
If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else - Xodarap
http://philosophyforprogrammers.blogspot.com/2014/09/if-you-want-to-start-startup-go-work.html
======
nostrademons
I've done both - worked for 2 other people's startups, founded my own, worked
5+ years at Google, now founding another. My experience is that you learn
something from both, but you learn _different things_ from each, and which
will teach you more depends on what skills you need to learn.

Working for someone else's startup, I learned how to quickly cobble solutions
together. I learned about uncertainty and picking a direction regardless of
whether you're sure it'll work. I learned that most startups fail, and that
when they fail, the people who end up doing well are the ones who were looking
out for their own interests all along. I learned a lot of basic technical
skills, how to write code quickly and learn new APIs quickly and deploy
software to multiple machines. I learned how quickly problems of scaling a
development team crop up, and how early you should start investing in
automation.

Working for Google, I learned how to fix problems once and for all and build
that culture into the organization. I learned that even in successful
companies, everything is temporary, and that great products are usually built
through a lot of hard work by many people rather than great ah-ha insights. I
learned how to architect systems for scale, and a lot of practices used for
robust, high-availability, frequently-deployed systems. I learned the value of
research and of spending a lot of time on a single important problem: many
startups take a scattershot approach, trying one weekend hackathon after
another and finding nobody wants any of them, while oftentimes there are
opportunities that nobody has solved because nobody wants to put in the work.
I learned how to work in teams and try to understand what other people want. I
learned what problems are really painful for big organizations. I learned how
to rigorously research the market and use data to make product decisions,
rather than making decisions based on what seems best to one person.

Founding a startup, I learned the limitations of all of the above, and that
even if you know in theory what can go wrong, it's quite a different matter to
avoid committing those mistakes too. I learned a lot _more_ technical skills;
it turns out that no matter how well you prepared in your job, finding a
workable startup opportunity requires that you do things that you don't know
how to do. I learned how to talk to other people and gather information about
the market from ordinary conversations. I learned to make decisions in the
absence of firm information, _knowing_ that I may be wrong but that I can't
make any forward progress without trying something out that is almost
certainly wrong. I learned how to take expedient shortcuts, and to un-learn
many of the rigorous engineering practices that I learned working for people
because they don't apply in this environment.

I've found many of these self-reinforce as well - I got farther on the first
startup because I'd learned many of the basic technical skills from the two
startup jobs I'd had before, then got into Google from the skills I taught
myself founding that startup, then have a different perspective on what's
possible for the second startup because of the work I did at Google. The
overlap is less than I (or most people) would like, but one of the unfortunate
facts of life you learn as you get older is that life is not a linear path of
one move reliably preparing you for the next, and there are often twists of
pure luck that throw a monkey wrench into all your plans.

~~~
hglaser
This is a great comment, thank you!

> I learned that most startups fail, and that when they fail, the people who
> end up doing well are the ones who were looking out for their own interests
> all along.

Can you elaborate on this? How were people "looking out for their own
interests", and how did it end up helping them? Could the founders have done
things differently to make the outcome more equitable?

Thanks!

~~~
bdowling
Also not the person you are replying to, but I have my own experience with
this.

Basically the people who leave a failing firm early do better than those who
stick around until the money runs out. They find better jobs faster because
they're not competing with a bunch of their former coworkers, they don't have
a gap in their employment to explain, and they don't have to answer the
question of why they stayed when they should have known the company was
failing. If you find yourself in this situation and you think that loyalty has
any value, think again.

------
saddino
The path I took (founded four startups previously, two exits, currently
working on fifth) was to first have a go at consulting.

Working for yourself is not much different from running a startup. You have a
product (yourself). You have sales (winning contracts). You have accounting
(for your invoices and for your expenses) and have to keep books. You have
legal (your contracts). It's a great way to learn how to run a (hopefully)
profitable business and build the foundation you'll need to run a startup.

------
Tloewald
Very informative and amusing post. My favorite statistic was the 18% of
entrepreneurs succeed the first time, and only 20% succeed the second time.

> The sort of person who jumps in and gives advice to the masses without doing
> a lot of research first generally believes that you should jump in and do
> things without doing a lot of research first.

Like most good polemics, this one probably overstates the case. It seems to me
that if you want to pursue an idea when you're young and inexperienced then go
for it; but don't go for "it" because doing so is intrinsically better than
getting a job.

In my thirties I left a pretty promising career to pursue the dream of
designing games and running a games company. I failed (in the ways I cared
about -- we didn't lose money or go broke). I _think_ I learned a lot. One
thing I learned is that sometimes there are advantages to being young, and
poor, and hungry (in the "stay hungry" sense) and sometimes there are
advantages to being older, comfortably well-off, and experienced.

~~~
graeme
>My favorite statistic was the 18% of entrepreneurs succeed the first time,
and only 20% succeed the second time.

This is a potentially misleading stat. The second cohort only includes the
failures. So clearly at least some of them learned something.

It's a 36% total success rate for entrepreneurs who try twice.

(Though I guess that number is missing those that try once and don't try
again)

~~~
Tloewald
There is nothing to suggest that the second cohort _only_ includes failures,
and bear in mind that many people -- having failed -- won't try a second time
-- and if they've learned anything, it will be the people who figure out
they're never going to succeed who drop out. Without knowing the probability
that someone who succeeds vs. fails will try again there's simply no way to
tell.

Anecdotally, it's very common for entrepreneurs to start a business, wait
until it's up and running, sell it, and start over. This applies both in high-
tech and more prosaic areas like restaurants and gas stations. I imagine that
first-time successes are _very_ likely to try again.

~~~
Smirnoff
Actually, the post says it explicitly that this 20% includes only failures.
--> "... entrepreneurs who previously failed have a 20% chance of succeeding."

~~~
Tloewald
But what chance of success do entrepreneurs who previously succeeded have?

~~~
Smirnoff
This statistic wasn't there but one could imagine that it would be higher than
20%. Also, keep in mind that success is a subjective term -- for some people
it's when you make $1M, break-even or get acquihired, for others it's at least
$100M or $1B.

------
btipling
> It's unclear whether the average person learns anything from a startup.

> Entrepreneurs don't seem to learn much from their failures

There is a difference between not learning anything at all and not learning
something from failures that will help in a future startup venture. I have
learned a tremendous amount working at startups. I am closer to everything,
nothing is in a silo and I have gotten exposure to all parts of the
architecture whereas at an employer I would have been barred from
infrastructure and operation tasks. There is also much more freedom to use
whatever technology you want to try out, and thus you learn a lot about new
programming languages and new libraries and new ways of doing things without
having to get approval from layers of management and architects. You learn
about your self too, your limits, you have to become independent, and self-
reliant.

> Our most important finding is that the reward to the entrepreneurs who
> provide the ideas and long hours of hard work in these startups is zero.

Maybe if you only consider money. If you are into startups for the money
alone, I feel like I would agree, stay away. If you're in a start up for the
small team size, for controlling your own destiny, for being close to the
customer, close to the product, and don't want to see your life's days waste
away in meetings and products that never see the light of day then the value
is actually immeasurable.

------
rcarrigan87
Analysis like this is interesting because it assesses entrepreneurship like a
career choice. Most entrepreneurs arise out of an idea. They aren't sitting on
HN dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur(not that there is anything wrong with
that). You see an unfulfilled need in the marketplace, believe you have the
solution and can smell the money.

The thought, "is this a good long-term career choice?" isn't in the equation.
That's for people looking to build a career. This is your one great idea that
will make you rich, fuck a career. You are your boss from now on.

If your thought process doesn't look like that than maybe you just haven't
stumbled upon that great idea. The idea that strips every rational bone out of
your body, that keeps you up at night. Or may you just don't have the risk
tolerance for entrepreneurship.

It's a fairly cavalier mindset, but you have to have that kind of naivete to
outlive the struggles of starting a business.

~~~
Xodarap
> Most entrepreneurs arise out of an idea.

And how did you get that idea? How did you get the experience to see that
there was an unfilled need in the marketplace?

People who have experience in a field perceive their risks as lower
(correctly!) and are therefore more likely to start a company. It is a
perfectly rational decision and is unrelated to risk tolerance.

~~~
rcarrigan87
Exactly my point actually. You work in an industry, might even have a cozy
corporate job and great benefits. You're on a solid career trajectory. Leaving
that to start a company rarely makes financial sense. But most people aren't
assessing it through that lens. They know their industry, have a great idea,
and they HAVE TO DO IT. Even if financially it seems nuts!

~~~
Xodarap
Entrepreneurs are, in general, not motivated by money. This may be what you
are saying - in which case I agree! What I object to is this statement:

> Or may you just don't have the risk tolerance for entrepreneurship.

Risk tolerance is at best weakly related to the likelihood that you will
become an entrepreneur, and risk-tolerant entrepreneurs [perform
worse]([http://hal.archives-
ouvertes.fr/docs/00/85/66/06/PDF/PEER_st...](http://hal.archives-
ouvertes.fr/docs/00/85/66/06/PDF/PEER_stage2_10.1016%252Fj.jebo.2010.02.012.pdf))
than average.

------
hellodevnull
The general idea is the same in education and almost every other aspect of
life: learning enough, then applied practice. You do a programming language
tutorial then work on your own programs to really grasp it. If you skip the
first step you'll make needless mistakes and pick up bad habits, if you skip
the second you'll rarely be of much use in the real world.

Here, working at another company can be considered the first step in learning
about building businesses, and I'm sure it's beneficial, but in startups I've
found you can quickly learn and practice whatever you're intending or supposed
to do. Let me give an example form personal experience. At one point in my
life I had never sold anything before and probably would have been a lot
better if I had worked in another company and observed the sales department,
however, when my time came, I had to start contacting customers. I spent a
while reading about sales then just went for it. I improved a lot in a short
space of time... now I consider this an accelerated experience gain because I
researched exactly what I needed for a particular task and applied it to a
problem. In the same way I'd only learn about some particular aspect of
programming because I've discovered it's what I need.

------
ffn
Article is confusing "startup" with "small business", if your field and your
methods are old enough to be tried-and-true then, yes, by all means,
apprentice yourself and learn the ropes. After spending the 7 or so years
working in a social-networking company, you too can create another stable
small-business in social-networking that (for example) staggers users' twitter
posts or sells slightly ridiculous shirts to facebook hipsters. If you balance
your books and keep at it, you'll probably make a handsome chunk of money and
maybe even make it really big one day.

If your field / technology / process is dangerously new and untested because
you just invented it (e.g. you're mining titanium from the moon using gravity
fields, you're desalinating sea water, you're selling a headset that streams
movies into your right eye checks your social feed in your left eye and sucks
your dick), there's going to be preciously little other people and books can
teach you. You've entered the realm of vague opinions, uncertain grey zones,
and questionable futures. In that case, you're only choice is to either not do
it and wait for more tests to return, or do it blindly in hopes of learning on
the job.

PG and his cronies recommend the "just do it" path for startups in the second
category because if you succeed, you'll find yourself in a temporary market
monopoly where you'll be entitled to make astronomical amounts of money. PG
and his cronies then invest maybe 1% or so of their utility while you invest
around 99% of your utility. If your business succeeds, PG and friends get a
1.5x boost to their utilities, while you get maybe a 2x boost to yours. If
your business fails, PG and friends shrug it off and offer you some words of
encouragement as you pick up the splattered mess of your life off the floor
and write a book about how the world wasn't ready for the movie-streaming-eye-
sucking machine.

~~~
georgemcbay
"e.g. you're mining titanium from the moon using gravity fields, you're
desalinating sea water"

The fundamental disconnect here is that while there are some "startups" that
actually do novel things, most are more like "build some ruby on rails app
that does XYZ thing that has always been done, but do it on computers, and
maybe cheaper than the big guy can by just ignoring existing regulations until
we get big enough that anyone cares".

And then you wind up with a startup company probably full of 20 year olds who
are smart and driven but haven't yet seen the hundreds of ways in which they
can paint themselves into a corner with bad software practices which creates
this negative feedback loop where everyone is working 80-120 hours spinning
their wheels trying to get shit to "just work" whereas if they had more
experienced technical talent (say people who have worked on highly scalable
software at google or microsoft or whoever for 5 years) who have already "seen
some shit", they would likely have much higher quality at a fraction of the
development time.

(And while the salaries for experienced folks would have to be higher per
employee, they could get by with a lot less of them and still have better
code).

------
god_bless_texas
I would agree that if you don't intend to utterly disrupt some industry, that
some experience working in another company can be helpful.

I would argue that as much good knowledge may be gained that the equal number
of bad habits may be learned and turn you into an "inside the box thinker".

Working in a hardware startup is a great example of this duality, however. Old
engineers know that planning, testing, and quality debugging lead to a great
product and that no amount of research can beat a good test program. Young
engineers are willing to try stuff because they don't know what they don't
know. Some huge innovations have come from younguns trying stuff that
"shouldn't" work, and become industry shaping product innovations.

Who's right in the end? Both have been.

Last, I think I am pretty sick of people saying "what the formula is". Just
shut up, because there isn't one!

------
Smirnoff
After working for a big multinational pay company, an investment bank, and a
year-long internship at a VC firm, and now starting my own business, I really
appreciate the experiences that I got from BigCo, especially when it comes to
operations, managing customer service, and doing lots of manual work.

Here are my lessons: 1\. MVP should be very minimal. Do not bloat it with lots
of automation. Just let a human deal with it. That's when you get real user
feedback, which you can later automate.

2\. Track your interactions with customers (investors, angels, partners) via
"Saleforce"-like software. There are cleaner and easier versions out there,
which can integrate with the web or mobile apps, and the customer will not
even know he or she submitted a ticket or has some reference number.

3\. At startup things go really fast, however the tech is being slow to
release.

------
wellboy
I've been doing my startup and have been working in companies on and off on
the side and to be honest I have a quite strong opinion towards the point of
view that people need to collect experience in a company before starting their
company. I think this is really bad. More specifically, every single day that
you work at a company

1\. The likelihood of you starting a company and the final size of your
company decreases, because every day you learn more about what's not possible.
Your mind becomes more restricted and corporate experience will certainly not
encourage you to invent Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Uber. These ideas can
only be done by people who have NO restrictions whatsoever in their minds, who
think everything is possible. Corporate life will prevent you from having
these ideas and that is why I want to prevent working in a company by all
means as long as I can. Which brings us to our second point.

2\. You get more used to corporate life, which includes receiving a pay-check,
which is mostly not based on how much money you made the company, adapting
your personality so that you are good in company politics, so that you look
good, so that you get promoted, but that's actually not good for the company.
These learnings are very bad for starting a company.

3\. You come closer to having kids. I think having kids is probably the
biggest factor preventing people from starting companies. Having kids is
almost like starting a company, they are your own startup, so having 2
startups is near to impossible.

There is some merit in working at a company, to learn about how politics are
weaved into corporate life. This helps you to understand that when you need to
sell to a larger company that the person you are selling to care much more
about how they look by buying your product than how good your product actually
is for his/her company.

This is why working 6 months does have value, which is how long it usually
takes to understand how company politics work. However everything more than 6
months will reduce your capability in starting your own startup, every single
day.

------
lambdasquirrel
It kind of drives me nuts that I've read a lot of this research elsewhere, and
all of my experiences have either flew in the face of them, or there were
major asterisks. It makes me wonder, who were the people being studied,
because I can see all of this being true in the general population, and you
can even see it in most of the valley.

There is something about the results that I don't trust, much like the way
that I don't trust anything I read about what's good or bad for you. Years
ago, they said fat was bad for you. Turns out, it's complicated. Then they
said carbs were bad. All I can tell is that my parent's immigrant diet was
healthier in ways that could not be assessed by "research."

~~~
kvee
I think it has something to do with the idea that 3% of YC applicants have a
100% chance of getting an interview.

If you follow PG's ethos perfectly maybe you choose to work at a great startup
that is going to succeed and then you start your own. Work at Justin.tv, and
then start Twitch/ZeroCater

~~~
Xodarap
I would disagree with the causality. The sort of person who can get an
influential job in a top-tier startup is probably also the sort of person who
can start a good company.

~~~
kvee
Sure. And that person would benefit from working at the top tier startup
before starting his own.

------
jobvandervoort
I found that starting a startup taught me quickly what I didn't know. In my
case, it led me to search for a place where I could learn what I needed.

It's hard to know what to look for, what to learn, when you have not ran
against any walls. Starting a startup forces you to find solutions you don't
have, for problems you weren't aware off. You might have many solutions when
employed, but you're unaware whether those will help you with your startup and
what problems you might encounter.

------
StandardFuture
While I am not the first person to defend Paul Graham's writing, I must admit
that the author of this article has zero understanding of what is _actually_
meant by the phrase "just do it."

All that statement relays is this: there is _no_ secret formula to having a
successful startup! So, the only way to figure things out is to actually be
out there doing it.

It is very true that you _can_ learn things working for someone else that
would contribute to your future startup. But that is highly dependent on who
you are working for and what you are doing for them.

As in regards to the cited studies. The first study actually lists a total of
_8_ important factors for startups that lasted longer than 5 years and were
started between 1991-2000. Interestingly, startups during those years had a 1
in 5 chance of survival. (Sidepoint: Does anyone know if the survival rate for
startups today is anywhere close to this rate?) In other words, industry
experience is only _one_ of many factors ... and industry experience means
_having worked in the same industry as your startup_ , it doesn't mean working
in any industry for any employer.

To list the 8 important factors for everyone (and I have a feeling that these
are in order of importance):

1\. supply chain integration 2\. market scope 3\. firm age 4\. size of
founding team 5\. financial resources 6\. founders' marketing experience 7\.
founders' industry experience 8\. existence of patent protection

[0]
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5885.2007....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5885.2007.00280.x/full)

------
ivanhoe
Companies are like babies, if you wait to be 100% ready to have one, you'll
never have one. You will never know everything, you will never be prepared for
everything. Being fully in control (specially through means of statistical
modeling) is just an illusion, it might be true for big enough samples, but
means nothing for your particular case... and that is why Paul Graham's advice
is actually a very good one.

------
benjamincburns
Not that I have heaps of experience to base this on, but here's my general
thoughts on a good strategy:

    
    
        while(0 == ideas.good_ideas.count ||
            FAIL == start_company(&ideas, &experience)) {
    
            // no ideas, or failed startup
            while(THRESHOLD > experience.why_failed.confidence ||
                0 == ideas.good_ideas.count) {
                
                // no ideas, and/or not sure why startup failed
                work_in_leadership_for_young_but_successful_company(&experience, &ideas);
            }
        }
    
        // would be interested to read more articles on
        // what goes here
        end_game();
    

I think employment for the sake of being a better entrepreneur is a great
strategy, but only if you can find the right role, and only if you approach it
with the correct frame of mind.

------
gdonelli
According to the author: \- 18% success rate for time founders \- 20% success
rate after that

Implying previous experience almost doesn't matter that much... so just trying
5 times should assure 1 success.

In that view, starting your company as soon as you can would still be the best
way to get to your first success faster.

~~~
Afforess
> _So trying 5 times should assure 1 success_

That's NOT how probability works. Just because you have a 50-50 chance of
flipping heads does not mean it only takes two try's to get heads. On AVERAGE
it does.

~~~
jere
Yea, I think even if people know this they don't intuitively grasp _how far
off_ they are. Five tries at 20% success rate is only 67% overall. That's
about the same odds you have to win two rounds of russian roulette.

To have an overall 99% chance (what we might conversationally say is a
guarantee), it'd take 21 tries.

------
inthewoods
I've got a full time job, and I've done startups - both are obviously
valuable. A friend of mine approached me recently with the idea of doing a
startup - but he didn't have any ideas. He wanted to do consulting in his
chosen space to find that idea.

My problem with this is that, in my mind, it doubles the risk - you have go
into consulting (which is not risk free), then hope you find an idea. There is
then additional risk of starting the company and finding out if the idea is a
scalable product - I've had it happen twice that we thought we had a product,
but it turned out we had a product that required so much consulting to launch
we were essentially a consulting company.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Consulting isn't all that risky depending. I never made as much money as when
I was part of a consulting partnership. But the work was less
glamorous/interesting. Mostly solving legacy system problems (where by
definition companies might have lost their expertise and have to call in an
outsider).

At least a startup is always new and fresh, at least with a good product.
That's why I gave up on consulting (that and the other partners had a falling-
out) and have been in startups every since.

~~~
inthewoods
Did you find any ideas while consulting that you could use in spinning up a
startup? I agree with you about consulting.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sure ideas are a dime a dozen. Getting a team, funding, traction are all more
important.

------
mdparker89
The self-employment study says that when people who are self-employed switch
to dependent employment their wages are at least as high as their dependent
employment counterparts.

From an earnings perspective, that makes start ups more appealing. You can
take a shot at starting your own company. If it fails, you can still make at
least as much money as if you had not started your own company.

The other thing is this blog post is looking at the average outcome. If you
are starting a company, you are already starting from the assumption that you
are not average.

------
tomasien
Glaring logical conclusion that is omitted: if there even is the slight bump
in the likelihood of success having worked for someone else vs. not, it's
still clear that simply the number of attempts at starting a company is still
the overwhelmingly more important factor in overall success.

It doesn't dismiss the point as the author is refuting a specific claim made
by PG and others (that you will be better off in your second startup having
learned from doing another startup vs. having a job) but it's still worth
noting.

------
jmatthews
I get the "link-bait" virtues of your title(and it worked on me), but the
title contradicts itself, literally.

If you want to start a start up, start a start up.

The body of your text also contradicts itself. One of your premises speaks to
the luck nature of success. Conceding your premise, the supporting text that
follows amounts to advising people to study to win the lottery.

A more interesting treatment would consider time cost, iterative or serial
entrepreneurship vs. whatever your win condition is, etc.

~~~
catshirt
there is no contradiction. what _you want to do_ and what _this article
suggests you do instead_ are not mutually exclusive.

consider the (perhaps poorly guided) advice "if you want to go to Florida [i
think you should] go to Hawaii [instead]".

------
paul9290
Bootstrapping my start-ups while working 9 to 5 on site consulting jobs has
proved frustrating!

All those who brought me on knew explicitly of my start-ups and yet my
consulting gigs never lasted more then a year. Which has been frustrating
because my bosses and I befriend each other during the course of the year, but
end up turning on me due to office politics. Sigh!

Well im starting a remote consulting gig, which is great, as I will turn in
solid work and be far away from office politics.

~~~
aggieben
> be far away from office politics.

heh. it may actually be _worse_ , because being remote adds a new dynamic to
all the politics.

Good luck.

~~~
paul9290
It's a work as many hours as I like and need to and they don't own or have
rights to my start-up companies nor can later profit from them.

I made it clear to them I am working towards raising money for my start-up and
will be able to work a few days a week (weekends included).

My focus is turn in solid/perfect work and rinse and repeat. Not try and worry
about trying to create friendships/getting the right people to like me.

I am likable and have a good amount of friends, but when your doing more then
just the 9 to 5 and getting visible attention for it, it seems to effect
people negatively towards me. So goodbye office politics and thankfully their
office is 4 hours away from home.

------
ohyes
I don't understand this. If you want to do a startup, just do it. Do it before
you have a bunch of excuses for why you shouldn't.

~~~
georgemcbay
"Just do it"... but have a fallback plan for when you will, statistically,
almost inevitably fail.

Granted, if you're on the technical side (and in SV or another "tech hub")
then the fallback plan is usually "get a job with someone else within a couple
of days of starting to look", but for that to be a reasonable fallback plan
you still need to be careful during your startup time to not take on lots of
personal debt, etc.

------
blazespin
Yeah, but then there is good research and bad research. Hey should have done a
bayesian analysis and iterated through all the people who've been successful
with startups. What percentage of them were likely successful because of
previous employment and those that weren't. How many of these guys are your
zucks and gates and andreesens of the world?

------
enowbi
The number one rule in startups, just like any other endeavor is just do it
and unleash the potentials you never knew you got. TRY is key. Very often we
read a lot of rules, dos and donts from successful people and finally just get
confused. A lot of them won't tell you they learned their mistakes early on,
made corrective adjustments and moved along.

------
stared
All research are "on average" and given a set of conditions. So, shouting
"anecdata!" is not a as strong as it sounds. There are many circumstances to
consider.

[Disclaimer: I am person who regrets not "just doing it" while waiting for
better times - and motivation for a particular project evaporates in years.]

------
lukasm
I pretty sure in one of the essays PG says you should finish collage and go
work for 2-3 years (or maybe it wasn't him)

I think there is no simple answer. Try defaulting to work for a few years, but
if you are hacking a project while you are studying and you are convinced that
you are on to something, take a year break to try it.

~~~
findjashua
work for 2-3 years, yes; college, maybe later.

If I could write a note to my high-school counterpart, it'd say 'learn
javascript, screw college, start working right after school'.

------
andyidsinga
you can definitely learn more by working with/for someone else than by simply
striking out on your own (too early) _IF_ those people actually care about
mentoring and have the ability to communicate their knowledge and experiences.

Sometimes working on your own ideas vs someone elses is very appealing
regardless of how efficient the learning might be. So, sometimes I have to
remind myself and others -- doing this is not just about efficiency.

I chuckle at the "Academics joke that "a month in the lab can save you an hour
in the library." line in the post. What immediately came to my mind was
something Click and Clack said : "reality often astonishes theory" ..which is
why spending time in the dirty reality of building and experimenting (or even
reproducing something you found in the library) is the yin to the library's
yang.

------
_delirium
Out of curiosity, does anyone know how academic positions are counted in these
numbers? Are the Google founders counted as having been previously employed in
tech, for example? (They had paid PhD research positions at Stanford CS, but
never worked in "regular" tech jobs in industry.)

~~~
analog31
In my observation, academic research shares a lot in common with
entrepreneurship. Stealing from nostrademons above:

>>>> Working for someone else's startup, I learned how to quickly cobble
solutions together. I learned about uncertainty and picking a direction
regardless of whether you're sure it'll work. I learned that most startups
fail, and that when they fail, the people who end up doing well are the ones
who were looking out for their own interests all along. I learned a lot of
basic technical skills, how to write code quickly and learn new APIs quickly
and deploy software to multiple machines. I learned how quickly problems of
scaling a development team crop up, and how early you should start investing
in automation. <<<<

I pretty much experienced all of those things in the course of my PhD
research, with the exception of forming teams.

------
WalterSear
If you want to be a cobbler, go work at a cobbler's shop. If you want to be a
luthier, go work at a luthiers. If you want to start a startup, go work at a
startup for a while.

Why is this news?

------
tomasien
Also is [http://www.paulgraham.com/](http://www.paulgraham.com/) down for
anyone else?

------
notastartup
I worked for two startups. One startup was fairly large 100+, it sure didn't
feel like a startup except for when it asked people to come on weekends and
work or stay behind until 11pm and have the manager call at 1am about work. It
also played the startup card when it came to pay. I learned that if you screw
people over, they will still stay if it means they can keep a job.

Another startup I joined was small, 20 people. CEO was very caring guy. Paid
people better and no crazy hours. Learned some things from the boss.

Overall, I've learned more from the second startup, but it probably won't
matter in helping my own. I learned so much more about just bootstrapping my
own product.

------
deepsearch
Finding which startups to work for is the trick

------
michaelochurch
These venture-funded startups make a mockery of the concept. After all, if
you're a true entrepreneur, are you _really_ going to waste 6 months of your
life asking a fucking venture capitalist for permission to be a founder? The
VC-funded game is just the same private-sector social climbing that a previous
generation called "the corporate ladder".

The real problem, the 9500-pound chain-smoking and belching elephant in the
room, is that almost no one can bootstrap because the U.S. middle class is
nearly gone and _almost no one has any fucking money_. In the 1960s, with
strong unions and low housing costs and cheap health insurance that covered
everything, worker bees actually _could_ save up and have starting capital.
The Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, and tuition) that is now killing the
middle class wasn't even on the horizon, so people of average means had a real
shot at starting their own ventures-- without having to get permission from a
bunch of effete Sand Hill Road bureaucrats.

Add to this the obscene cost of living in Silicon Valley. Even the people with
supposedly well-paid corporate jobs can't afford to buy houses. The only real
way to make money in the Valley: _be a landlord._ Whenever entrepreneurship
revives on the North American continent, it will be far from the tapped-out,
overpriced, landlord's paradise wasteland of California.

Ok, so on to the finding itself... I agree. Most people who launch successful
businesses had to learn on someone else's dime and risk before they had the
capital, skills, and domain knowledge necessary to go on their own. It's
pretty rare that a 22-year-old, fresh out of college, has (a) the leadership
skill to create a business from scratch, and (b) insight into a real-world
problem that can actually be made into a business. These VC darlings aren't
true entrepreneurs and shouldn't be taken as typical; instead, they're rich
kids whose parents are laundering family connections so it looks like their
underachieving spawn are "startup wunderkinds" instead of well-placed halfwits
that Wall Street didn't want.

~~~
gfodor
That's just, like, your opinion man. You seem to be focusing on the glitzy
veneer of the Sand Hill VCs and ignoring the fact that new capital intensive
businesses almost always involve seed investment, be it from friends and
family, or venture capitalists.

In either case, it's almost always a good idea to use other peoples' money
instead of your own. Particularly in environments like the current one where
you can get money without giving up ridiculous amounts of equity. You're
undermining your ability to have a few failures to learn from if you put all
of your personal assets on the line in one venture.

If your main complaint isn't VCs per se, but _access_ to VCs, then sure,
that's a fair argument. But arguing that somehow we'd be better of if people
were risking massive amounts of their personal capital on their startups (vs
what we have now where the risk is split between them and others who can
afford it) seems wrong. Even the founders who _do_ have money aren't so dumb
as to turn away VCs out of pride of being a "true entrepreneur" if the terms
are favorable.

~~~
michaelochurch
_In either case, it 's almost always a good idea to use other peoples' money
instead of your own._

I agree. You used to be able to get bank loans on co-investment (i.e. you put
up some of the capital). Now they require personal liability. Things have gone
to the worse.

 _You 're undermining your ability to have a few failures to learn from if you
put all of your personal assets on the line in one venture._

True. But in a time when (a) bank loans were available with co-investment
alone (not you're-insane-if-you-take-it personal liability) and (b) people in
the middle class actually had money, it was possible to get going while only
putting up 5% of the seed money (and getting a larger equity disbursement,
because you actually are doing the work on a low salary).

 _But arguing that somehow we 'd be better of if people were risking massive
amounts of their personal capital on their startups (vs what we have now where
the risk is split between them and others who can afford it) seems wrong._

I agree. My point is that, before the VC era, people didn't have to risk
massive amounts of personal capital. A 5% co-investment, and a willingness to
work on a lower-than-market salary for a while, was enough to get you in the
game.

 _Even the founders who do have money aren 't so dumb as to turn away VCs out
of pride of being a "true entrepreneur" if the terms are favorable._

Fair. It's not that all VC is bad or should be turned away. It's that a
6-month permission-seeking process discourages most people who have the
entrepreneurial spirit, favoring social climbers.

