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A couple of comments here: 1. I don't agree with the general premise of the author. a) I'm of the opinion that successful people are successful. Regardless of

A couple of comments here: 1. I don't agree with the general premise of the author. a) I'm of the opinion that successful people are successful. Regardless of their background, if they have an idea, a goal, a desire, they'll make it happen. They make the leap from, "Want to go skydiving tomorrow?" to, "We're going skydiving tomorrow. Obviously this can't be true for everything they do, but they always demand success from themselves. b) I can speak from personal experience going in the opposite direction. I started out technical, ended up biased towards the business side of the work when we sold. Business is tricky because the knowledge required (and applied) runs the full gamut of being so boringly easy (payroll and accounting) to mind-numbingly tricky (payroll and accounting). Jokes aside, the author seems to be herding all business students into the "marketing and sales role". There, you can only be good at your job if you have the guts to go out and get experience. For those who don't have the guts, networking is the alternative. It's much easier to pitch an idea to a group of friends than it is to pitch to an audience of strangers. As such, an MBA from Stanford makes perfect sense. Half of your friends from B-school are already VCs or Angels, why would you have to cold-sell to anyone else? (The converse is true also, an MBA from Stanford lets you get in on tech deals earlier.) 2. "The almost obligatory ‘I have a great idea, where can I find a developer to build it for me for X% equity?’ Facebook post." The fourth option, not listed, is convincing the technical side that the idea is wonderful and that both sides are willing to sacrifice to get the job done. If the non-technical side is any good, that should be one of their primo skills. I've interacted with lots of amazing salespeople and by-golly they are amazing at making anything sound fun. 3. Writing a business plan. Oh god. Please do it. There is nothing worse than seeing a promising company wander around in circles with no idea what's going on. Not having a business plan may work out if: a) You already have a secure source of funding and you don't care how long it's going to take to get to market. b) Working on your idea has no opportunity cost (instead of playing video games, you're working on your idea). 4. Applying to startup competitions I actually agree with the sentiment by the author here. I think that applying (or just working on an application) to a single, established competition/incubator is really useful (see business plan) because it forces the team to know their stuff. Applying to 50 just for publicity's sake is useless. 5. Hiring too quickly. This may be different in Europe because laws there are very biased against the business when it comes to employment, but in the United States, debt is not a bad thing at all. In fact, using debt correctly allows for a win-win-win (business - investment - customer) situation. The business wins because it can bring product "x" to market 1 year earlier. It then uses revenue generated by "x" to fund "y". Repeat. The bank wins because interest collection is a thing. The customer wins because product "x" -- something which helps their life -- makes it to market a year earlier. So yes, hiring too quickly is bad. Hiring quickly is really, really important. What's the difference between the two? I have no clue. 6. Your wage. Most founders I know don't really care what they're being paid. They just want to see their idea take root. This applies to both technical and non-technical. You don't need school to teach you that: "Me need money to get food to eat". There are people from both sides who value a $400,000 luxury car over the success of the company, but those folks don't make it too far. 7. Lack of perseverance. This applies to everyone. The author's example of "scientists working for 3 years on research...without feedback" is certainly wrong. Along the way, their RA moderates their thinking, they publish papers and grants, they present at conferences. If that's not constant feedback, I have no idea what counts. I didn't respond to all the points, but I didn't agree with most of them, the ones I named were just the most wrong in my opinion.

lubujackson 11y ago
Having run through a few startups (and dealt with some business school grads), I agree with the general premise because it is how most business schools train students to think. There's two types of business schools in general - ones that focus on forging middle managers (working with spreadsheets, managing employees, etc.) and some that focus on entrepreneurship (writing business plans, dealing with contracts, etc.) Both are not very helpful in the early going, because the reality is that EARLY STAGE startups are only about one thing: validating a business. A lot of the "lean startup" movement lessons apply: test your assumptions as quickly and cheaply as possible, spend as little money as possible, don't work on things that don't forward those goals. My first business my partner and I felt like impostors the whole time because we weren't raising millions of funding, we weren't renting huge offices or blitzing marketing, we simply were working to make our business better and make money faster. It's the most obvious thing, but it tends to be forgotten when dreaming too big too fast, and having all these business school lessons to lean on tend to make things even worse because they only confuse the situation at the earliest stages. I'm not saying these aren't useful things to know, but first-time founders tend to lack awareness of where their company is in reality. The best person to work on a startup is the guy who knows how to make a buck from nothing, the guy who fixed computers when he was 12 or paid kids to make things he sold on Etsy when he was in high school or whatever. "Doing" gets harder and harder the more time you spend on "how to do things right."
louisswiss 11y ago
OP here - I agree with a lot (but not all) of what you say. I probably didn't do a good enough job of specifying either the kind of person or the phase of startup I was talking about - as you can no doubt tell by the quality of the writing it was written as a rant in one sitting. To clear things up - I am still very convinced that the 10 points I wrote about are, broadly speaking, true for most business student founders with no technical experience, however in light of your feedback I will add two clarifying constraints/explanations: 1) I don't believe that business students are 'doomed' to fail as entrepreneurs. Rather, I believe that business school instills a number bad startup practices into the way that business students think, resulting in higher failure rates. Hopefully, by becoming aware of these 'mistakes/traps', business students who are founding a startup can save themselves time and energy which they need to keep momentum going. 2) I was writing with founders in mind who had not yet started up/were in the very first 2-3 months of working on their project. After 6 months (or maybe even earlier depending on traction), a lot of what I have written is no longer important/has successfully been navigated. As a direct counter to your fourth option in point 2) --> if you don't have a personal friend who trusts you enough to build your product, can't pay someone to do it and haven't proven that you can do the non-technical things (to a certain extend marketing and sales, but of course also other things), why would any technical founder work together with you? I have met quite a few hopeless non-technical founders with pretty good ideas (perhaps with a few tweaks). I have to confess to considering building their idea, but not with the hopeless founder as a partner...

lubujackson 11y ago

Having run through a few startups (and dealt with some business school grads), I agree with the general premise because it is how most business schools train students to think. There's two types of business schools in general - ones that focus on forging middle managers (working with spreadsheets, managing employees, etc.) and some that focus on entrepreneurship (writing business plans, dealing with contracts, etc.) Both are not very helpful in the early going, because the reality is that EARLY STAGE startups are only about one thing: validating a business. A lot of the "lean startup" movement lessons apply: test your assumptions as quickly and cheaply as possible, spend as little money as possible, don't work on things that don't forward those goals. My first business my partner and I felt like impostors the whole time because we weren't raising millions of funding, we weren't renting huge offices or blitzing marketing, we simply were working to make our business better and make money faster. It's the most obvious thing, but it tends to be forgotten when dreaming too big too fast, and having all these business school lessons to lean on tend to make things even worse because they only confuse the situation at the earliest stages. I'm not saying these aren't useful things to know, but first-time founders tend to lack awareness of where their company is in reality. The best person to work on a startup is the guy who knows how to make a buck from nothing, the guy who fixed computers when he was 12 or paid kids to make things he sold on Etsy when he was in high school or whatever. "Doing" gets harder and harder the more time you spend on "how to do things right."

louisswiss 11y ago

OP here - I agree with a lot (but not all) of what you say. I probably didn't do a good enough job of specifying either the kind of person or the phase of startup I was talking about - as you can no doubt tell by the quality of the writing it was written as a rant in one sitting. To clear things up - I am still very convinced that the 10 points I wrote about are, broadly speaking, true for most business student founders with no technical experience, however in light of your feedback I will add two clarifying constraints/explanations: 1) I don't believe that business students are 'doomed' to fail as entrepreneurs. Rather, I believe that business school instills a number bad startup practices into the way that business students think, resulting in higher failure rates. Hopefully, by becoming aware of these 'mistakes/traps', business students who are founding a startup can save themselves time and energy which they need to keep momentum going. 2) I was writing with founders in mind who had not yet started up/were in the very first 2-3 months of working on their project. After 6 months (or maybe even earlier depending on traction), a lot of what I have written is no longer important/has successfully been navigated. As a direct counter to your fourth option in point 2) --> if you don't have a personal friend who trusts you enough to build your product, can't pay someone to do it and haven't proven that you can do the non-technical things (to a certain extend marketing and sales, but of course also other things), why would any technical founder work together with you? I have met quite a few hopeless non-technical founders with pretty good ideas (perhaps with a few tweaks). I have to confess to considering building their idea, but not with the hopeless founder as a partner...