There's a lot to like about this speech, but if a 15 year old heard it and then asked me for more detail I'd have to point out a few things that were glossed ov

There's a lot to like about this speech, but if a 15 year old heard it and then asked me for more detail I'd have to point out a few things that were glossed over: 1. 15-25 year olds who do programming passion projects are often attracted to video games. Video game companies are not "startups" in the sense pg means here. You will not get rich by indulging a passion for the entertainment industry. 2. You do in fact need capital to do a startup, and there is a lot more to getting that than just having cofounders and something you're interested in. 3. "What you need in a startup idea, and all you need, is something your friends actually want." This isn't really true, is it. I thought there is another pg/ycombinator essay somewhere that warns people away from specific types of startup pitches, and one of them is something like "an app that tells you about events in your local community". Supposedly this is one of those things that everyone wants to use and everyone wants to work on, but which never turns into a successful startup. There are actually a lot of things that your friends might want which are not startup material anywhere except Sand Hill Road, mostly because there are lots of things people want but won't pay for. A sad example of this is developer tools. If you take pg's advice literally and learn programming, hang out with other people who do that and then do projects with them, soon you will see lots of sticky doors that look like missing bits of infrastructure. Unfortunately startups that do dev tooling aren't a good way to get rich. Developers generally don't or can't buy things, so you have to sell to their CTOs and thus all the money accumulates in companies like Amazon or Microsoft. Example of what happens if you try, even with great PMF: Docker. Most kids with ideas in the world don't have the contacts or work visas to raise money from US VC firms. They need a project that people will pay money for immediately. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the size of the US VC ecosystem is that if someone comes up with a good idea that takes off and they try to grow like a normal company, and they aren't taking VC money, then they will be immediately outcompeted by someone who does, simply because whoever does have that access will engage in market dumping until there's nobody else left except other VC funded startups. One of the US funded companies will end up taking the entire market even if they are burning money with no hope of ever balancing the books, but that's OK because one of the VC's other investments can always be persuaded to give a clean exit. Example: DailyMotion (European) vs YouTube (US). At the time YouTube was bought they didn't have a hope in hell of ever being a standalone business and didn't even care to try, but they were down the road from Google and were scaring Larry/Sergey/Eric with their success. Buying a company if you can just jump in your car to go visit them is easy, if you need to constantly do trans-Atlantic flights, not so easy. It doesn't make sense to bet on the "grow like crazy and wait for an exit" strategy elsewhere. WhatsApp is another example of an MTV based company that had no strategy beyond grow-and-exit. I actually made a WhatsApp-like app a few years before the smartphone revolution hit, and my friends thought it was awesome, but I had no illusions that it could ever be a business. And indeed none of these messenger apps ever have been. In the world of "startups" (vs small businesses), you don't necessarily need to care.