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"So strangely enough the optimal thing do to in college if you want to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational version of college fo
by dkural 12y ago
"So strangely enough the optimal thing do to in college if you want to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational version of college focused on "entrepreneurship." It's the classic version of college as education for its own sake. If you want to start a startup after college, what you should do in college is learn powerful things. And if you have genuine intellectual curiosity, that's what you'll naturally tend to do if you just follow your own inclinations. [10]
The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. The way to become Larry Page was to become an expert on search. And the way to become an expert on search was to be driven by genuine curiosity, not some ulterior motive.
At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity. And you'll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive toward the end of the process.
So here is the ultimate advice for young would-be startup founders, boiled down to two words: just learn."
This is my favorite part. Elon Musk does it this way even after his first few companies. He goes and learns a bunch of stuff to the cutting edge.
- DodgyEggplant 12y agoThe most important point in the lecture: Startups are the one area where the traditional gaming of the system will not work. May bring you seed or even series A, but not users. Learning in a college is, after all, gaming a traditional system.
- strlen 12y ago> He goes and learns a bunch of stuff to the cutting edge. Some of my best work and graduate school assignments had started off by being handed an RFC (or a language, or a third party library, or a paper, etc...), asked to become an expert on it, and then implement it (or in the case of a library to re-factor old NIH-y code to use that library, etc...). Learning isn't useful as preparation for something else, but it's extremely rewarding in it of itself.
- Vulkum 12y agoSome of the things I've learned at university are pretty interesting and fun to play with. Now, notice the "fun to play" with part. Some thing require a lot of investment (both money and time) in order to be learned. So, I believe it's not unfeasible to want to start a company so that you can fund your curiosity and learn the new things. The company itself might fail, or might not, but I believe as long as the purpose was to learn something new, failing is not as bad. If you start a company thinking this is the future, and you put value in making money as opposed to learning, then failing is losing.
- chton 12y agoIn an ideal world, that would be possible, yes. But a company does need to make some money, even if only to pay its founders for their time. That money can come from investments, but if you start a company just to learn new stuff you'll have a hard time finding those.
- Patient0 12y agoI found this ironic given that he was saying this as a guest lecturer for Sam Altman's "startup" class at Stanford.
- dnissley 12y agoI didn't find it ironic because those are people who are quite likely to go out and do the opposite, which is to focus on money or some other extrinsic motivation.