My point is that if I wanted to start my own company (which I don’t), I wouldn’t feel nervous. The reason is clear: By earning a PhD in computer science at MIT I developed a skill that’s rare and valuable to this particular economic segment.
So this guy thinks that getting emails from recruiters means that he has what it takes to be an entrepreneur? He thinks that a degree you get from a University teaches you something about running a business. Oh, and by the way, he would be fabulously successful at it if he wanted to. Yeah, I could dunk over Shaq too, it's just that I don't have any interest in playing basketball.
Being an entrepreneur has so little to do with skills (you can always learn those). It's about decision-making, ability to learn and pivot, and guts. Frankly, I find this guys ivory-tower preaching to be grating. He doesn't know jack about entrepreneurship and yet he's willing to take a dump all over someone who happened to be starting their first business in a market segment that was hit terribly hard by the recession.
I'm not sure the author is saying he has what it takes to be an amazing entrepreneur. He seems to be referencing his education and skillset to prove a much different point -- that even if he starts a business and fails, he won't have much to fear because getting a job will be easier for him. That's a valid point.
"By earning a PhD in computer science at MIT I developed a skill that’s rare and valuable to this particular economic segment."
I think if the word "skill" is replaced by "asset", it reads better. OK, a little better.
Maybe what he was trying to say was either (a) it is much easier to get a job in this economy if you have an MIT PhD or (b) he could get funding etc easily thanks to his MIT PhD or (c) while working through his PhD he acquired unique skills which enable him to found a company (as compared to someone who did a course in Yoga). (c) is more dubious than (a) or (b), as dasil003 points out above)
I am just guessing here but it might be the case that the problem might be with the phrasing than the underlying idea. I agree that as written, the sentence seems to imply that he could be an entrepreneur just bacuse his MIT PhD is "rare".
Indeed, it seems to me that he would fail miserably at starting a company because he equates the product/service his company would make/offer with his education.
It's as if Google would have been successful just by branding their search as "Google - the search engine developed by Stanford PhD's"
What's rare and valuable are people that accomplish a lot with a little. I have no idea if the culture at MIT preferentially fosters that kind of dogged resourcefulness, but thinking you're done before you even get started because of a handful of letters on a piece of paper is a start in the wrong direction.
he would fail miserably at starting a company because he equates the product/service his company would make/offer with his education
I think you misunderstood the post. The author said nothing about how his PhD would directly relate to starting a new company (the author's research is theoretical, anyway). Rather, the point is that by acquiring a valuable skill (a PhD from MIT), his risk profile is lower: he could go and start a new venture, or equivalently wager all his assets at the roulette table; either way, his skills mean he would be able to find a good job if the gamble doesn't turn out well.
If you like, substitute "MIT PhD" for "become one of the top 5 Linux kernel developers" for an equivalently rare, valuable skill that would help to ensure future employment.
Upon rereading, I agree with your assessment, but the crux of the issue is that his example of Lisa isn't so "pristine."
He argues that her small business failed because her skills weren't rare and valuable. Then he says his skills are rare and valuable.
A consistent argument springing from those two statements would be either a) my business won't fail because my skills are rare and valuable, or b) Lisa can't find another job in marketing (the job she held for a decade before quitting) because those skills aren't rare and valuable.
He didn't make either of those arguments, instead focusing on her yoga instructor skills. It makes for a muddled post.
There's a corollary in here: if you're early in your career, optimize for skill-building as much as possible. It doesn't matter whether you're building skills at someone else's company or at your own (though the former pays better), but it does matter that you're building them.
I quit my day job a couple years ago to found a startup with a friend. The startup flamed out miserably, and in hindsight I was woefully unprepared. But the skills I learned at my startup set me up for my next job, where there are many more opportunities to learn further skills. Hopefully by my next attempt, I'll have enough "rare and desirable" skills to make it succeed.
Come to think of it, this may make a good litmus test for when to leave your job. Quit when the opportunities available for skill building are less than what you'd learn from a failed startup.
This is the third article in last 24 hours in the top list where the author uses straw man to shove his own view forward by attacking an incorrectly interpreted opposing view. I hope it doesn't become a trend.
Using your nervousness level to gauge if you should go forward is as flawed as you can get. Some of the best achievers in their field--Tyson, Kobe etc.--admit to getting nervous.
Absolutely. The part where he says he doesn't feel nervous about doing a startup because he has a PhD from MIT. I almost threw up.
I don't know any start-up founder that cites his degree as a key motivation for doing a start-up.
All this is really sad because I think someone can write a solid post about the possible downsides of quitting your boring job and what precautions to take. This guy is trying to do that - but in all the wrong ways.
I don't know any start-up founder that cites his degree as a key motivation for doing a start-up.
Nowhere does the post suggest that a PhD is motivation for doing a startup. The point is that if you have a valuable skill (whether a PhD or experience as a successful VP), if you take a risk, you'll still have a comfortable position to fall back on.
I've interviewed a lot of people and I have to say having a PhD has never influenced me. I just really don't care. Can you code, are you smart, and can you work well with people? Those are much more important than how much schooling you've had.
Nervousness is not your fully-informed-and-purely-reason-based subconscious trying to convince your irrational conscious mind of the underlying facts. That's about the most backwards way I can imagine it.
MIT has a mailing list devoted to CS-related job opportunities. In the last few years I've gotten over 6500 joblist emails. I recently graduated and I'm working hard on my first startup, but not a day goes by without a few emails that catch my eye. The author writes:
much better jobs are out there, but they’re only available to people with much better skills than most of their peers
There's a lot of truth to this statement. It almost seems unfair that my inbox is filled with jobs, while people like my mother and some of my friends spend hours sending out their resumes.
Were your mother and friends unable to acquire the required skills, or were they simply not interested in doing so? Perhaps there are thousands of job requests, but few that would suit your friend's taste?
I am pretty sure even your mom could become a Java developer...
My twin brother graduated from UGA last week with a degree in English. Four years ago he had no clue what he wanted to do in life, and three years ago he discovered that he loves writing. Since then he's been doing everything in his power to become a better writer. He's about a month away from finishing his first novel, and from what I've read it looks quite promising. His writing abilities have improved drastically.
My situation is similar in some regards. I've always known that I wanted to start a business, but it wasn't until halfway through college that I even started gathering the skills I figured I'd need. Two years later, I'm a practiced web designer and developer. I'm proficient with HTML, CSS, PHP and CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, JS and jQuery, SQL, etc. I'm lucky enough that I can spend the next 6+ months without a job, living off of funding and savings while I work on my company.
My bro and I have the ability and the work ethic to make most of our dreams a reality, and we're confident in our potential to learn new things at any time. If life's an RPG, why not spend your time upping your skills and gaining experience? I suspect there are millions of other people with this same mindset, including a large slice of people on HN.
But for every person who's driven, there are a bunch of people who aren't for various reasons. All of my friends think I'm crazy for spending so much time reading, learning, and working. My brother's friends are absolutely perplexed at his tendency to stay in and write while they go out drinking. And all of the above + my mom have expressed a lack of self-confidence when it comes to self-improvement... They look at a few lines of code, or a well-written paragraph, and say, "Wow I could never do that." And they believe it.
i don't know about the exact nature of these jobs emails, but oftentimes the positions are only advertised to current students and recent alums of the universities. even if his mom could learn java quickly, she might not be eligible for those jobs, since they want to interview fresh-faced 20-year-old college seniors from College X
The only useful thing in the article is the message that "if you can get a job at an incubator before starting a company then do so". Ie, if you can simulate the experience of starting a company then do so.
Everything else is nonsense.
* Whenever your going to do something outside of your previous experience, your going to be nervous.
* Being nervous doesnt mean you give up. What if Laird had complained that he was too nervous to surf Teahupoo?
* Sometimes your not going to be able to simulate what you want to do. So make sure you have an safety net if things dont go according to plan.
IMHO In the end the regret of never having tried is far worse than any other consequence.
The implication is that "instinct" knows better than you do.
But my instinct sucks. I have no usable skills, and yet I'm not nervous at all- I'm fairly fearless in general. It's reason that's telling me that this is probably a bad idea, not instinct.
In terms of startups, the question to consider is if you need a valuable and rare skill to make a valuable product.
I would guess that you need several valuable skills to build and market a great product, but those skills do not necessarily correspond to having several fantastic job offers as this writer suggests.
Terrible advice. Everything in life is a risk. Chances are you will end up with many boring & comfortable jobs in your life. Sometimes you'll leave by choice, sometimes you won't have any choice at all. I figure everyone owes it to themselves to at least try their dream in life. The key is to be well prepared, pragmatic, time it right and do it before others are relying on you for their well being. Usually the worst outcome is you have to go crawling back to that boring & comfortable job.
Not enough. The woman in the example given had a DRRS, but it disappeared because the skill being used was not rare, nor valuable in and of itself.
The claim in the article is that having a skill that is rare and valuable make you non-nervous, thus being nervous about taking the leap means you don't have a skill that's rare and valuable.
Clearly false - anyone can be nervous regardless of their skills. However, it's worth a moment's thought.
It's cruel to pick on a poor unemployed entrepreneur. On the other hand, it's no crueler than life itself has been, and it might save some others, so let me apologize in advance and then say that:
Karma Kids Yoga — a yoga practice focused on young children and pregnant women.
... may be a Replacement Revenue Strategy, but I am not convinced it is Decent. It sounds like a terrible business idea. By definition your target market is constantly turning over -- mothers these days have one or two kids, maybe three at the outside, and those kids don't stay young for long. You build a clientele, and then that clientele graduates and you need a whole new clientele. And the plan doesn't scale -- you're limited to recruiting from a very specific demographic in one very specific location.
And it's not as if you're selling baby food, or strollers, or something that every mother actually needs -- you probably can't even net 100% of the mothers who live in your neighborhood and practice yoga [1], since anyone can practice yoga on their own, and the economy is in the dumps.
"It sounds like a terrible business idea. By definition your target market is constantly turning over -- mothers these days have one or two kids, maybe three at the outside, and those kids don't stay young for long. You build a clientele, and then that clientele graduates and you need a whole new clientele."
I wonder if the outcome would be different if she targeted elderly.
It seems like a better market both thanks to demographics and IMHO also as value provided to the customers (and society in general) would be higher.
may be a Replacement Revenue Strategy, but I am not convinced it is Decent.
That was my thought - but for different reasons.
Whenever anyone talks about starting a Yoga (or other fitness) startup it usually strikes me as a field full of "false guru's" and depending on "sheep" followers.
I know that is a stereotype and such setups are mixed among plenty of non-scams. But even so it seems like a minefield of a business to get into (especially if you enroach on a guru's turf!).
(I'd say fitness is very very high on the list of businesses I would never touch)
Entrepreneurship is not limited to doing a tech startup. Also, going on your own is not worthwhile only for people with other comfortable options.
It is a pity that a PhD with such high credentials has such a narrow world view.
Edit: This article seems to be saying startups make sense when one has these desirable skills. In other words only start on your own if you are in a field where you need a difficult or highly prized degree. Well we all know where the highly desired financial engineering skills have led the economy.
The author is just risk averse. Which is OK. So a degree and other options - which are a hedge against startup failure - seem to him to be pre-requisites for going on your own.
He's in the fortunate position of being able to increase his job-market value, while actually working. If you really want to change your job, you might have to quit and start again from scratch - whether you are nervous or not.
Best advice I've heard is to make small changes that get you closer to your desired job, while utilizing your existing skillset, like asking for additional duties at your current employer. This way, you avoid the start-from-scratch phase you describe.
That's great advice. I took a position as a dev lead at my job a while back because I wanted more experience dealing with clients, budgets, estimating, and delegating tasks. It's been far more stressful than my previous position, and my pay has yet to increase accordingly (though it should within the next month), but I consider it a win for all the experience it has provided me. I look forward to applying these skills to my own projects.
Many people have boring and ok jobs yet never have the courage to try something different. In this situation, it is perhaps healthy to actually quit the job and try it. In the worst case, your new startup fails, you learn something, you return to another boring job. But I guess you will feel much better about yourself, as a human being who has the courage to follow your dream, rather than as a boring person who always complains about the boring job.
That's not the worst case though. The worst case is the possibility of ruining your finances because you have no income while trying your startup. And what if you can't find a job when you finally give up?
The startup process has several validations built into it. First when you pitch it to your friends you see how they react..maybe build a prototype and see traction. Its not like you wake up one day, and go...I am going to quit my job and do a startup. The balance is how much you trust other people's opinion vs your own instinct.
No -- he says being nervous about a switch suggests you aren't yet qualified to make the leap. And while you should not quit your job if this is the case, there is an upside because your current nervousness gives you a metric about how qualified you are and a goal of improving until you are no longer nervous (at which point you switch jobs).
I other words what the article is suggesting is forget about your dreams, your personal goals and the ideas that along with percisentence could have a chance to make you feel good about yourself, your life and maybe even help you actually enjoy the limited amount of seconds that you have to live and instead be thankful for the opportunities you have been "given" and shut up because things could actually be worse. Look at that 90% of the world that wish they had half of what life have given you.
It's incredibly sad how what the article suggest is exactly what the majority of the world does when what we really are supposed to do with our life is so simple.
Life is short, try to enjoy it no matter what, never give up on you. If you have to spend all of your life trying to make work whatever it's you want to do and that you think it will make you happy, do it. Because if you don't, if you give up and do what you are "supposed" to do, what is safe, what society, your education, your family and your religious "beliefs" have tried to imposed on you will never be happy. That is guaranteed. But, hey! worse nothing than what you already have! right..
You can't will your rent payment into existence, and you won't fully enjoy your admittedly short life while deciding between another week of spaghetti or tuna.
He is saying you should work on developing your skills until you are good enough to be able to succeed in pursuing your dreams. You know, learn to skydive before jumping. It sounds as if you're suggesting everyone just throw themselves off the cliff.
The problem is that if we tell ourselves to wait until timing is right, we will make sure timing is never right.
It all comes down to the fact we are just scared of giving up the illusion of security or what is "convenient" even if that convenience is what is keeping us from achieving our goals, from what is truly important to us.
We will make sure we do anything possible to postpone the moment when we can say are I'm "ready".
Even if being ready just comes down to having enough money saved so we don't have to eat spaghetti or tuna while we work on our dreams, the story always goes something like this:
You want to have enough $ saved so you don't have to worry for 6 months and be able to just focus on yourself, on whatever you really want to do.
Once you have that $ saved you might tell to yourself, well, but things never work out the way we plan them so I think it would be better if I have enough saved for a year. I just need to keep doing what I would love to quit for a couple more months, and that's it, I will be ready then. Since that reasoning actually makes sense to you you end up postponing it for a bit longer.
A few months later you find yourself either worried about things like the economy, or maybe you think you need more money, or anything else you can come up with to justify postponing your dream and you keep doing it over and over.
The time is never right. You just have figure out what the worse case scenario would be, what could happen if everything you though you knew was absolutely wrong and what options you have to go back where you started in the event you fail. The chances are once you are aware of it, it won't be that bad as you though and hopefully you won''t longer be scared and will quit what you need to quit to invest your time on yourself.
While I agree with most of your comment, there is something to be said for preparation. Do you think it's unwise of me to wait until after I pay off my student loans (a year, perhaps) to quit my job and start my own business? Keep in mind that student loans are one of the only loans you can't get out of with bankruptcy. This is the kind of very specific preparation that doesn't have to keep escalating. I'm reasonably comfortable walking away from a failed startup with nothing; what I'm not comfortable with is being saddled with an ever-growing debt I can't get rid of.
and an important psychological principle backing this up is cognitive dissonance. if you keep doing what you're doing, you'll rationalize your behaviors to yourself.
In order to not be nervous this guy first has to finish is Ph.D from MIT. Then and ONLY then will he be able to start a successful company. I would bet that the vast majority of successful software entrepreneurs have much less than a Ph.d. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if even the relative percentages of Bachelors to Ph.ds starting successful companies is higher. In my experience a lot of people go for their PH.Ds because they don't know what they want to do and don't feel like getting a real job.
So this guy thinks that getting emails from recruiters means that he has what it takes to be an entrepreneur? He thinks that a degree you get from a University teaches you something about running a business. Oh, and by the way, he would be fabulously successful at it if he wanted to. Yeah, I could dunk over Shaq too, it's just that I don't have any interest in playing basketball.
Being an entrepreneur has so little to do with skills (you can always learn those). It's about decision-making, ability to learn and pivot, and guts. Frankly, I find this guys ivory-tower preaching to be grating. He doesn't know jack about entrepreneurship and yet he's willing to take a dump all over someone who happened to be starting their first business in a market segment that was hit terribly hard by the recession.