10 ms·

Advice for ambitious 19 year olds (2013)

100 points by Jarred 12y ago

withdavidli 12y ago
"I just watched someone turn down one of these breakout companies because Microsoft offered him $30k per year more in salary—that was a terrible decision. He will not build interesting things and may not work with smart people." Quite the blanket statement. Microsoft is a gigantic company, it will greatly depend on the team they're on. One great advice, be around smart and ambitious people. This is contagous and helps motivation.
- wyager 12y ago
  It also ignores the fact that working somewhere can always get you experience with which to do great things later on.
- semerda 12y ago
  I agree. Building an OS or associated platform/cloud software at MS requires some clever brains/engineering. That will be more rewarding from an experience point than building another link sharing web app / a regurgitated clone.
  - Namrog84 12y ago
    I agree with you both and that's what I'm hoping for. I start in 1 week at MS to work on some cloud related software. I sure hope it's interesting/rewarding!
    - semerda 12y ago
      Congrats! One advise I can give you (assuming you are a graduate) is DO NOT focus on the money, just focus on building your skills & experience. But don't let anyone take advantage of that either. Sooner or later you will demand a premium when you are a rockstar! Connect with as many people as possible and ask a ton of questions. "He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. ~ Chinese Proverb"
- bunkat 12y ago
  But if he works at Microsoft, then the VCs won't be able to extract value from him and make their money (especially painful when they lose a 20 something willing to work 90 hours weeks). Sure he might be happier, but think about the VCs! This is why it was a terrible decision.
- UK-AL 12y ago
  I found that odd. Microsoft probably has some of the best engineers in the industry.
  - semerda 12y ago
    I cannot comment as a whole industry but I can say that the MS guys I worked with & hired in SV were one of the best engineers in the company. Far far switched on & capable then the larger group of hacky script kiddies from Yahoo who only knew how to copy & paste.
FiloSottile 12y ago
> Working on something good will pull you along a path where good things keep happening to you. Words to live by. I'm 19, not attending college and experiencing some bits of success. I have friends that like to say (not maliciously) how I'm that kind of person that can keep making risky decisions because has big strikes of luck. What I keep trying to tell them, is that I have "big strikes of luck" because I keep myself always as exposed as possible to them. And I do so exactly with those decisions they deem risky, like not going to college, spending money on conferences, relocating, loosing ties.
- jxf 12y ago
  It's apocryphal [0], but I'm reminded of Thomas Jefferson's quote: "I am a great believer in luck -- the harder I work, the more I have of it." [0]: http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/i-am-great-believer-luckquotation http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/i-am...
  - fossuser 12y ago
    There's also the other kind of luck that you're not really in control of. You can attempt to position yourself for the best possible outcome, but even the ability to do that may be determined by original surroundings. https://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S33/87/54K53/index.xml https://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S33/87/54K53/ind...
  - PhasmaFelis 12y ago
    I don't mean to criticize you personally, but it's hard to take pithy aphorisms about the value of hard work seriously from someone who ran a slave plantation. Perhaps the real lesson here is: when someone in a position of power likes to talk about the value of hard work, take a minute to think about who's doing the work and who's reaping the value.
- iLoch 12y ago
  Amen. I'm right there with you. It's definitely not the cookie cutter success plan, and in some ways I'm happy about that. Personally I'm most excited to see where I'll be when my friends start looking for work after university. Not in a "haha, I'm better than you" kind of way - just as validation that what I've done isn't completely crazy. But who knows, maybe I'll be living out of a cardboard box somewhere in the heart of Silicon Valley in a couple years. :)
nickporter 12y ago
be around smart people Can't stress that enough. It made a huge difference for me during university.
- theghostofLT 12y ago
  Indeed - I would say this is probably the most important thing. I spent the first three years of my career in an Office Space BigCorp environment with colleagues and managers who were - well, I don't want to say stupid, but not terribly motivated, or intellectually curious, or particularly invested in the quality of their work. Emerging from that environment into one full of extraordinarily sharp and ambitious people who had spent years honing their craft and investing in themselves, and having to suddenly perform on their level, was a shock and an extremely unpleasant lesson in opportunity costs.
yzzxy 12y ago
This article worried me - because I'm ~19 and hadn't even considered not going to college. This is despite being directly in the discussed demographic. I have pretty conclusive evidence that I'm hiring material to some of these companies and have conceived of, planned, and built user-facing multiple technical projects independently. However, I've never thought of skipping out on college. I live in a very affluent area and even the academically worst-off seniors usually end up going to decent 4-year programs. The idea that so many people similar to me at my age would miss college for a startup or similar experience worries me because it makes me think that the community I've grown up with has distorted my perception of the opportunities available to me. It's time to take a long reevaluation of my plans, I think.
- necubi 12y ago
  There's nothing wrong with going to college. College can be great! If you do it right, you'll learn a lot about a diverse set of things including history, literature, the arts, and the sciences. If you're in a good program, you'll also learn the theoretical underpinnings of computer science, which I think is underappreciated by many in the industry. And really, you do have time. The Silicon Valley myth is that if you haven't had success by 22, you're done. And while there are outliers (including Sam), this is mostly a fiction. Many successful founders are in their late 20s, or even 30s, 40s and 50s. I was at a meet-up a few nights ago and met a team of 40-something founders that are reinventing film for the VR age. You have a lot of time, and you should be spending it learning. Whether the best place for that is in college or not, I urge you to remember that there are important parts of education that do not involve compilers or databases and which should not be neglected. But Sam's advice is good: be always learning, and surround yourself with smart people. You can certainly waste college, but it doesn't have to be a waste. Finally, I was in your position not very long ago, and if you'd like to talk, my email's in my profile.
- brianchu 12y ago
  Yeah, it's definitely a Silicon Valley thing. I grew up in SV and go to school at Berkeley, and dropping out is definitely considered a valid choice. People I know in SF encourage me to drop out all the time, and I know of several college students that dropped out. Edit (reply to below): I took a year off to work before I went to college, so I think I have a good perspective when I say this. You assume that: 1) college is going to educate someone about the world, get them a good job (not a measly startup job), give them discipline, and introduce them to cofounders; and 2) college will do this so much better than you could by working in industry that it justifies the cost (anywhere between $150-200k tuition for a good school, and possibly $200k in lost savings). Suffice to say, not all of those things are necessarily true. I'd be happy to talk about this perspective to anyone over email.
ARama 12y ago
> "be around smart people. " I couldn't agree more. I'm 20 years old and dropped out of university after my first year. There was a large amount of people I was surrounded by who weren't motivated at all and didn't really seem to take interest in anything we were doing. I moved to San Francisco ( from New Zealand ) after I dropped out in the beginning of 2013, attended a programming bootcamp and was surrounded by smart people who all shared the same drive and passion as me. It made a world of difference, my core group of friends were all people who breathed code. We all motivated each other to better ourselves and to learn new technologies. Moving to the valley was the best thing I've ever done, I learned so much in such a short amount of time and was even approached by some companies with some great offers. Unfortunately I had to move back to New Zealand as my year was up and US work visas require a degree or an extensive amount of experience. That was probably the biggest downside of dropping out, a degree can definitely open up many doors.
NAFV_P 12y ago
> No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people. That depends on whether these 'smart' people respect you, it is a horrible situation to have to hang around smart people who don't hold the same opinion of yourself.
doctorpangloss 12y ago
>If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory. There are a usually a handful of these at a time, and they are usually identifiable to a smart young person. >Working on something good will pull you along a path where good things keep happening to you. So his advice is, to boil it down, "Do successful stuff, but hopefully it's obvious to you what is going to be successful."
- imsky 12y ago
  Yeah, I noticed that, too. "Just be an expert at identifying successful startups early and get a job there."
- ryandrake 12y ago
  By the time you've identified that a company is truly that one out of a thousand that are on a breakout trajectory, it's too late, they've already got 50 other employees who will have all the equity. Basically, the advice boils down to, "Spin the startup roulette wheel or go join Microsoft for 30K more salary." VCs can increase their odds of lucking into the rocket ship growth company by investing in 100 companies. I can't work for 100 companies simultaneously.
edanm 12y ago
"If you start a company, only do so if you have an idea you’re in love with. If you’re hanging out with your friends trying to come up with an idea, I don’t think you should start that company (although there are many who disagree with me)." I'm one of those that disagree with this. Entrepreneurship is a long-term "profession" all of its own. If you plan to be an entrepreneur, you need to treat it as such. You need to work in it by e.g. building companies, you need to fail it in a few times before you succeed, etc. Most importantly, unlike most Software Developers, you need to realize the goal of an entrepreneur is to make money. You shouldn't be starting a company because you have a great idea, or because you feel like starting a company, but rather, because you want to make money and have identified that the path to make it is to be an entrepreneur and start this particular company. This affects both which companies you do start and which you don't. This is not to say I necessarily think starting a company at 19 is the right thing to do. My advice to ambitious 19 year olds who want to be entrepreneurs would be to find a job as a personal assistant to a CEO of a small company in the field they want to work in, and learn the ropes from her. NOTE: I give a very "entrepreneur==trying to get rich" perspective here, which I believe is sorely lacking in most young Software Developers. Some people start startups for other reasons entirely, which is of course great and absolutely your choice.
- mseebach 12y ago
  What are your thoughts on Alex Payne's Letter to a Young Programmer? Personally, I found it overly pessimistic, and my instinct is to be skeptical of such things - but I'm not knowledgable enough to actually pick apart his arguments. https://al3x.net/2013/05/23/letter-to-a-young-programmer.html https://al3x.net/2013/05/23/letter-to-a-young-programmer.htm...
- UK-AL 12y ago
  Software Developers are in it for the money too. Lets face it, most employed software developers would rather be working on their own interesting project, but can't because of financial reasons. They just won't admit to that, because they have silly idealism.
hayksaakian 12y ago
> Remember that there will be lots of other opportunities to start companies, and that startups are a 6-10 year commitment—wait for the right one I've heard conflicting advice on this topic. I'm currently of the opinion that you should fail fast. Does it really take six to ten years to determine if your startup failed? From my understanding if you've survived to year 6 and you're not delusional about your potential as a company, then you've already made it.
- deleted 12y ago
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- Gustomaximus 12y ago
  I see this more in the case of a business is not failing, but it's only slowly growing. I've met quite a few entrepreneurs who keep their business slowly growing for the 5 or so years perhaps move from them to a couple of employees and then around year 5/6/7 go into hyper growth and have 20 employees by year end. I think this happens particularity in business that has a personal element to do business. It takes time to get credibility, reputation and hone your business pitch.
  - hayksaakian 12y ago
    Can you suggest some examples? I'd like to read about them.
deleted 12y ago
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- adwn 12y ago
  > basing their business around product X [...] X was halting-problem-equivalent Now I'm curious: can you tell us more about this product?
  - a-saleh 12y ago
    I was talking about this comment at lunch \w coleague, and he claimed, that his coleague found halting problem-equvalence in experimental package manager of fedora :) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNF https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNF I haven't yet verified this claim, but when you are using sat solvers for dependency resulution ... it wouldn't suprise me that much if you could describe halting problem in the new & fancy dependency graph :D
- deleted 12y ago
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- argonaut 12y ago
  I wouldn't have ever considered Loopt a breakout company. You've defined breakout a little more liberally than I think Sam meant. I think companies like Airbnb / Pinterest are really good examples of the types of companies that Sam is referring to. Other, slightly more risky examples might include Stripe, Uber (mostly due to competition).
  - bunkat 12y ago
    Even then - Airbnb is a souped up Craigslist that is breaking laws everywhere and Pinterest is yet another photo sharing board. They just happen to be very successful at the moment. Is that work really more interesting and engaging than creating operating systems, compilers, or working with the biggest of big data?
sorpaas 12y ago
This article is talking about 3 important things: * Build important stuff. * Learn new things / be around talented people. * Take right risks.
jqm 12y ago
Here is my advice: -Take everything with a healthy bit of secret skepticism but don't be cocky nor disrespectful. Very seldom does anything good come of that...but don't forget the skepticism. -Learn to control your passions. Character really is important even though people who say things like this are usually dimwillys. -Romantic relationships can break some people. Be aware, but don't give up the best things in life for lesser things. Certainly romantic relationships are among the best things in life. -Stay curious about other fields. Isolating in one discipline can give people myopia. But do focus and specialize. This is important. -Keep in mind that a lot will change in the next 60, and even next 10 years. Expect change and you won't be as thrown by it. Adaption is a very valuable skill. As far as college and starting a company... do what you feel is best. Certainly people succeed at many paths and likewise fail at many. The advice in the article about seeking out the smartest people is good though. Avoid the "party always" crowd. Bad things generally follow them.
kamaal 12y ago
One advice from my end is to cultivate the discipline to save and invest money. You will be surprised how much this one thing will put you light years ahead of many others folks by the time your turn 35 or 40. You will turn 35 and realize the past 1.5 decades went like a second, yet the the investments you made are bearing fruit during middle age. Time is on your side, the biggest weapon when it comes investments. Don't waste it. Keep loans away(unless your country has high inflation). Avoid credit card debt. Buy gold routinely. Try to get your self a own home to stay in, even if you actually can't stay in it(rent it out). Buy yourself a life insurance and most important of all investments by the time you turn 30 try to get married and have at least one kid.
- thewarrior 12y ago
  Buying a house in an Indian metro (without taking a loan) doesn't look too realistic for a person in his 20s.
  - kamaal 12y ago
    No, but in any Indian metro you can easily buy a plot on the city outskirts for some money. Agreed that you may still need a loan. But that is likely to be in the figure of 10-12 lacs, given you have done basic savings in your early 20's. Also the inflation in India is close to 9%. Which means the principle you owe to the bank is losing value at the rate of 9% per annum, while your property value appreciates. Buying a car in your 20's is the worst mistake you can make. If you haven't made this mistake making 50% down payment to a plot in city outskirts should be a walk in the park. And the monthly gold saving schemes available with any big jeweller has helped people triple their money in as little as 5-6 years. Add to that the regular tax saving endowment insurance policies. In all if you have made your investments even with mediocre planning, you should end up pretty rich by 35.
- joelrunyon 12y ago
  > and most important of all investments by the time you turn 30 try to get married and have at least one kid. Why?
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
it's pretty good advice for 49 year olds too
gedrap 12y ago
Many people say that college/university is not worth it but I disagree. If the one you are attending makes you think it's not worth it, just get to a better one. I think university is a safe default choice. Yes, you will be learning things that you might never need. On the other hand, you will learn things you wouldn't have learned otherwise and they will open up your eyes. Also, you get to be surround with smart people (given you are at a good uni). And attending university doesn't mean you can't work on something on the side, and drop uni if things go well. Of course, there are cases when starting/continue working on your business is much better. But I believe those are exceptions, and if that's the case for you, you won't need anyone to tell you that. It will be obvious that you should do that.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  I'd like to take the contrarian position here. I think that nowadays, if you are aiming for career skills and a position in industry, most university degrees and maybe an internship or two will prepare you extremely well. Degree programs today largely seem to focus on taking the student from the bare ignorance of their secondary education to the most fundamental rudiments of really understanding a field and thence to Hard Work and Job Skills as fast as possible. The elite universities distinguish themselves by also doing this as intensively and painfully as possible. What they don't actually prepare their students for is really understanding a field in-depth and coming up with genuinely sound new ideas. This seems to be something people are supposed to learn on their own sometime around the PhD level, as not even graduate school ever seems to actually teach with the aim of real understanding. Self-study (for the truly masochistic ;-)) or mentorship are the only ways given for a student to actually reach the frontier of knowledge in anything, and quite often, nobody exposes the young to a broad enough base of rigorous knowledge for them to have even heard important facts about their own field. It's kind of like how you have to get involved in programming-language theory or a few other small specialties to ever hear about category theory, despite it's being so general that it's been called the next major foundation of mathematics after set theory.
- reillyse 12y ago
  Agreed, I've spent 10 years in university and I couldn't be happier with my choices. I feel I've really got a deep appreciation for my craft and my own abilities and I've always been able to work on my side projects at the same time. So I'd say going to university is rarely ever a bad choice. Also, there will be plenty of time later to work, why not have some fun first and make a huge peer group of interesting intelligent people who have similar hobbies and interests to you.
mqsiuser 12y ago
I live in Germany and I can't move to the valley easily (will investigate on "work visa" and I will take part in the green card lottery over the next couple of years :) But even if I make it to SV, nothing ever relieves you from thinking really hard constantly (and informing yourself). There are so many influencing factors and the article is great, but I can also see that people tend to overestimate themselves (including me). Thought exchange is key and you'll find people you can do that with, e.g. in College. Ryan Dahl did node in Germany and he was exchanging thoughts with someone who was just (only) listening and giving him (sanity) feedback. So though exchange may or is also very valuable (from someone) when you have a genius idea. College or university can also be an accelerator and maybe you'd consider joining to actually have a lot of spare time to do the next Facebook by exploiting it's context (e.g. people). And think of the big ones: They dropped out of college (when they were successful)! We are always having (very) limited knowledge and there usually is (always) a high risk. If Google or Apple just decides to do cars this may wipe out all car manufactures in the rest of the world, since for some reason they seem to be just able to do so.
mvembu 12y ago
"No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people. “Stuff” can be a lot of different things—open source projects outside of class, a startup, a new sales process at a company you work at—but, obviously, sitting around talking with your friends about how you guys really should build a website together does not count." Building stuff is true for to all age groups including VC's
gabzuka 12y ago
I don't understand why people would want to go straight to work when only 19 if they have the choice not to. That's the best age to enjoy and learn about life, to grow as an integral person. I would never ever exchange the time I had at uni for being at work, no matter what I could be doing. At uni not only did I become a programmer, I also met by best friends, I met my now wife, I got involved in social issues, I traveled, I formed a band, learned foreign languages and yes went to lots of parties, nothing wrong with parties. It's not related to what I do on a daily basis for work? No, so what?. Has it helped me in my career? I don't know, but I still got my dream job and it has surely made me a much happier person.
klunger 12y ago
Someone should write advice for ambitious 29 year olds who only recently discovered the marvelous world of web development and entrepreneurship, after a more typical decade of school and work drudgery...
- Gustomaximus 12y ago
  Would it be that different? Perhaps swap university for MBA and a few smal things but the fundamentals stay the same.
personlurking 12y ago
"One big con is that it’s easy to start a company for the wrong reasons—usually so that you can say you’re starting a company—and this makes it easy to cloud your judgment." Recently, I've randomly come across a lot of people here in Lisbon, all in their 20s, saying they're in a brand-new startup or starting one. When I ask them about it, mum is the word. They hesitate and fumble for words, say a key word or two, then speak very generally before clamming up. It's amazing how many times I've seen this exact scene play itself out in the last few months. It's a mixture of being unsure about what they're doing and not wanting someone to steal their idea. They're all either novice coders without a business-minded partner, or vice-versa. It's to the point that I often feel like I'm in a scene from the Truman Show. Seeing this happen, and while being in the midst of starting my own thing, I'm hesitant to say I'm doing a startup. I find myself preferring to say 'I'm starting a business online'.
- abledon 12y ago
  The idea of not being able to express what your company is about was kind of covered in silicon valley episode 4 haha
stiff 12y ago
If you describe yourself as an "ambitious 19 year old" (and ambition by itself is not necessarily a virtue) and if you tie your happiness to doing "something great", you are likely in for a very unhappy life. Everything we do, will ultimately be undone, if you extend the time horizon long enough. The greatest scientists, inventors, football players and political leaders get forgotten after a few generations, in fact whole civilizations have been living on this very earth, and were since erased from its surface, many of which we might have not a single trace left of. Being "great" in our culture typically accounts to beating hundreds of people, so by definition for every person who succeeds there will be hundreds of "loosers". This is a ridiculous game, and I think every wise person should refuse to participate in it in the first place and set their own priorities. You should do things to try to have a happy life from day to day, not to "get somewhere".
- enscr 12y ago
  Subtle & important yet widely misunderstood or misinterpreted. Being happy is important, not the other way round.
- yebyen 12y ago
  This seems like as good a place as any to bring up Great Ozymandias... I think I prefer Smith's version to Shelley's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Comparison_of_the_two_poems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Comparison_of_the_tw...
- vbuterin 12y ago
  > Everything we do, will ultimately be undone, if you extend the time horizon long enough. Well, not necessarily. Economics quite clearly says that the total future benefit of any amount of nonzero-benefit present activity, at least if measured in currency units, tends toward infinity; that's why we have interest rates and the concept of rent. Of course, it's not the optimal strategy for securing personal happiness unless you already know you have a solid chance, especially if you're shooting for the "remembered by humanity for all time" mark and not something more modest, but living for progress is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
- lispylol 12y ago
jw2013 12y ago
Great article. >> If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory. There are a usually a handful of these at a time, and they are usually identifiable to a smart young person... Spending a few years at a company that fails has path consequences, and working at an already-massively-successful company means you will learn much less, and probably work with less impressive people. I actually find it opposite. First of all, it is not so easy to identify a company on a breakout trajectory. The line between a breakout success and failure is just too thin on an early-stage startups. Even if the startup works on the same field as your expertise, you have been following that field for years, and you think the founders are brilliant, you can still get the judgement wrong a lot of the time. I think a startup's failure is not so bad for a young and ambitious employee. There are just as many lessons can be learnt from failure as from success. As for path consequences, the young kids got so many productive years left and one failure is not really destructive or harmful. And a great thing is, if a startup fails most likely it fails fast. For your next job, people won't hire/reject you because the previous company you worked for failed, they hire/reject because you are brilliant or not. Likely the stuff you learnt in the failed startup will make you a brilliant person (tech and non-tech wise).
sdnguyen90 12y ago
I dropped out but looking back it was a very risky decision even though I was already making a little bit of money. I was confident in my skills at the time but now looking back I didn't know shit. There are so many potential unforeseen situations in life that can take you off track pretty bad(relationships, family passing away, etc.). I was lucky to have a job that allowed me to have time to hone my technical skills at the same time. If any of those situations happened to me, I probably would be stuck in a very bad financial situation that I would never have been able to bounce back from. I see a lot of my friends who dropped out because their families couldn't afford to not have them working full time and it looks like they won't be able to make that much more than minimum wage for a while.
d--b 12y ago
The "hang around smart people" advice doesn't make any sense. First, you should hang around whoever you want to hang around with. Second, define smart
AYBABTME 12y ago
Not getting a degree pretty much only applies as a viable option for US citizens.
maj0rhn 12y ago
When I look around Silicon Valley, I see a lot of 40-somethings and older who have been very successful in their technical endeavors, but now have narrow lives because they never took the time to become complete persons. The best thing you can do as ambitious 19 year old is recognize that there is a lot more to the world than technology, and that college is effectively the only time in your life that you can, guilt-free, learn about the arc of civilization, or study Shakespeare in depth, or have a hope of learning biochemistry. Remember Henlein: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." Starting a company is rather a ridiculous thing to do when the entire world is open to you.
- graeme 12y ago
  As a counterpoint: if I could do college over, I would have taken something practical, like programming, and bootstrapped a company. I started at 25, and bootstrapped a company. I'm 28, and I now have enough passive income that I can do pretty much what I want. I enjoyed my 20s. I would have enjoyed them even more if I had had this same setup from age 21-23. Of course, I only recommend this with the specific goal of "freedom" in mind. I do like the topics you selected to study though. I studied international relations and economics. The second taught me a bit, and the first I learned from my own readings. I would recommend students study either: A very practical skill that will help them be free of their time (programming, design, etc.) or something interesting, that's harder to learn outside of school (Shakespeare, fine arts, music, dance, one of the sciences)
  - philangist 12y ago
    I'm an "ambitious 19 year old" (it feels really weird to say that), and I have a fulltime job as a programmer, but I'd be really interested in hearing about this. While I'm currently very happy at my job and will probably remain here for a few more hours, I'd like to hear about the process of bootstrapping a company.
lispylol 12y ago
> If you’re hanging out with your friends trying to come up with an idea, I don’t think you should start that company The difference between a founder that started a company this way versus a founder that started a company out of significant personal experience is astounding. The way they talk about their company is utterly different and I imagine that has a great deal of influence on hiring as well.
michaelochurch 12y ago
Even if you want to be a VC, you’re much better off starting or joining a startup, and getting partner offers when you’re 28. Plus, good founders want to work with an investor that has operational experience. This is the kind of misleading startup bullshit that needs to stop. The vast majority of people who enter the startup racket are not getting partner-level VC offers 9 years later. The VC Valhalla that awaits failed startup founders doesn't really exist. That happens if you get extremely lucky (< 0.01%) or have rich parents, in which case normal advice doesn't apply. If you want to be a VC, get a Harvard MBA. It's a lot easier than doing a startup (you're competing against MBAs instead of hackers, which means that what good programmers would consider average intelligence would put you in the top 5%) and the path is surer. The reason risk-averse people prefer the MBA path is because (surprise?) it's more likely to work.
jmscharff2 12y ago
I am very scared about this new trend in, hey you like tech/programming and want to be an entrepreneur skip college join/start a company. While yes you can be very successful and you can learn a lot, if you fail or the company fails you are stuck with a resume where you have no degree, no formal education just a job where you may have learned a lot but a lot of the time that cannot get you in the door of the next company. I worry that people who went to these top schools MIT/Harvard/Yale etc are telling people to not go to school, if you take a very smart person and they drop out of a top school that is completely different than having a 19 year old kid not sure what to do with his life and he enjoys programming. It just seems like a scary trend that is cropping up in tech, sure you can learn a lot if not more from a startup than your college education but the degree is what will get you in the door to a lot of places in your future. That degree is the base for your career, its great to join/start a startup but if that fails you have nothing to fall back on, if you think you can get an interview with no degree to a top tier company and you dont have some kind of crazy resume then you are clearly living in a dream world. A single job where your company failed will not be the same as a degree. (all assuming that you dont become a billionaire from this startup)
the_watcher 12y ago
I love this post, especially this: "The secret is that any of these can be right answer, and you should make your decision based on the specific circumstances of each option." My general advice to ambitious young people - go do something fun, interesting, and challenging that your unique age allows. Generally, this means it is something made possible by the combination of an abundance of free time and absence of major life responsibilities (like bills and children). So long as it meets all 3 of those characteristics, if you think you'd want to do it someday, just do it now. Leave the US and travel. Go to college and have fun (but remember that challenging is one of your key characteristics, and don't forget to challenge yourself). Start a company. You are 19. If you fail, no one will hold it against you, and you'll never regret it if you actually did something fun, challenging, and interesting. The one piece of (slightly depressing) advice I would add this: student loans can be great for ambitious 19 year olds. Just know that you have to start repaying them 6 months after you quit going to school (if you can, only take subsidized loans and do your best to pay at least the interest+at least $1 towards principal of the rest while in school. Had one friend who did this, and I was shocked at the difference it made, perhaps naively), and if what you do after that doesn't allow to rapidly pay them off, you'll lose a lot of the freedom you had at 19 before you expected (coming from someone who has a small enough loan burden to have some freedom as a 25 year old, but large enough to prevent me from simply not having a steady income).
Balgair 12y ago
The best advice for the young man (most techy people at 19 are men, and I assume this onward), is and will always will be: 1)You can never overdress 2)Dance a lot 3)Always ask out the best looking girl in the room. 4)Leave college or any job with a piece of work (thesis, rock opera, example circuit boards, etc) 5)Go left. If your opponent knows you can't shoot left, you are done for. Applies to war, business and arguments. 6)Shake hands very firmly. Especially with women. It's respect. 7)Keep the gas at a half tank. Emergencies happen. 8)Family is more important to most people than their own life, or yours. 9)Use tools, learn to fix your own car. 10)Learn to cook well. Flip burgers and steaks ONCE and ONLY ONCE. DO NOT squeeze the juices out of them. 11)DO NOT become addicted. Do not develop alcoholism or start smoking. Enjoy these things, sure, but chemical addiction is horrible. 12) Set goals every 6 months. Write them down, tell your family about them, post them on your fridge. Nothing here has anything to do with ambition. That's more a personality trait and isn't really adoptable or disposable. Luck has so much to do with life and business and can't be assumed. But that is OK. Relax, dance, drink wine with your new wife. Play with your niece and grandfather. But hustle your ass off when you aren't. Work hard at things you enjoy. If you don't enjoy them, set a goal for when you are leaving and work on that at least once a day. Happiness is NOT success. Happiness is what you are and if you let others define your happiness, be they heroin or cigarettes or Harvard admissions committee or Palantir or Jeff Bezos, then you are not going to be happy. I have literally 919 more one-liners and lots of quotes I hope to give to a son someday. Most of it is stupid simple reminders, but some I hope will help that young man along in life.

100 points by Jarred 12y ago

"I just watched someone turn down one of these breakout companies because Microsoft offered him $30k per year more in salary—that was a terrible decision. He will not build interesting things and may not work with smart people." Quite the blanket statement. Microsoft is a gigantic company, it will greatly depend on the team they're on. One great advice, be around smart and ambitious people. This is contagous and helps motivation.

wyager 12y ago
It also ignores the fact that working somewhere can always get you experience with which to do great things later on.
semerda 12y ago
I agree. Building an OS or associated platform/cloud software at MS requires some clever brains/engineering. That will be more rewarding from an experience point than building another link sharing web app / a regurgitated clone.
- Namrog84 12y ago
  I agree with you both and that's what I'm hoping for. I start in 1 week at MS to work on some cloud related software. I sure hope it's interesting/rewarding!
  - semerda 12y ago
    Congrats! One advise I can give you (assuming you are a graduate) is DO NOT focus on the money, just focus on building your skills & experience. But don't let anyone take advantage of that either. Sooner or later you will demand a premium when you are a rockstar! Connect with as many people as possible and ask a ton of questions. "He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. ~ Chinese Proverb"
bunkat 12y ago
But if he works at Microsoft, then the VCs won't be able to extract value from him and make their money (especially painful when they lose a 20 something willing to work 90 hours weeks). Sure he might be happier, but think about the VCs! This is why it was a terrible decision.
UK-AL 12y ago
I found that odd. Microsoft probably has some of the best engineers in the industry.
- semerda 12y ago
  I cannot comment as a whole industry but I can say that the MS guys I worked with & hired in SV were one of the best engineers in the company. Far far switched on & capable then the larger group of hacky script kiddies from Yahoo who only knew how to copy & paste.

FiloSottile 12y ago

> Working on something good will pull you along a path where good things keep happening to you. Words to live by. I'm 19, not attending college and experiencing some bits of success. I have friends that like to say (not maliciously) how I'm that kind of person that can keep making risky decisions because has big strikes of luck. What I keep trying to tell them, is that I have "big strikes of luck" because I keep myself always as exposed as possible to them. And I do so exactly with those decisions they deem risky, like not going to college, spending money on conferences, relocating, loosing ties.

jxf 12y ago
It's apocryphal [0], but I'm reminded of Thomas Jefferson's quote: "I am a great believer in luck -- the harder I work, the more I have of it." [0]: http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/i-am-great-believer-luckquotation http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/i-am...
- fossuser 12y ago
  There's also the other kind of luck that you're not really in control of. You can attempt to position yourself for the best possible outcome, but even the ability to do that may be determined by original surroundings. https://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S33/87/54K53/index.xml https://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S33/87/54K53/ind...
- PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  I don't mean to criticize you personally, but it's hard to take pithy aphorisms about the value of hard work seriously from someone who ran a slave plantation. Perhaps the real lesson here is: when someone in a position of power likes to talk about the value of hard work, take a minute to think about who's doing the work and who's reaping the value.
iLoch 12y ago
Amen. I'm right there with you. It's definitely not the cookie cutter success plan, and in some ways I'm happy about that. Personally I'm most excited to see where I'll be when my friends start looking for work after university. Not in a "haha, I'm better than you" kind of way - just as validation that what I've done isn't completely crazy. But who knows, maybe I'll be living out of a cardboard box somewhere in the heart of Silicon Valley in a couple years. :)

nickporter 12y ago

be around smart people Can't stress that enough. It made a huge difference for me during university.

theghostofLT 12y ago
Indeed - I would say this is probably the most important thing. I spent the first three years of my career in an Office Space BigCorp environment with colleagues and managers who were - well, I don't want to say stupid, but not terribly motivated, or intellectually curious, or particularly invested in the quality of their work. Emerging from that environment into one full of extraordinarily sharp and ambitious people who had spent years honing their craft and investing in themselves, and having to suddenly perform on their level, was a shock and an extremely unpleasant lesson in opportunity costs.

yzzxy 12y ago

This article worried me - because I'm ~19 and hadn't even considered not going to college. This is despite being directly in the discussed demographic. I have pretty conclusive evidence that I'm hiring material to some of these companies and have conceived of, planned, and built user-facing multiple technical projects independently. However, I've never thought of skipping out on college. I live in a very affluent area and even the academically worst-off seniors usually end up going to decent 4-year programs. The idea that so many people similar to me at my age would miss college for a startup or similar experience worries me because it makes me think that the community I've grown up with has distorted my perception of the opportunities available to me. It's time to take a long reevaluation of my plans, I think.

necubi 12y ago
There's nothing wrong with going to college. College can be great! If you do it right, you'll learn a lot about a diverse set of things including history, literature, the arts, and the sciences. If you're in a good program, you'll also learn the theoretical underpinnings of computer science, which I think is underappreciated by many in the industry. And really, you do have time. The Silicon Valley myth is that if you haven't had success by 22, you're done. And while there are outliers (including Sam), this is mostly a fiction. Many successful founders are in their late 20s, or even 30s, 40s and 50s. I was at a meet-up a few nights ago and met a team of 40-something founders that are reinventing film for the VR age. You have a lot of time, and you should be spending it learning. Whether the best place for that is in college or not, I urge you to remember that there are important parts of education that do not involve compilers or databases and which should not be neglected. But Sam's advice is good: be always learning, and surround yourself with smart people. You can certainly waste college, but it doesn't have to be a waste. Finally, I was in your position not very long ago, and if you'd like to talk, my email's in my profile.
brianchu 12y ago
Yeah, it's definitely a Silicon Valley thing. I grew up in SV and go to school at Berkeley, and dropping out is definitely considered a valid choice. People I know in SF encourage me to drop out all the time, and I know of several college students that dropped out. Edit (reply to below): I took a year off to work before I went to college, so I think I have a good perspective when I say this. You assume that: 1) college is going to educate someone about the world, get them a good job (not a measly startup job), give them discipline, and introduce them to cofounders; and 2) college will do this so much better than you could by working in industry that it justifies the cost (anywhere between $150-200k tuition for a good school, and possibly $200k in lost savings). Suffice to say, not all of those things are necessarily true. I'd be happy to talk about this perspective to anyone over email.

ARama 12y ago

> "be around smart people. " I couldn't agree more. I'm 20 years old and dropped out of university after my first year. There was a large amount of people I was surrounded by who weren't motivated at all and didn't really seem to take interest in anything we were doing. I moved to San Francisco ( from New Zealand ) after I dropped out in the beginning of 2013, attended a programming bootcamp and was surrounded by smart people who all shared the same drive and passion as me. It made a world of difference, my core group of friends were all people who breathed code. We all motivated each other to better ourselves and to learn new technologies. Moving to the valley was the best thing I've ever done, I learned so much in such a short amount of time and was even approached by some companies with some great offers. Unfortunately I had to move back to New Zealand as my year was up and US work visas require a degree or an extensive amount of experience. That was probably the biggest downside of dropping out, a degree can definitely open up many doors.

NAFV_P 12y ago

> No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people. That depends on whether these 'smart' people respect you, it is a horrible situation to have to hang around smart people who don't hold the same opinion of yourself.

doctorpangloss 12y ago

>If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory. There are a usually a handful of these at a time, and they are usually identifiable to a smart young person. >Working on something good will pull you along a path where good things keep happening to you. So his advice is, to boil it down, "Do successful stuff, but hopefully it's obvious to you what is going to be successful."

imsky 12y ago
Yeah, I noticed that, too. "Just be an expert at identifying successful startups early and get a job there."
ryandrake 12y ago
By the time you've identified that a company is truly that one out of a thousand that are on a breakout trajectory, it's too late, they've already got 50 other employees who will have all the equity. Basically, the advice boils down to, "Spin the startup roulette wheel or go join Microsoft for 30K more salary." VCs can increase their odds of lucking into the rocket ship growth company by investing in 100 companies. I can't work for 100 companies simultaneously.

edanm 12y ago

"If you start a company, only do so if you have an idea you’re in love with. If you’re hanging out with your friends trying to come up with an idea, I don’t think you should start that company (although there are many who disagree with me)." I'm one of those that disagree with this. Entrepreneurship is a long-term "profession" all of its own. If you plan to be an entrepreneur, you need to treat it as such. You need to work in it by e.g. building companies, you need to fail it in a few times before you succeed, etc. Most importantly, unlike most Software Developers, you need to realize the goal of an entrepreneur is to make money. You shouldn't be starting a company because you have a great idea, or because you feel like starting a company, but rather, because you want to make money and have identified that the path to make it is to be an entrepreneur and start this particular company. This affects both which companies you do start and which you don't. This is not to say I necessarily think starting a company at 19 is the right thing to do. My advice to ambitious 19 year olds who want to be entrepreneurs would be to find a job as a personal assistant to a CEO of a small company in the field they want to work in, and learn the ropes from her. NOTE: I give a very "entrepreneur==trying to get rich" perspective here, which I believe is sorely lacking in most young Software Developers. Some people start startups for other reasons entirely, which is of course great and absolutely your choice.

mseebach 12y ago
What are your thoughts on Alex Payne's Letter to a Young Programmer? Personally, I found it overly pessimistic, and my instinct is to be skeptical of such things - but I'm not knowledgable enough to actually pick apart his arguments. https://al3x.net/2013/05/23/letter-to-a-young-programmer.html https://al3x.net/2013/05/23/letter-to-a-young-programmer.htm...
UK-AL 12y ago
Software Developers are in it for the money too. Lets face it, most employed software developers would rather be working on their own interesting project, but can't because of financial reasons. They just won't admit to that, because they have silly idealism.

hayksaakian 12y ago

> Remember that there will be lots of other opportunities to start companies, and that startups are a 6-10 year commitment—wait for the right one I've heard conflicting advice on this topic. I'm currently of the opinion that you should fail fast. Does it really take six to ten years to determine if your startup failed? From my understanding if you've survived to year 6 and you're not delusional about your potential as a company, then you've already made it.

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Gustomaximus 12y ago
I see this more in the case of a business is not failing, but it's only slowly growing. I've met quite a few entrepreneurs who keep their business slowly growing for the 5 or so years perhaps move from them to a couple of employees and then around year 5/6/7 go into hyper growth and have 20 employees by year end. I think this happens particularity in business that has a personal element to do business. It takes time to get credibility, reputation and hone your business pitch.
- hayksaakian 12y ago
  Can you suggest some examples? I'd like to read about them.

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adwn 12y ago
> basing their business around product X [...] X was halting-problem-equivalent Now I'm curious: can you tell us more about this product?
- a-saleh 12y ago
  I was talking about this comment at lunch \w coleague, and he claimed, that his coleague found halting problem-equvalence in experimental package manager of fedora :) https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNF https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNF I haven't yet verified this claim, but when you are using sat solvers for dependency resulution ... it wouldn't suprise me that much if you could describe halting problem in the new & fancy dependency graph :D
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argonaut 12y ago
I wouldn't have ever considered Loopt a breakout company. You've defined breakout a little more liberally than I think Sam meant. I think companies like Airbnb / Pinterest are really good examples of the types of companies that Sam is referring to. Other, slightly more risky examples might include Stripe, Uber (mostly due to competition).
- bunkat 12y ago
  Even then - Airbnb is a souped up Craigslist that is breaking laws everywhere and Pinterest is yet another photo sharing board. They just happen to be very successful at the moment. Is that work really more interesting and engaging than creating operating systems, compilers, or working with the biggest of big data?

sorpaas 12y ago

This article is talking about 3 important things: * Build important stuff. * Learn new things / be around talented people. * Take right risks.

jqm 12y ago

Here is my advice: -Take everything with a healthy bit of secret skepticism but don't be cocky nor disrespectful. Very seldom does anything good come of that...but don't forget the skepticism. -Learn to control your passions. Character really is important even though people who say things like this are usually dimwillys. -Romantic relationships can break some people. Be aware, but don't give up the best things in life for lesser things. Certainly romantic relationships are among the best things in life. -Stay curious about other fields. Isolating in one discipline can give people myopia. But do focus and specialize. This is important. -Keep in mind that a lot will change in the next 60, and even next 10 years. Expect change and you won't be as thrown by it. Adaption is a very valuable skill. As far as college and starting a company... do what you feel is best. Certainly people succeed at many paths and likewise fail at many. The advice in the article about seeking out the smartest people is good though. Avoid the "party always" crowd. Bad things generally follow them.

kamaal 12y ago

One advice from my end is to cultivate the discipline to save and invest money. You will be surprised how much this one thing will put you light years ahead of many others folks by the time your turn 35 or 40. You will turn 35 and realize the past 1.5 decades went like a second, yet the the investments you made are bearing fruit during middle age. Time is on your side, the biggest weapon when it comes investments. Don't waste it. Keep loans away(unless your country has high inflation). Avoid credit card debt. Buy gold routinely. Try to get your self a own home to stay in, even if you actually can't stay in it(rent it out). Buy yourself a life insurance and most important of all investments by the time you turn 30 try to get married and have at least one kid.

thewarrior 12y ago
Buying a house in an Indian metro (without taking a loan) doesn't look too realistic for a person in his 20s.
- kamaal 12y ago
  No, but in any Indian metro you can easily buy a plot on the city outskirts for some money. Agreed that you may still need a loan. But that is likely to be in the figure of 10-12 lacs, given you have done basic savings in your early 20's. Also the inflation in India is close to 9%. Which means the principle you owe to the bank is losing value at the rate of 9% per annum, while your property value appreciates. Buying a car in your 20's is the worst mistake you can make. If you haven't made this mistake making 50% down payment to a plot in city outskirts should be a walk in the park. And the monthly gold saving schemes available with any big jeweller has helped people triple their money in as little as 5-6 years. Add to that the regular tax saving endowment insurance policies. In all if you have made your investments even with mediocre planning, you should end up pretty rich by 35.
joelrunyon 12y ago
> and most important of all investments by the time you turn 30 try to get married and have at least one kid. Why?

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

it's pretty good advice for 49 year olds too

gedrap 12y ago

Many people say that college/university is not worth it but I disagree. If the one you are attending makes you think it's not worth it, just get to a better one. I think university is a safe default choice. Yes, you will be learning things that you might never need. On the other hand, you will learn things you wouldn't have learned otherwise and they will open up your eyes. Also, you get to be surround with smart people (given you are at a good uni). And attending university doesn't mean you can't work on something on the side, and drop uni if things go well. Of course, there are cases when starting/continue working on your business is much better. But I believe those are exceptions, and if that's the case for you, you won't need anyone to tell you that. It will be obvious that you should do that.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago
I'd like to take the contrarian position here. I think that nowadays, if you are aiming for career skills and a position in industry, most university degrees and maybe an internship or two will prepare you extremely well. Degree programs today largely seem to focus on taking the student from the bare ignorance of their secondary education to the most fundamental rudiments of really understanding a field and thence to Hard Work and Job Skills as fast as possible. The elite universities distinguish themselves by also doing this as intensively and painfully as possible. What they don't actually prepare their students for is really understanding a field in-depth and coming up with genuinely sound new ideas. This seems to be something people are supposed to learn on their own sometime around the PhD level, as not even graduate school ever seems to actually teach with the aim of real understanding. Self-study (for the truly masochistic ;-)) or mentorship are the only ways given for a student to actually reach the frontier of knowledge in anything, and quite often, nobody exposes the young to a broad enough base of rigorous knowledge for them to have even heard important facts about their own field. It's kind of like how you have to get involved in programming-language theory or a few other small specialties to ever hear about category theory, despite it's being so general that it's been called the next major foundation of mathematics after set theory.
reillyse 12y ago
Agreed, I've spent 10 years in university and I couldn't be happier with my choices. I feel I've really got a deep appreciation for my craft and my own abilities and I've always been able to work on my side projects at the same time. So I'd say going to university is rarely ever a bad choice. Also, there will be plenty of time later to work, why not have some fun first and make a huge peer group of interesting intelligent people who have similar hobbies and interests to you.

mqsiuser 12y ago

I live in Germany and I can't move to the valley easily (will investigate on "work visa" and I will take part in the green card lottery over the next couple of years :) But even if I make it to SV, nothing ever relieves you from thinking really hard constantly (and informing yourself). There are so many influencing factors and the article is great, but I can also see that people tend to overestimate themselves (including me). Thought exchange is key and you'll find people you can do that with, e.g. in College. Ryan Dahl did node in Germany and he was exchanging thoughts with someone who was just (only) listening and giving him (sanity) feedback. So though exchange may or is also very valuable (from someone) when you have a genius idea. College or university can also be an accelerator and maybe you'd consider joining to actually have a lot of spare time to do the next Facebook by exploiting it's context (e.g. people). And think of the big ones: They dropped out of college (when they were successful)! We are always having (very) limited knowledge and there usually is (always) a high risk. If Google or Apple just decides to do cars this may wipe out all car manufactures in the rest of the world, since for some reason they seem to be just able to do so.

mvembu 12y ago

"No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people. “Stuff” can be a lot of different things—open source projects outside of class, a startup, a new sales process at a company you work at—but, obviously, sitting around talking with your friends about how you guys really should build a website together does not count." Building stuff is true for to all age groups including VC's

gabzuka 12y ago

I don't understand why people would want to go straight to work when only 19 if they have the choice not to. That's the best age to enjoy and learn about life, to grow as an integral person. I would never ever exchange the time I had at uni for being at work, no matter what I could be doing. At uni not only did I become a programmer, I also met by best friends, I met my now wife, I got involved in social issues, I traveled, I formed a band, learned foreign languages and yes went to lots of parties, nothing wrong with parties. It's not related to what I do on a daily basis for work? No, so what?. Has it helped me in my career? I don't know, but I still got my dream job and it has surely made me a much happier person.

klunger 12y ago

Someone should write advice for ambitious 29 year olds who only recently discovered the marvelous world of web development and entrepreneurship, after a more typical decade of school and work drudgery...

Gustomaximus 12y ago
Would it be that different? Perhaps swap university for MBA and a few smal things but the fundamentals stay the same.

personlurking 12y ago

"One big con is that it’s easy to start a company for the wrong reasons—usually so that you can say you’re starting a company—and this makes it easy to cloud your judgment." Recently, I've randomly come across a lot of people here in Lisbon, all in their 20s, saying they're in a brand-new startup or starting one. When I ask them about it, mum is the word. They hesitate and fumble for words, say a key word or two, then speak very generally before clamming up. It's amazing how many times I've seen this exact scene play itself out in the last few months. It's a mixture of being unsure about what they're doing and not wanting someone to steal their idea. They're all either novice coders without a business-minded partner, or vice-versa. It's to the point that I often feel like I'm in a scene from the Truman Show. Seeing this happen, and while being in the midst of starting my own thing, I'm hesitant to say I'm doing a startup. I find myself preferring to say 'I'm starting a business online'.

abledon 12y ago
The idea of not being able to express what your company is about was kind of covered in silicon valley episode 4 haha

stiff 12y ago

If you describe yourself as an "ambitious 19 year old" (and ambition by itself is not necessarily a virtue) and if you tie your happiness to doing "something great", you are likely in for a very unhappy life. Everything we do, will ultimately be undone, if you extend the time horizon long enough. The greatest scientists, inventors, football players and political leaders get forgotten after a few generations, in fact whole civilizations have been living on this very earth, and were since erased from its surface, many of which we might have not a single trace left of. Being "great" in our culture typically accounts to beating hundreds of people, so by definition for every person who succeeds there will be hundreds of "loosers". This is a ridiculous game, and I think every wise person should refuse to participate in it in the first place and set their own priorities. You should do things to try to have a happy life from day to day, not to "get somewhere".

enscr 12y ago
Subtle & important yet widely misunderstood or misinterpreted. Being happy is important, not the other way round.
yebyen 12y ago
This seems like as good a place as any to bring up Great Ozymandias... I think I prefer Smith's version to Shelley's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Comparison_of_the_two_poems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Comparison_of_the_tw...
vbuterin 12y ago
> Everything we do, will ultimately be undone, if you extend the time horizon long enough. Well, not necessarily. Economics quite clearly says that the total future benefit of any amount of nonzero-benefit present activity, at least if measured in currency units, tends toward infinity; that's why we have interest rates and the concept of rent. Of course, it's not the optimal strategy for securing personal happiness unless you already know you have a solid chance, especially if you're shooting for the "remembered by humanity for all time" mark and not something more modest, but living for progress is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
lispylol 12y ago

jw2013 12y ago

Great article. >> If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory. There are a usually a handful of these at a time, and they are usually identifiable to a smart young person... Spending a few years at a company that fails has path consequences, and working at an already-massively-successful company means you will learn much less, and probably work with less impressive people. I actually find it opposite. First of all, it is not so easy to identify a company on a breakout trajectory. The line between a breakout success and failure is just too thin on an early-stage startups. Even if the startup works on the same field as your expertise, you have been following that field for years, and you think the founders are brilliant, you can still get the judgement wrong a lot of the time. I think a startup's failure is not so bad for a young and ambitious employee. There are just as many lessons can be learnt from failure as from success. As for path consequences, the young kids got so many productive years left and one failure is not really destructive or harmful. And a great thing is, if a startup fails most likely it fails fast. For your next job, people won't hire/reject you because the previous company you worked for failed, they hire/reject because you are brilliant or not. Likely the stuff you learnt in the failed startup will make you a brilliant person (tech and non-tech wise).

sdnguyen90 12y ago

I dropped out but looking back it was a very risky decision even though I was already making a little bit of money. I was confident in my skills at the time but now looking back I didn't know shit. There are so many potential unforeseen situations in life that can take you off track pretty bad(relationships, family passing away, etc.). I was lucky to have a job that allowed me to have time to hone my technical skills at the same time. If any of those situations happened to me, I probably would be stuck in a very bad financial situation that I would never have been able to bounce back from. I see a lot of my friends who dropped out because their families couldn't afford to not have them working full time and it looks like they won't be able to make that much more than minimum wage for a while.

d--b 12y ago

The "hang around smart people" advice doesn't make any sense. First, you should hang around whoever you want to hang around with. Second, define smart

AYBABTME 12y ago

Not getting a degree pretty much only applies as a viable option for US citizens.

maj0rhn 12y ago

When I look around Silicon Valley, I see a lot of 40-somethings and older who have been very successful in their technical endeavors, but now have narrow lives because they never took the time to become complete persons. The best thing you can do as ambitious 19 year old is recognize that there is a lot more to the world than technology, and that college is effectively the only time in your life that you can, guilt-free, learn about the arc of civilization, or study Shakespeare in depth, or have a hope of learning biochemistry. Remember Henlein: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." Starting a company is rather a ridiculous thing to do when the entire world is open to you.

graeme 12y ago
As a counterpoint: if I could do college over, I would have taken something practical, like programming, and bootstrapped a company. I started at 25, and bootstrapped a company. I'm 28, and I now have enough passive income that I can do pretty much what I want. I enjoyed my 20s. I would have enjoyed them even more if I had had this same setup from age 21-23. Of course, I only recommend this with the specific goal of "freedom" in mind. I do like the topics you selected to study though. I studied international relations and economics. The second taught me a bit, and the first I learned from my own readings. I would recommend students study either: A very practical skill that will help them be free of their time (programming, design, etc.) or something interesting, that's harder to learn outside of school (Shakespeare, fine arts, music, dance, one of the sciences)
- philangist 12y ago
  I'm an "ambitious 19 year old" (it feels really weird to say that), and I have a fulltime job as a programmer, but I'd be really interested in hearing about this. While I'm currently very happy at my job and will probably remain here for a few more hours, I'd like to hear about the process of bootstrapping a company.

lispylol 12y ago

> If you’re hanging out with your friends trying to come up with an idea, I don’t think you should start that company The difference between a founder that started a company this way versus a founder that started a company out of significant personal experience is astounding. The way they talk about their company is utterly different and I imagine that has a great deal of influence on hiring as well.

michaelochurch 12y ago

Even if you want to be a VC, you’re much better off starting or joining a startup, and getting partner offers when you’re 28. Plus, good founders want to work with an investor that has operational experience. This is the kind of misleading startup bullshit that needs to stop. The vast majority of people who enter the startup racket are not getting partner-level VC offers 9 years later. The VC Valhalla that awaits failed startup founders doesn't really exist. That happens if you get extremely lucky (< 0.01%) or have rich parents, in which case normal advice doesn't apply. If you want to be a VC, get a Harvard MBA. It's a lot easier than doing a startup (you're competing against MBAs instead of hackers, which means that what good programmers would consider average intelligence would put you in the top 5%) and the path is surer. The reason risk-averse people prefer the MBA path is because (surprise?) it's more likely to work.

jmscharff2 12y ago

I am very scared about this new trend in, hey you like tech/programming and want to be an entrepreneur skip college join/start a company. While yes you can be very successful and you can learn a lot, if you fail or the company fails you are stuck with a resume where you have no degree, no formal education just a job where you may have learned a lot but a lot of the time that cannot get you in the door of the next company. I worry that people who went to these top schools MIT/Harvard/Yale etc are telling people to not go to school, if you take a very smart person and they drop out of a top school that is completely different than having a 19 year old kid not sure what to do with his life and he enjoys programming. It just seems like a scary trend that is cropping up in tech, sure you can learn a lot if not more from a startup than your college education but the degree is what will get you in the door to a lot of places in your future. That degree is the base for your career, its great to join/start a startup but if that fails you have nothing to fall back on, if you think you can get an interview with no degree to a top tier company and you dont have some kind of crazy resume then you are clearly living in a dream world. A single job where your company failed will not be the same as a degree. (all assuming that you dont become a billionaire from this startup)

the_watcher 12y ago

I love this post, especially this: "The secret is that any of these can be right answer, and you should make your decision based on the specific circumstances of each option." My general advice to ambitious young people - go do something fun, interesting, and challenging that your unique age allows. Generally, this means it is something made possible by the combination of an abundance of free time and absence of major life responsibilities (like bills and children). So long as it meets all 3 of those characteristics, if you think you'd want to do it someday, just do it now. Leave the US and travel. Go to college and have fun (but remember that challenging is one of your key characteristics, and don't forget to challenge yourself). Start a company. You are 19. If you fail, no one will hold it against you, and you'll never regret it if you actually did something fun, challenging, and interesting. The one piece of (slightly depressing) advice I would add this: student loans can be great for ambitious 19 year olds. Just know that you have to start repaying them 6 months after you quit going to school (if you can, only take subsidized loans and do your best to pay at least the interest+at least $1 towards principal of the rest while in school. Had one friend who did this, and I was shocked at the difference it made, perhaps naively), and if what you do after that doesn't allow to rapidly pay them off, you'll lose a lot of the freedom you had at 19 before you expected (coming from someone who has a small enough loan burden to have some freedom as a 25 year old, but large enough to prevent me from simply not having a steady income).

Balgair 12y ago

The best advice for the young man (most techy people at 19 are men, and I assume this onward), is and will always will be: 1)You can never overdress 2)Dance a lot 3)Always ask out the best looking girl in the room. 4)Leave college or any job with a piece of work (thesis, rock opera, example circuit boards, etc) 5)Go left. If your opponent knows you can't shoot left, you are done for. Applies to war, business and arguments. 6)Shake hands very firmly. Especially with women. It's respect. 7)Keep the gas at a half tank. Emergencies happen. 8)Family is more important to most people than their own life, or yours. 9)Use tools, learn to fix your own car. 10)Learn to cook well. Flip burgers and steaks ONCE and ONLY ONCE. DO NOT squeeze the juices out of them. 11)DO NOT become addicted. Do not develop alcoholism or start smoking. Enjoy these things, sure, but chemical addiction is horrible. 12) Set goals every 6 months. Write them down, tell your family about them, post them on your fridge. Nothing here has anything to do with ambition. That's more a personality trait and isn't really adoptable or disposable. Luck has so much to do with life and business and can't be assumed. But that is OK. Relax, dance, drink wine with your new wife. Play with your niece and grandfather. But hustle your ass off when you aren't. Work hard at things you enjoy. If you don't enjoy them, set a goal for when you are leaving and work on that at least once a day. Happiness is NOT success. Happiness is what you are and if you let others define your happiness, be they heroin or cigarettes or Harvard admissions committee or Palantir or Jeff Bezos, then you are not going to be happy. I have literally 919 more one-liners and lots of quotes I hope to give to a son someday. Most of it is stupid simple reminders, but some I hope will help that young man along in life.