Those concerns are valid, but I disagree with you about college grads lacking that resilience. By your own admission you've been through some start ups. Could

Those concerns are valid, but I disagree with you about college grads lacking that resilience. By your own admission you've been through some start ups. Could you handle it? What does it mean to not be able to handle it? I think this touches on the core of the talk--people are afraid to jump into the startup world because they don't think they can handle it. It sounds like he's saying it's not that bad. Your company may fail, yes...but then you just get out there and find a new company to work for. Zach Holman was Github employee number 9 [1]. I'd say they were a startup at that time. His perspective is obviously colored by their success, but they only sought funding 2 years later. Still, the definition of 'startup' is indeed vague, and PG wrote an essay on it [2]. I interpret PG's definition--a company designed to scale fast--to mean that so long as a company is growing by a multiplicative factor, it's still a startup. [1] http://zachholman.com/posts/scaling-github-employees/ http://zachholman.com/posts/scaling-github-employees/ [2] http://paulgraham.com/growth.html http://paulgraham.com/growth.html