups, why not undergrads? I'm glad I phrased that as aquestion, because now I can pretend it wasn't merely a rhetoricalone. At the time I couldn't imagine why there should be any lowerlimit for the age of startup founders. Graduation is a bureaucraticchange, not a biological one. And certainly there are undergradsas competent technically as most grad students. So why shouldn'tundergrads be able to start startups as well as grad students?I now realize that something does change at graduation: you lose ahuge excuse for failing. Regardless of how complex your life is,you'll find that everyone else, including your family and friends,will discard all the low bits and regard you as having a singleoccupation at any given time. If you're in college and have asummer job writing software, you still read as a student. Whereasif you graduate and get a job programming, you'll be instantlyregarded by everyone as a programmer.The problem with starting a startup while you're still in schoolis that there's a built-in escape hatch. If you start a startupin the summer between your junior and senior year, it reads toeveryone as a summer job.So if it goes nowhere, big deal; you return to school in thefall with all the other seniors; no one regards you as a failure,because your occupation is student, and you didn't fail at that.Whereas if you start a startup just one year later, after yougraduate, as long as you're not accepted to grad school in the fallthe startup reads to everyone as your occupation. You'renow a startup founder, so you have to do well at that.For nearly everyone, the opinion of one's peers is the most powerfulmotivator of all—more powerful even than the nominal goal of moststartup founders, getting rich. [1]About a month into each fundingcycle we have an event called Prototype Day where each startuppresents to the others what they've got so far. You might thinkthey wouldn't need any more motivation. They're working on theircool new idea; they have funding for the immediate future; andthey're playing a game with only two outcomes: wealth or failure.You'd think that would be motivation enough. And yet the prospectof a demo pushes most of them into arush of activity.Even if you start a startup explicitly to get rich, the money youmight get seems pretty theoretical most of the time. What drivesyou day to day is not wanting to look bad.You probably can't change that. Even if you could, I don't thinkyou'd want to; someone who really, truly doesn't care what his peersthink of him is probably a psychopath. So the best you can do isconsider this force like a wind, and set up your boat accordingly.If you know your peers are going to push you in some direction,choose good peers, and position yourself so they push you in adirection you like.Graduation changes the prevailing winds, and those make a difference.Starting a startup is so hardthat it's a close call even for the ones that succeed. Howeverhigh a startup may be flying now, it probably has a few leaves stuckin the landing gear from those trees it barely cleared at the endof the runway. In such a close game, the smallest increase in theforces against you can be enough to flick you over the edge intofailure.When we first started Y Combinator we encouraged people to startstartups while they were still in college. That's partly becauseY Combinator began as a kind of summer program. We've kept theprogram shape—all of us having dinner together once a week turnsout to be a good idea—but we've decided nowthat the party line should be to tell people to wait till theygraduate.Does that mean you can't start a startup in college? Not at all.Sam Altman, the co-founder of Loopt,had just finished his sophomore year when we funded them, and Looptis probably the most promising of all the startups we've funded sofar. But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about threeminutes of meeting him, I remember thinking "Ah, so this is whatBill Gates must have been like when he was 19."If it can work to start a startup during college, why dowe tell people not to? For the same reason that the probablyapocryphal violinist, whenever he was asked to judge someone'splaying, would always say they didn't have enough talent to makeit as a pro. Succeeding as a musician takes determination as wellas talent, so this answer works out to be the right advice foreveryone. The ones who are uncertain believe it and give up, andthe ones who are sufficiently determined think "screw that, I'llsucceed anyway."So our official policy now is only to fund undergrads we can't talkout of it. And frankly, if you're not certain, you should wait.It's not as if all the opportunities to start companies are goingto be gone if you don't do it now. Maybe the window will close onsome idea you're working on, but that won't be the last idea you'llhave. For every idea that times out, new ones become feasible.Historically the opportunities to start startups have only increasedwith time.In that case, you might ask, why not wait longer? Why not go workfor a while, or go to grad school, and then start a startup? Andindeed, that might be a good idea. If I had to pick the sweet spotfor startup founders, based on who we're most excited to seeapplications from, I'd say it's probably the mid-twenties. Why?What advantages does someone in their mid-twenties have over someonewho's 21? And why isn't it older? What can 25 year olds do that32 year olds can't? Those turn out to be questions worth examining.PlusIf you start a startup soon after college, you'll be a young founderby present standards, so you should know what the relative advantagesof young founders are. They're not what you might think. As ayoung founder your strengths are: stamina, poverty, rootlessness,colleagues, and ignorance.The importance of stamina shouldn't be surprising. If you've heardanything about startups you've probably heard about the long hours.As far as I can tell these are universal. I can't think of anysuccessful startups whose founders worked 9 to 5. And it'sparticularly necessary for younger founders to work long hoursbecause they're probably not as efficient as they'll be later.Your second advantage, poverty, might not sound like an advantage,but it is a huge one. Poverty implies you can live cheaply,and this is critically important for startups. Nearly every startupthat fails, fails by running out of money. It's a little misleadingto put it this way, because there's usually some other underlyingcause. But regardless of the source of your problems, a low burnrate gives you more opportunity to recover from them. And sincemost startups make all kinds of mistakes at first, room to recoverfrom mistakes is a valuable thing to have.Most startups end up doing something different than they planned.The way the successful ones find something that works is by tryingthings that don't. So the worst thing you can do in a startup isto have a rigid, pre-ordained plan and then start spending a lotof money to implement it. Better to operate cheaply and give yourideas time to evolve.Recent grads can live on practically nothing, and this gives youan edge over older founders, because the main cost in softwarestartups is people. The guys with kids and mortgages are at areal disadvantage. This is one reason I'd bet on the 25 year oldover the 32 year old. The 32 year old probably is a better programmer,but probably also has a much more expensive life. Whereas a 25year old has some work experience (more on that later) but can liveas cheaply as an undergrad.Robert Morris and I were 29 and 30 respectively when we startedViaweb, but fortunately we still lived like 23 year olds. We both hadroughly zero assets. I would have loved to have a mortgage,since that would have meant I had a house. But in retrospecthaving nothing turned out to be convenient. I wasn't tied down andI was used to living cheaply.Even more important than living cheaply, though, is thinking cheaply.One reason the Apple II was so popular was that it was cheap. Thecomputer itself was cheap, and it used cheap, off-the-shelf peripheralslike a cassette tape recorder for data storage and a TV as a monitor.And you know why? Because Woz designed this computer for himself,and he couldn't afford anything more.We benefitted from the same phenomenon. Our prices weredaringly low for the time. The top level of service was$300 a month, which was an order of magnitude below the norm. Inretrospect this was a smart move, but we didn't do it because wewere smart. $300 a month seemed like a lot of money to us. LikeApple, we created something inexpensive, and therefore popular,simply because we were poor.A lot of startups have that form: someone comes along and makessomething for a tenth or a hundredth of what it used to cost, andthe existing players can't follow because they don't even want tothink about a world in which that's possible. Traditional longdistance carriers, for example, didn't even want to think aboutVoIP. (It was coming, all the same.) Being poor helps in thisgame, because your own personal bias points in the same directiontechnology evolves in.The advantages of rootlessness are similar to those of poverty.When you're young you're more mobile—not just because you don'thave a house or much stuff, but also because you're less likely tohave serious relationships. This turns out to be important, becausea lot of startups involve someone moving.The founders of Kiko, for example, are now en route to the Bay Areato start their next startup. It's a better place for what theywant to do. And it was easy for them to decide to go, becauseneither as far as I know has a serious girlfriend, and everythingthey own will fit in one car—or more precisely, will either fitin one car or is crappy enough that they don't mind leaving itbehind.They at least were in Boston. What if they'd been in Nebraska,like Evan Williams was at their age? Someone wrote recently thatthe drawback of Y Combinator was that you had to move to participate.It couldn't be any other way. The kind of conversations we havewith founders, we have to have in person. We fund a dozen startupsat a time, and we can't be in a dozen places at once. But even ifwe could somehow magically save people from moving, we wouldn't.We wouldn't be doing founders a favor by letting them stay inNebraska. Places that aren't startup hubs are toxic to startups.You can tell that from indirect evidence. You can tell how hardit must be to start a startup in Houston or Chicago or Miami fromthe microscopically small number, per capita, that succeed there. I don't know exactly what's suppressing all the startups in thesetowns—probably a hundred subtle little things—but somethingmust be.[2]Maybe this will change. Maybe the increasing cheapness of startupswill mean they'll be able to survive anywhere, instead of only inthe most hospitable environments. Maybe 37signals is the patternfor the future. But maybe not. Historically there have alwaysbeen certain towns that were centers for certain industries, andif you weren't in one of them you were at a disadvantage. So myguess is that 37signals is an anomaly. We're looking at a patternmuch older than "Web 2.0" here.Perhaps the reason more startups per capita happen in the Bay Areathan Miami is simply that there are more founder-type people there.Successful startups are almost never started by one person. Usuallythey begin with a conversation in which someone mentions thatsomething would be a good idea for a company, and his friend says,"Yeah, that is a good idea, let's try it." If you're missing thatsecond person who says "let's try it," the startup never happens.And that is another area where undergrads have an edge. They'resurrounded by people willing to say that. At a good college you'reconcentrated together with a lot of other ambitious and technicallyminded people—probably more concentrated than you'll ever beagain. If your nucleus spits out a neutron, there's a good chanceit will hit another nucleus.The number one question people ask us at Y Combinator is: Where canI find a co-founder? That's the biggest problem for someone startinga startup at 30. When they were in school they knew a lot of goodco-founders, but by 30 they've either lost touch with them or thesepeople are tied down by jobs they don't want to leave.Viaweb was an anomaly in this respect too. Though we were comparativelyold, we weren't tied down by impressive jobs. I was trying to bean artist, which is not very constraining, and Robert, though 29,was still in grad school due to a little interruption in his academiccareer back in 1988. So arguably the Worm made Viaweb possible.Otherwise Robert would have been a junior professor at that age,and he wouldn't have had time to work on crazy speculative projectswith me.Most of the questions people ask Y Combinator we have some kind ofanswer for, but not the co-founder question. There is no goodanswer. Co-founders really should be people you already know. Andby far the best place to meet them is school. You have a largesample of smart people; you get to compare how they all perform onidentical tasks; and everyone's life is pretty fluid. A lot ofstartups grow out of schools for this reason. Google, Yahoo, andMicrosoft, among others, were all founded by people who met inschool. (In Microsoft's case, it was high school.)Many students feel they should wait and get a little more experiencebefore they start a company. All other things being equal, theyshould. But all other things are not quite as equal as they look.Most students don't realize how rich they are in the scarcestingredient in startups, co-founders. If you wait too long, you mayfind that your friends are now involved in some project they don'twant to abandon. The better they are, the more likely this is tohappen.One way to mitigate this problem might be to actively plan yourstartup while you're getting those n years of experience. Sure,go off and get jobs or go to grad school or whatever, but gettogether regularly to scheme, so the idea of starting a startupstays alive in everyone's brain. I don't know if this works, butit can't hurt to try.It would be helpful just to realize what an advantage you have asstudents. Some of your classmates are probably going to be successfulstartup founders; at a great technical university, that is a nearcertainty. So which ones? If I were you I'd look for the peoplewho are not just smart, but incurable builders. Lookfor the people who keep starting projects, and finish at least someof them. That's what we look for. Above all else, above academiccredentials and even the idea you apply with, we look for peoplewho build things.The other place co-founders meet is at work. Fewer do than atschool, but there are things you can do to improve the odds. Themost important, obviously, is to work somewhere that has a lot ofsmart, young people. Another is to work for a company located ina startup hub. It will be easier to talk a co-worker into quittingwith you in a place where startups are happening all around you.You might also want to look at the employment agreement you signwhen you get hired. Most will say that any ideas you think of whileyou're employed by the company belong to them. In practice it'shard for anyone to prove what ideas you had when, so the line getsdrawn at code. If you're going to start a startup, don't write anyof the code while you're still employed. Or at least discard anycode you wrote while still employed and start over. It's not somuch that your employer will find out and sue you. It won't cometo that; investors or acquirers or (if you're so lucky) underwriterswill nail you first. Between t = 0 and when you buy that yacht,someone is going to ask if any of your code legally belongsto anyone else, and you need to be able to say no.[3]The most overreaching employee agreement I've seen so far is Amazon's.In addition to the usual clauses about owning your ideas, you alsocan't be a founder of a startup that has another founder who workedat Amazon—even if you didn't know them or even work there at thesame time. I suspect they'd have a hard time enforcing this, butit's a bad sign they even try. There are plenty of other placesto work; you may as well choose one that keeps more of your optionsopen.Speaking of cool places to work, there is of course Google. But Inotice something slightly frightening about Google: zero startupscome out of there. In that respect it's a black hole. People seemto like working at Google too much to leave. So if you hope to starta startup one day, the evidence so far suggests you shouldn't workthere.I realize this seems odd advice. If they make your life so goodthat you don't want to leave, why not work there? Because, ineffect, you're probably getting a local maximum. You need a certainactivation energy to start a startup. So an employer who's fairlypleasant to work for can lull you into staying indefinitely, evenif it would be a net win for you to leave.[4]The best place to work, if you want to start a startup, is probablya startup. In addition to being the right sort of experience, oneway or another it will be over quickly. You'll either end up rich,in which case problem solved, or the startup will get bought, inwhich case it it will start to suck to work there and it will beeasy to leave, or most likely, the thing will blow up and you'llbe free again.Your final advantage, ignorance, may not sound very useful. Ideliberately used a controversial word for it; you might equallycall it innocence. But it seems to be a powerful force. My YCombinator co-founder Jessica Livingston is just about to publisha book of interviewswith startup founders, and I noticed a remarkable pattern in them.One after another said that if they'd known how hard it would be,they would have been too intimidated to start.Ignorance can be useful when it's a counterweight to other formsof stupidity. It's useful in starting startups because you'recapable of more than you realize. Starting startups is harder thanyou expect, but you're also capable of more than you expect, sothey balance out.Most people look at a company like Apple and think, how could Iever make such a thing? Apple is an institution, and I'm just aperson. But every institution was at one point just a handful ofpeople in a room deciding to start something. Institutions aremade up, and made up by people no different from you.I'm not saying everyone could start a startup. I'm sure most peoplecouldn't; I don't know much about the population at large. Whenyou get to groups I know well, like hackers, I can say more precisely.At the top schools, I'd guess as many as a quarter of the CS majorscould make it as startup founders if they wanted.That "if they wanted" is an important qualification—so importantthat it's almost cheating to append it like that—because once youget over a certain threshold of intelligence, which most CS majorsat top schools are past, the deciding factor in whether you succeedas a founder is how much you want to. You don't have to be thatsmart. If you're not a genius, just start a startup in some unsexyfield where you'll have less competition, like software for humanresources departments. I picked that example at random, but I feelsafe in predicting that whatever they have now, it wouldn't takegenius to do better. There are a lot of people out there workingon boring stuff who are desperately in need of better software, sohowever short you think you fall of Larry and Sergey, you can ratchetdown the coolness of the idea far enough to compensate.As well as preventing you from being intimidated, ignorance cansometimes help you discover new ideas. Steve Wozniakput this very strongly: All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.When you know nothing, you have to reinvent stuff for yourself, andif you're smart your reinventions may be better than what precededthem. This is especially true in fields where the rules change.All our ideas about software were developed in a time when processorswere slow, and memories and disks were tiny. Who knows what obsoleteassumptions are embedded in the conventional wisdom? And the waythese assumptions are going to get fixed is not by explicitlydeallocating them, but by something more akin to garbage collection.Someone ignorant but smart will come along and reinvent everything,and in the process simply fail to reproduce certain existing ideas.MinusSo much for the advantages of young founders. What about thedisadvantages? I'm going to start with what goes wrong and try totrace it back to the root causes.What goes wrong with young founders is that they build stuff thatlooks like class projects. It was only recently that we figuredthis out ourselves. We noticed a lot of similarities between thestartups that seemed to be falling behind, but we couldn't figureout how to put it into words. Then finally we realized what itwas: they were building class projects.But what does that really mean? What's wrong with class projects?What's the difference between a class project and a real startup?If we could answer that question it would be useful not just towould-be startup founders but to students in general, because we'dbe a long way toward explaining the mystery of the so-called realworld.There seem to be two big things missing in class projects: (1) aniterative definition of a real problem and (2) intensity.The first is probably unavoidable. Class projects will inevitablysolve fake problems. For one thing, real problems are rare andvaluable. If a professor wanted to have students solve real problems,he'd face the same paradox as someone trying to give an example ofwhatever "paradigm" might succeed the Standard Model of physics.There may well be something that does, but if you could think ofan example you'd be entitled to the Nobel Prize. Similarly, goodnew problems are not to be had for the asking.In technology the difficulty is compounded by the fact that realstartups tend to discover the problem they're solving by a processof evolution. Someone has an idea for something; they build it;and in doing so (and probably only by doing so) they realizethe problem they should be solving is another one. Even if theprofessor let you change your project description on the fly, thereisn't time enough to do that in a college class, or a market tosupply evolutionary pressures. So classprojects are mostly about implementation, which is the leastof your problems in a startup.It's not just that in a startup you work on the idea as well asimplementation. The very implementation is different. Its mainpurpose is to refine the idea. Often the only value of most of thestuff you build in the first six months is that it proves yourinitial idea was mistaken. And that's extremely valuable. Ifyou're free of a misconception that everyone else still shares,you're in a powerful position. But you're not thinking that wayabout a class project. Proving your initial plan was mistaken wouldjust get you a bad grade. Instead of building stuff to throw away,you tend to want every line of code to go toward that final goalof showing you did a lot of work.That leads to our second difference: the way class projects aremeasured. Professors will tend to judge you by the distance betweenthe starting point and where you are now. If someone has achieveda lot, they should get a good grade. But customers will judge youfrom the other direction: the distance remaining between where youare now and the features they need. The market doesn't give a shithow hard you worked. Users just want your software to do what theyneed, and you get a zero otherwise. That is one of the mostdistinctive differences between school and the real world: thereis no reward for putting in a good effort. In fact, the wholeconcept of a "good effort" is a fake idea adults invented to encouragekids. It is not found in nature.Such lies seem to be helpful to kids. But unfortunately when yougraduate they don't give you a list of all the lies they told youduring your education. You have to get them beaten out of you bycontact with the real world. And this is why so many jobs wantwork experience. I couldn't understand that when I was in college.I knew how to program. In fact, I could tell I knew how to programbetter than most people doing it for a living. So what was thismysterious "work experience" and why did I need it?Now I know what it is, and part of the confusion is grammatical.Describing it as "work experience" implies it's like experienceoperating a certain kind of machine, or using a certain programminglanguage. But really what work experience refers to is not somespecific expertise, but the elimination of certain habits left overfrom childhood.One of the defining qualities of kids is that they flake. Whenyou're a kid and you face some hard test, you can cry and say "Ican't" and they won't make you do it. Of course, no one can makeyou do anything in the grownup world either. What they do insteadis fire you. And when motivated by thatyou find you can do a lot more than you realized. So one of thethings employers expect from someone with "work experience" is theelimination of the flake reflex—the ability to get things done,with no excuses.The other thing you get from work experience is an understandingof what work is, and in particular, how intrinsically horrible itis. Fundamentally the equation is a brutal one: you have to spendmost of your waking hours doing stuff someone else wants, or starve.There are a few places where the work is so interesting that thisis concealed, because what other people want done happens to coincidewith what you want to work on. But you only have to imagine whatwould happen if they diverged to see the underlying reality.It's not so much that adults lie to kids about this as never explainit. They never explain what the deal is with money. You know froman early age that you'll have some sort of job, because everyoneasks what you're going to "be" when you grow up. What theydon't tell you is that as a kid you're sitting on the shoulders ofsomeone else who's treading water, and that starting working meansyou get thrown into the water on your own, and have to start treadingwater yourself or sink. "Being" something is incidental; theimmediate problem is not to drown.The relationship between work and money tends to dawn on you onlygradually. At least it did for me. One's first thought tends tobe simply "This sucks. I'm in debt. Plus I have to get up on mondayand go to work." Gradually you realize that these two things areas tightly connected as only a market can make them.So the most important advantage 24 year old founders have over 20year old founders is that they know what they're trying to avoid.To the average undergrad the idea of getting rich translates intobuying Ferraris, or being admired. To someone who has learned fromexperience about the relationship between money and work, ittranslates to something way more important: it means you get to optout of the brutal equation that governs the lives of 99.9% of people.Getting rich means you can stop treading water.Someone who gets this will work much harder at making a startupsucceed—with the proverbial energy of a drowning man, in fact.But understanding the relationship between money and work alsochanges the way you work. You don't get money just for working,but for doing things other people want. Someone who's figured thatout will automatically focus more on the user. And that cures theother half of the class-project syndrome. After you've been workingfor a while, you yourself tend to measure what you've done the sameway the market does.Of course, you don't have to spend years working to learn thisstuff. If you're sufficiently perceptive you can grasp these thingswhile you're still in school. Sam Altman did. He must have, becauseLoopt is no class project. And as his example suggests, this canbe valuable knowledge. At a minimum, if you get this stuff, youalready have most of what you gain from the "work experience"employers consider so desirable. But of course if you really getit, you can use this information in a way that's more valuable toyou than that.NowSo suppose you think you might start a startup at some point, eitherwhen you graduate or a few years after. What should you do now?For both jobs and grad school, there are ways to prepare whileyou're in college. If you want to get a job when you graduate, youshould get summer jobs at places you'd like to work. If you wantto go to grad school, it will help to work on research projects asan undergrad. What's the equivalent for startups? How do you keepyour options maximally open?One thing you can do while you're still in school is to learn howstartups work. Unfortunately that's not easy. Few if any collegeshave classes about startups. There may be business school classeson entrepreneurship, as they call it over there, but these arelikely to be a waste of time. Business schools like to talk aboutstartups, but philosophically they're at the opposite end of thespectrum. Most books on startups also seem to be useless. I'velooked at a few and none get it right. Books in most fields arewritten by people who know the subject from experience, but forstartups there's a unique problem: by definition the founders ofsuccessful startups don't need to write books to make money. As aresult most books on the subject end up being written by people whodon't understand it.So I'd be skeptical of classes and books. The way to learn aboutstartups is by watching them in action, preferably by working atone. How do you do that as an undergrad? Probably by sneaking inthrough the back door. Just hang around a lot and gradually startdoing things for them. Most startups are (or should be) verycautious about hiring. Every hire increases the burn rate, and badhires early on are hard to recover from. However, startups usuallyhave a fairly informal atmosphere, and there's always a lot thatneeds to be done. If you just start doing stuff for them, manywill be too busy to shoo you away. You can thus gradually workyour way into their confidence, and maybe turn it into an officialjob later, or not, whichever you prefer. This won't work for allstartups, but it would work for most I've known.Number two, make the most of the great advantage of school: thewealth of co-founders. Look at the people around you and askyourself which you'd like to work with. When you apply that test,you may find you get surprising results. You may find you'd preferthe quiet guy you've mostly ignored to someone who seems impressivebut has an attitude to match. I'm not suggesting you suck up topeople you don't really like because you think one day they'll besuccessful. Exactly the opposite, in fact: you should only starta startup with someone you like, because a startup will put yourfriendship through a stress test. I'm just saying you should thinkabout who you really admire and hang out with them, instead ofwhoever circumstances throw you together with.Another thing you can do is learn skills that will be useful to youin a startup. These may be different from the skills you'd learnto get a job. For example, thinking about getting a job will makeyou want to learn programming languages you think employers want,like Java and C++. Whereas if you start a startup, you get to pickthe language, so you have to think about which will actually letyou get the most done. If you use that test you might end uplearning Ruby or Python instead.But the most important skill for a startup founder isn't a programmingtechnique. It's a knack for understanding users and figuring outhow to give them what they want. I know I repeat this, but that'sbecause it's so important. And it's a skill you can learn, thoughperhaps habit might be a better word. Get into the habit of thinkingof software as having users. What do those users want? What wouldmake them say wow?This is particularly valuable for undergrads, because the conceptof users is missing from most college programming classes. The wayyou get taught programming in college would be like teaching writingas grammar, without mentioning that its purpose is to communicatesomething to an audience. Fortunately an audience for software isnow only an http request away. So in addition to the programmingyou do for your classes, why not build some kind of website peoplewill find useful? At the very least it will teach you how to writesoftware with users. In the best case, it might not just bepreparation for a startup, but the startup itself, like it was forYahoo and Google.Notes[1]Even the desire to protect one's children seems weaker, judgingfrom things people have historically done to their kidsrather than risk their community's disapproval. (I assume we stilldo things that will be regarded in the future as barbaric, buthistorical abuses are easier for us to see.)[2]Worrying that Y Combinator makes founders move for 3 monthsalso suggests one underestimates how hard it is to start a startup.You're going to have to put up with much greater inconveniences thanthat.[3]Most employee agreementssay that any idea relating to the company's present or potentialfuture business belongs to them. Often as not the second clause couldinclude any possible startup, and anyone doing due diligence for an investor or acquirer will assume the worst.To be safe either (a) don't use code written while youwere still employed in your previous job, or (b) get your employer torenounce, in writing, any claim to the code you write for your side project. Many will consent to (b) rather thanlose a prized employee. The downside is that you'll have to tell themexactly what your project does.[4]Geshke and Warnock only founded Adobe because Xerox ignoredthem. If Xerox had used what they built, they would probably never have left PARC.Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris for readingdrafts of this, and to Jeff Arnold and the SIPB for inviting me tospeak.Comment on this essay.
