6 ms·

Student Entrepreneurs: If Peter Thiel Calls, Hang Up

56 points by npalli 13y ago

boon 13y ago
If Peter Thiel calls you, it might make sense to at least hear him out. Slamming doors is rarely a good approach to life. And school will always be there to go back to.
- vinceguidry 13y ago
  I don't think it's really worth going back to school. I dropped out to join the military. (Later left that too) 10 years later, every time I think about going back I think, "why?". I've already got a job, and I make decent money. I'd learn much more, faster, by taking on more responsibilities here than I would in some sandbox environment. Unless I went to, like, Harvard or something.
  - maaku 13y ago
    ... which is actually an argument for staying in school in the first place. Once you're out, the realities of life make it very difficult to go back.
    - vinceguidry 13y ago
      I dropped out because I didn't feel I was learning enough to justify the expense. I can educate myself on my own time. I'd make the same decision today, only I'd be more certain about it, what with skyrocketing tuition costs and all. Of course, not everyone's like me. But for people in the same socio-economic position I was in back then, I don't think college offers the solid pathway to middle class comfort everyone seems to think it does. You might get lucky, you might also get saddled with a $30+K piece of paper and no marketable skills, in which case you'd have been no better off working as a waiter/tress or whatever and working towards something better on your own terms.
    - nostrademons 13y ago
      Is it? That argument assumes that school is worthwhile in the first place. If you assume your conclusion, it seems an awful lot like begging the question. If you don't go to school, live your life, and find out everything is just hunky-dory without it - what exactly have you missed out on? Maybe you were right in the first place, and can congratulate yourself on making wise decisions that turned out to be vindicated in the end?
      - maaku 13y ago
        The OP said he has thought about going back multiple times. Obviously it has some value to him.
        nostrademons 13y ago
        ...and then decided against it every time, so obviously it has less value to him than other things he could be doing with his life.
        maaku 13y ago
        ...a life which is much, much more complicated after leaving school, serving in the military, having a career, starting a family, etc. If school has any value to you at all, the utility of finishing school vs dropping out is higher earlier in life than later. Maybe for some people it makes sense to drop out (Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg being canonical examples). But for most people the decision isn't so clear-cut, and going back becomes tremendously more difficult as time goes by.
auggierose 13y ago
Also, yes, hiring is difficult. Do you really think you are learning how to do it properly by working at Big Corp first?
- zhemao 13y ago
  Well, you will at least learn how not to do it.
  - thejulielogan 13y ago
    Not true. Rarely do you (a cog) see the hiring process (a different cog) used by your massive company (the machine). Especially when you're just out of college.
    - ewang1 13y ago
      Agreed. Ideally, you are an early employee at a startup where the founders had some previous successes. This way you get to see and take part in behind the scene processes as implemented by the experienced founders.
    - nostrademons 13y ago
      Hmm? I've done interviews for both of my past two employers. The first one was a startup, but the second one is Google. Do the big companies you work for not have people interview with employees in their particular role? It seems relatively common among my friends for them to be interviewing people just 1-2 years younger than them, either for internships or to fill the position they're about to be promoted out of.
      - thejulielogan 13y ago
        A startup isn't a massive company and Google is notoriously atypical with transparency and inclusiveness with hiring. Even so, just conducting an interview is far from learning about the thought process behind the actual act of hiring.
- 13y ago
colinbartlett 13y ago
"Management is a tremendously undervalued skill on the tech startup scene, and that single fact contributes, I believe, to the failure of more companies than any other factor." Truth.
- seiji 13y ago
  If a company let's children be managers without any prior experience or training, the company should force all their child prodigies to at a minimum read http://www.amazon.com/Great-Danes-Barrons-Dog-Bibles/dp/0764197541 http://www.amazon.com/Great-Danes-Barrons-Dog-Bibles/dp/0764...
  - rpedela 13y ago
    Why?
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - seiji 13y ago
      If you can't learn how to manage a dog, what hope do you have in managing multiple divergent human personalities?
      - rpedela 13y ago
        I am allergic to dogs so never learned how to take care of one. I seem able to manage others effectively and of course always more to learn. Honestly, a pretty odd choice for a book. If you really believe that book is a prerequisite, wouldn't it be better for that person to just get a dog?
        seiji 13y ago
        If you "just get a dog," are you assuming everybody has innate knowledge on how to raise and train a dog? It takes—looping back to the main point here—education to know the best ways to take care of a dog. Sure, you can just practice by trial and error for a while, or you could use knowledge from people who have done The Right Thing for years and get ahead of many common mistakes you would have made out of "intuition."
rpedela 13y ago
Seeing how successful companies work is extremely valuable. No company is perfect so you get to see what works and what does not. If your idea is something highly technical, then the degree (or equivalent experience) is very important. Name one highly successful company whose product is highly technical where the founder was not also technical? I cannot think of one myself.
- gotrecruit 13y ago
  apple?
  - rpedela 13y ago
    Woz was/is extremely technical. Steve also knew how to build computers although not great at it.
ebiester 13y ago
...Says the man who went to school when the opportunity cost wasn't a decade in debt (at the very least). If you succeed, then you didn't need school. If you fail, then you can always go back to school afterwards. I don't see the downside of the Thiel fellowship, at least on its surface.
- C1D 13y ago
  Agreed. It's at the least worth a try and if you fail not only can you go back to school but the fact that Peter Thiel, Co-Founder of Paypal believed in you will at least do you some good, reputation wise.
- jeffasinger 13y ago
  There are plenty of school options that involve much lower debt than that. You don't need to go to a school that costs $50k a year, there are plenty of alternatives.
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    There are plenty of alternatives, but do they provide the same quality of education for your degree of choice?
    - Fomite 13y ago
      With very, very rare exceptions, yes. Most flagship state schools will give you an excellent education at a much, much better value.
    - zalzane 13y ago
      Why wouldn't they? It's not like MIT/whatever uses special books that no other uni can use. It's not like prestigious universities follow some special program that makes it so their students gain a much better insight into the subject than people who go to other universities. The perks of attending a prestigious university typically has nothing to do with your education. It has to do with rubbing shoulders with blue bloods, creating a powerful social network, and being able to woo people with the pedigree associated with the words "MIT graduate" on your resume.
kippn_it_real 13y ago
There seems to be a consensus here that all big corporations are inept and the all that you can learn from them is what not to do. Only ~5% of startups are successful while 100% of big corporations were at one point. If you can't learn anything from Big Corp you aren't trying.
- hobs 13y ago
  Yeah, I encourage people to go work for one for a year or two to learn all the stupid things they do and the ways they are vulnerable. Also to understand why you should love what you are doing now.
- Fomite 13y ago
  Agreed - hell, if they are inept, you can learn how you went from "Successful Industry Leader" to "Cumbersome, Lumbering Dinosaur" - and avoid that same path with your startup.
tptacek 13y ago
There's a valid point in here about the way the structure of the Thiel program, with its strain of radical individualism, might blind new entrepreneurs to the idea that most of them shouldn't be CEOs. I think more entrepreneurs should try to grok this idea. Even people who are "born leaders" don't necessarily belong in the CEO role, because CEOs need to be more than leaders. They often also need to be moderating influences, level-headed, execution-focused, and accountable. I've been in startups since I was 18 years old, and have started multiple companies, and would not hire me as a CEO. Unfortunately, the article makes that point by inflating the importance of management theory and by suggesting that college is somewhere you go to pick up a trade. So, someone else should try to write the good article that makes the CEO point.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  Yes, this would be a really good article if it made a completely different point.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    If I'm mistaken, and it's not trying to make the "CEO argument" I was playing with upthread, you could correct my mistake using evidence. I read the article and I don't think I'm mistaken, but would love to be surprised. Otherwise, I'm not sure of the point of your comment.
polarix 13y ago
In some sense, though, most of these situations do see the founders learning management on someone else's dime. It's just a segmented capital super-structure, rather than a traditional corporate system.
tobyjsullivan 13y ago
I appreciate the article and the point of view but I have to disagree completely with his recommendation that you spend your years working for someone else before you launch your own business. He talks about working for a company after finishing college to learn about how they operate and do business. You know what I learned in the five years after college I worked for a company as a dev? A whole lot about software development. Nothing about hiring (beyond what I gleaned while interviewing), basics of management and nothing about marketing or sales. You know what I learned in the first few months of trying and failing to launch a business? A heck of a lot about everything, including a lot more about software development. Working in my trade for a few years out of school made me very good at what I do but it certainly did not make me a very good entrepreneur.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  I'm the exact opposite. I started in a tech support role and learned the value of proper customer service, then transferred to a sales engineering role and learned how to analyze a customer's needs and match them with the correct product offering. From a management side, just by looking at how my company is managed, I learned how not to manage a company. Every time a coworker got treated like crap, I told myself I would never treat my employees like that when I have my own company. What would have happened if I had started a business straight out of college? Presumably, I'd have made a whole bunch of dumb mistakes, some of which could have cost me the business. I would have failed a bunch of times and learned things the hard way. Most importantly, I might have become demotivated and given up entirely. Which is actually what happens to most people. I'd say that the past five years I've worked for a company (my first one out of college) have allowed me to find myself in terms of confidence, skills and purpose. I feel like I'm a much better, much more stable place for starting something on my own.
- thejulielogan 13y ago
  Agreed. Being elsewhere for a few years, finishing school before that, doesn't guarantee you'll learn the managerial skills required to be a CEO.
- michaelt 13y ago
  No doubt it depends on the company - did you ask to be trained in management? I know at my employer some people don't aspire to cease being developers and start being managers (which is fine) so they don't get trained to be managers (which is also fine).
szany 13y ago
This is good advice, because the right sort of person to be a Thiel fellow would read this and scoff anyway.
thejulielogan 13y ago
He reduces the entire situation to two options. What I've learned from being in a startup? There are never just two options. His article does students a massive disservice by creating just an A or B scenario.
npalli 13y ago
“I'm a crotchety old guy. I worry about all these new companies. I'm glad that they're easier to start, but the problem is, they're just as hard to finish as they have always been” This is a great observation from Mike Olson. I think a lot of people who are dropping off to start on the entrepreneurial path vastly underestimate the difficulty of building a company to a point where they can sell or IPO or get just get a good return. Lot of the startup-lore is built around expectation of success that has vastly diminished in the last few years and we will soon find a lot of people who are thirty-five, have worked through three-four failed startups and nothing to offer to the broader world. If you look at number of seed accelerators in the US[1], we have about 175. Every year about 3000 companies are formed and a vast number of them fail. Take the top accelerator in the country (perhaps the world). YCombinator. It has funded about 550 companies, pg is rightfully proud of the value created. However, if you took out the top 10 of them I suspect 99% of the value goes away. I remember just AirBnB and Dropbox making 75% of the value. Think about it, even if you came out of YC, you have a 2% chance of success. That means if you even if you join a startup accelerator in Middletown, USA your chance is probably 0.5% and if you don’t even get to join a accelerator it is probably even less (0.1%?) I suspect a lot of people still think there is a 5% chance you will succeed in a startup. That was the case 15 years back. With a 5% success rate, you could possible iterate to a better than even odd of success if you went through 3-4 startups. If you were told you have a 0.1% chance of success, it is more of a random crapshoot. What is it that you will learn and show after 3-4 attempts? The other option of going to college, working for a big company and the associated payoff hasn’t changed much. If the startup option is now 50 times riskier, you need to think hard about your choices. Maybe you are an optimist, that’s OK but don’t default to choices. [1] http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators
wellboy 13y ago
You can gain more "experience" before you try to do your own thing, however the more experience you gain, the worse you become at creating the next billion dollar startup. For every year that you don´t start your own business, your capability to think large and taking risks and your resourcefulness dramatically declines. That´s the reason why none of the four horsemen in tech, Google, Apple, Amazon or Facebook were founded by founders over 30. Looking at all the other billion dollar startups Microsoft, Dropbox, Airbnb, Twitter, Instagram, Waze, Paypal, Tumblr none of their founders were over 30. See a pattern? There are probably billion startups who were founded by founders older than 30, but there are very few. The less experience you have, the more likely you are to create the next billion dollar company. If you start your startup after 30, it's very unlikely that you will be able to make it into a $1B startup.
- tensor 13y ago
  This is abhorrent ageism, and completely wrong. Peter Thiel, 31, Paypal, 37, Palintar. Larry Elison, 33, Oracle. Reid Hoffman, 35, Linked In. Evan Williams, 35, Twitter. Mark Pincus, 41, Zynga. Arianna Huffington, 54, Huffington Post. Can we stop making things up? Maybe five minutes of research would be good? You know, there is a place they teach these things.
  - wellboy 13y ago
    Founders that had had successful startups before don't count. That's why I was referring to "experience BEFORE you try to do your own thing." And yes there are a few startup founders that were older than 30, I give you Larry Ellison. However none of the 4 horsemen had founders >30, plus the other founders except for Peter Thiel had already sold their previous startups. Regarding Palantir, they had Peter Thiel as a cofounder, I don't give you that one.
    - tensor 13y ago
      Again, you may want to do some research. Many of those I listed are first time founders. Your attitude mirrors the also incorrect idea that scientists must make their name before 30. That too, was studied and found to be completely wrong. I can only assume that this attitude comes from arrogant young people who want to think they are special.
jasonwatkinspdx 13y ago
This is an important point, but it also shouldn't be overstated. There are many examples of where professional managers lacking passion and personal interest in a business's market have hindered more than helped. As Thiel often says a variety of ways, copycat behavior is unlikely to produce success in a high risk/reward context like a startup. You need an information advantage, and often that advantage is someone who knows their own itch very well. I also hate that the meme for this has become "adult supervision." It's such a patronizing and self-aggrandizing description.
avty 13y ago
Wow, what a de-empowering article. Good luck guys.
argumentum 13y ago
The best way to learn, anything, is by trying, failing and iterating. This is true (for me at least) in programming and otherwise. I generally believe you should stay in school, and more importantly stay learning technical stuff (whether undergrad, grad school or in a technically challenging job). It's the best way to get ideas, and more importantly find people to work with (if you want to start a company). So I do harbor doubts about the Thiel Fellowship (though I happen to know quite a few talented kids in the program, and think it's working well for most of them). However, you will not learn how to be a Founder/CEO without being a Founder/CEO. Some have a natural ability at this, but 99% of even the best CEOs probably just have the ability to learn quickly on their feet. By the time their mistakes might be noticed, they've already learned and corrected them. The only thing you'll learn by working your way up the corporate ladder is how to work your way up the corporate ladder. The stuff about learning how to work hard is BS. If you want to do a startup and hope things will happen for you, you probably believe in an all-powerful being that has a plan for you.

56 points by npalli 13y ago

boon 13y ago

If Peter Thiel calls you, it might make sense to at least hear him out. Slamming doors is rarely a good approach to life. And school will always be there to go back to.

vinceguidry 13y ago
I don't think it's really worth going back to school. I dropped out to join the military. (Later left that too) 10 years later, every time I think about going back I think, "why?". I've already got a job, and I make decent money. I'd learn much more, faster, by taking on more responsibilities here than I would in some sandbox environment. Unless I went to, like, Harvard or something.
- maaku 13y ago
  ... which is actually an argument for staying in school in the first place. Once you're out, the realities of life make it very difficult to go back.
  - vinceguidry 13y ago
    I dropped out because I didn't feel I was learning enough to justify the expense. I can educate myself on my own time. I'd make the same decision today, only I'd be more certain about it, what with skyrocketing tuition costs and all. Of course, not everyone's like me. But for people in the same socio-economic position I was in back then, I don't think college offers the solid pathway to middle class comfort everyone seems to think it does. You might get lucky, you might also get saddled with a $30+K piece of paper and no marketable skills, in which case you'd have been no better off working as a waiter/tress or whatever and working towards something better on your own terms.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    Is it? That argument assumes that school is worthwhile in the first place. If you assume your conclusion, it seems an awful lot like begging the question. If you don't go to school, live your life, and find out everything is just hunky-dory without it - what exactly have you missed out on? Maybe you were right in the first place, and can congratulate yourself on making wise decisions that turned out to be vindicated in the end?
    - maaku 13y ago
      The OP said he has thought about going back multiple times. Obviously it has some value to him.
      - nostrademons 13y ago
        ...and then decided against it every time, so obviously it has less value to him than other things he could be doing with his life.
        maaku 13y ago
        ...a life which is much, much more complicated after leaving school, serving in the military, having a career, starting a family, etc. If school has any value to you at all, the utility of finishing school vs dropping out is higher earlier in life than later. Maybe for some people it makes sense to drop out (Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg being canonical examples). But for most people the decision isn't so clear-cut, and going back becomes tremendously more difficult as time goes by.

auggierose 13y ago

Also, yes, hiring is difficult. Do you really think you are learning how to do it properly by working at Big Corp first?

zhemao 13y ago
Well, you will at least learn how not to do it.
- thejulielogan 13y ago
  Not true. Rarely do you (a cog) see the hiring process (a different cog) used by your massive company (the machine). Especially when you're just out of college.
  - ewang1 13y ago
    Agreed. Ideally, you are an early employee at a startup where the founders had some previous successes. This way you get to see and take part in behind the scene processes as implemented by the experienced founders.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    Hmm? I've done interviews for both of my past two employers. The first one was a startup, but the second one is Google. Do the big companies you work for not have people interview with employees in their particular role? It seems relatively common among my friends for them to be interviewing people just 1-2 years younger than them, either for internships or to fill the position they're about to be promoted out of.
    - thejulielogan 13y ago
      A startup isn't a massive company and Google is notoriously atypical with transparency and inclusiveness with hiring. Even so, just conducting an interview is far from learning about the thought process behind the actual act of hiring.
13y ago

colinbartlett 13y ago

"Management is a tremendously undervalued skill on the tech startup scene, and that single fact contributes, I believe, to the failure of more companies than any other factor." Truth.

seiji 13y ago
If a company let's children be managers without any prior experience or training, the company should force all their child prodigies to at a minimum read http://www.amazon.com/Great-Danes-Barrons-Dog-Bibles/dp/0764197541 http://www.amazon.com/Great-Danes-Barrons-Dog-Bibles/dp/0764...
- rpedela 13y ago
  Why?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - seiji 13y ago
    If you can't learn how to manage a dog, what hope do you have in managing multiple divergent human personalities?
    - rpedela 13y ago
      I am allergic to dogs so never learned how to take care of one. I seem able to manage others effectively and of course always more to learn. Honestly, a pretty odd choice for a book. If you really believe that book is a prerequisite, wouldn't it be better for that person to just get a dog?
      - seiji 13y ago
        If you "just get a dog," are you assuming everybody has innate knowledge on how to raise and train a dog? It takes—looping back to the main point here—education to know the best ways to take care of a dog. Sure, you can just practice by trial and error for a while, or you could use knowledge from people who have done The Right Thing for years and get ahead of many common mistakes you would have made out of "intuition."

rpedela 13y ago

Seeing how successful companies work is extremely valuable. No company is perfect so you get to see what works and what does not. If your idea is something highly technical, then the degree (or equivalent experience) is very important. Name one highly successful company whose product is highly technical where the founder was not also technical? I cannot think of one myself.

gotrecruit 13y ago
apple?
- rpedela 13y ago
  Woz was/is extremely technical. Steve also knew how to build computers although not great at it.

ebiester 13y ago

...Says the man who went to school when the opportunity cost wasn't a decade in debt (at the very least). If you succeed, then you didn't need school. If you fail, then you can always go back to school afterwards. I don't see the downside of the Thiel fellowship, at least on its surface.

C1D 13y ago
Agreed. It's at the least worth a try and if you fail not only can you go back to school but the fact that Peter Thiel, Co-Founder of Paypal believed in you will at least do you some good, reputation wise.
jeffasinger 13y ago
There are plenty of school options that involve much lower debt than that. You don't need to go to a school that costs $50k a year, there are plenty of alternatives.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  There are plenty of alternatives, but do they provide the same quality of education for your degree of choice?
  - Fomite 13y ago
    With very, very rare exceptions, yes. Most flagship state schools will give you an excellent education at a much, much better value.
  - zalzane 13y ago
    Why wouldn't they? It's not like MIT/whatever uses special books that no other uni can use. It's not like prestigious universities follow some special program that makes it so their students gain a much better insight into the subject than people who go to other universities. The perks of attending a prestigious university typically has nothing to do with your education. It has to do with rubbing shoulders with blue bloods, creating a powerful social network, and being able to woo people with the pedigree associated with the words "MIT graduate" on your resume.

kippn_it_real 13y ago

There seems to be a consensus here that all big corporations are inept and the all that you can learn from them is what not to do. Only ~5% of startups are successful while 100% of big corporations were at one point. If you can't learn anything from Big Corp you aren't trying.

hobs 13y ago
Yeah, I encourage people to go work for one for a year or two to learn all the stupid things they do and the ways they are vulnerable. Also to understand why you should love what you are doing now.
Fomite 13y ago
Agreed - hell, if they are inept, you can learn how you went from "Successful Industry Leader" to "Cumbersome, Lumbering Dinosaur" - and avoid that same path with your startup.

tptacek 13y ago

There's a valid point in here about the way the structure of the Thiel program, with its strain of radical individualism, might blind new entrepreneurs to the idea that most of them shouldn't be CEOs. I think more entrepreneurs should try to grok this idea. Even people who are "born leaders" don't necessarily belong in the CEO role, because CEOs need to be more than leaders. They often also need to be moderating influences, level-headed, execution-focused, and accountable. I've been in startups since I was 18 years old, and have started multiple companies, and would not hire me as a CEO. Unfortunately, the article makes that point by inflating the importance of management theory and by suggesting that college is somewhere you go to pick up a trade. So, someone else should try to write the good article that makes the CEO point.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Yes, this would be a really good article if it made a completely different point.
- tptacek 13y ago
  If I'm mistaken, and it's not trying to make the "CEO argument" I was playing with upthread, you could correct my mistake using evidence. I read the article and I don't think I'm mistaken, but would love to be surprised. Otherwise, I'm not sure of the point of your comment.

polarix 13y ago

In some sense, though, most of these situations do see the founders learning management on someone else's dime. It's just a segmented capital super-structure, rather than a traditional corporate system.

tobyjsullivan 13y ago

I appreciate the article and the point of view but I have to disagree completely with his recommendation that you spend your years working for someone else before you launch your own business. He talks about working for a company after finishing college to learn about how they operate and do business. You know what I learned in the five years after college I worked for a company as a dev? A whole lot about software development. Nothing about hiring (beyond what I gleaned while interviewing), basics of management and nothing about marketing or sales. You know what I learned in the first few months of trying and failing to launch a business? A heck of a lot about everything, including a lot more about software development. Working in my trade for a few years out of school made me very good at what I do but it certainly did not make me a very good entrepreneur.

enraged_camel 13y ago
I'm the exact opposite. I started in a tech support role and learned the value of proper customer service, then transferred to a sales engineering role and learned how to analyze a customer's needs and match them with the correct product offering. From a management side, just by looking at how my company is managed, I learned how not to manage a company. Every time a coworker got treated like crap, I told myself I would never treat my employees like that when I have my own company. What would have happened if I had started a business straight out of college? Presumably, I'd have made a whole bunch of dumb mistakes, some of which could have cost me the business. I would have failed a bunch of times and learned things the hard way. Most importantly, I might have become demotivated and given up entirely. Which is actually what happens to most people. I'd say that the past five years I've worked for a company (my first one out of college) have allowed me to find myself in terms of confidence, skills and purpose. I feel like I'm a much better, much more stable place for starting something on my own.
thejulielogan 13y ago
Agreed. Being elsewhere for a few years, finishing school before that, doesn't guarantee you'll learn the managerial skills required to be a CEO.
michaelt 13y ago
No doubt it depends on the company - did you ask to be trained in management? I know at my employer some people don't aspire to cease being developers and start being managers (which is fine) so they don't get trained to be managers (which is also fine).

szany 13y ago

This is good advice, because the right sort of person to be a Thiel fellow would read this and scoff anyway.

thejulielogan 13y ago

He reduces the entire situation to two options. What I've learned from being in a startup? There are never just two options. His article does students a massive disservice by creating just an A or B scenario.

npalli 13y ago

“I'm a crotchety old guy. I worry about all these new companies. I'm glad that they're easier to start, but the problem is, they're just as hard to finish as they have always been” This is a great observation from Mike Olson. I think a lot of people who are dropping off to start on the entrepreneurial path vastly underestimate the difficulty of building a company to a point where they can sell or IPO or get just get a good return. Lot of the startup-lore is built around expectation of success that has vastly diminished in the last few years and we will soon find a lot of people who are thirty-five, have worked through three-four failed startups and nothing to offer to the broader world. If you look at number of seed accelerators in the US[1], we have about 175. Every year about 3000 companies are formed and a vast number of them fail. Take the top accelerator in the country (perhaps the world). YCombinator. It has funded about 550 companies, pg is rightfully proud of the value created. However, if you took out the top 10 of them I suspect 99% of the value goes away. I remember just AirBnB and Dropbox making 75% of the value. Think about it, even if you came out of YC, you have a 2% chance of success. That means if you even if you join a startup accelerator in Middletown, USA your chance is probably 0.5% and if you don’t even get to join a accelerator it is probably even less (0.1%?) I suspect a lot of people still think there is a 5% chance you will succeed in a startup. That was the case 15 years back. With a 5% success rate, you could possible iterate to a better than even odd of success if you went through 3-4 startups. If you were told you have a 0.1% chance of success, it is more of a random crapshoot. What is it that you will learn and show after 3-4 attempts? The other option of going to college, working for a big company and the associated payoff hasn’t changed much. If the startup option is now 50 times riskier, you need to think hard about your choices. Maybe you are an optimist, that’s OK but don’t default to choices. [1] http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators http://www.seed-db.com/accelerators

wellboy 13y ago

You can gain more "experience" before you try to do your own thing, however the more experience you gain, the worse you become at creating the next billion dollar startup. For every year that you don´t start your own business, your capability to think large and taking risks and your resourcefulness dramatically declines. That´s the reason why none of the four horsemen in tech, Google, Apple, Amazon or Facebook were founded by founders over 30. Looking at all the other billion dollar startups Microsoft, Dropbox, Airbnb, Twitter, Instagram, Waze, Paypal, Tumblr none of their founders were over 30. See a pattern? There are probably billion startups who were founded by founders older than 30, but there are very few. The less experience you have, the more likely you are to create the next billion dollar company. If you start your startup after 30, it's very unlikely that you will be able to make it into a $1B startup.

tensor 13y ago
This is abhorrent ageism, and completely wrong. Peter Thiel, 31, Paypal, 37, Palintar. Larry Elison, 33, Oracle. Reid Hoffman, 35, Linked In. Evan Williams, 35, Twitter. Mark Pincus, 41, Zynga. Arianna Huffington, 54, Huffington Post. Can we stop making things up? Maybe five minutes of research would be good? You know, there is a place they teach these things.
- wellboy 13y ago
  Founders that had had successful startups before don't count. That's why I was referring to "experience BEFORE you try to do your own thing." And yes there are a few startup founders that were older than 30, I give you Larry Ellison. However none of the 4 horsemen had founders >30, plus the other founders except for Peter Thiel had already sold their previous startups. Regarding Palantir, they had Peter Thiel as a cofounder, I don't give you that one.
  - tensor 13y ago
    Again, you may want to do some research. Many of those I listed are first time founders. Your attitude mirrors the also incorrect idea that scientists must make their name before 30. That too, was studied and found to be completely wrong. I can only assume that this attitude comes from arrogant young people who want to think they are special.

jasonwatkinspdx 13y ago

This is an important point, but it also shouldn't be overstated. There are many examples of where professional managers lacking passion and personal interest in a business's market have hindered more than helped. As Thiel often says a variety of ways, copycat behavior is unlikely to produce success in a high risk/reward context like a startup. You need an information advantage, and often that advantage is someone who knows their own itch very well. I also hate that the meme for this has become "adult supervision." It's such a patronizing and self-aggrandizing description.

avty 13y ago

Wow, what a de-empowering article. Good luck guys.

argumentum 13y ago

The best way to learn, anything, is by trying, failing and iterating. This is true (for me at least) in programming and otherwise. I generally believe you should stay in school, and more importantly stay learning technical stuff (whether undergrad, grad school or in a technically challenging job). It's the best way to get ideas, and more importantly find people to work with (if you want to start a company). So I do harbor doubts about the Thiel Fellowship (though I happen to know quite a few talented kids in the program, and think it's working well for most of them). However, you will not learn how to be a Founder/CEO without being a Founder/CEO. Some have a natural ability at this, but 99% of even the best CEOs probably just have the ability to learn quickly on their feet. By the time their mistakes might be noticed, they've already learned and corrected them. The only thing you'll learn by working your way up the corporate ladder is how to work your way up the corporate ladder. The stuff about learning how to work hard is BS. If you want to do a startup and hope things will happen for you, you probably believe in an all-powerful being that has a plan for you.