From my guest lecture at Stanford Entrepreneurship Course

Author Note: This article stems from my guest lecture at Stanford Entrepreneurship Course. It was supposed to be for college students, but most of it also applies to potential entrepreneurs in other age groups.

One of the benefits of raising a child is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself: "What do I say to my child?" "My kids are small, but I can imagine how I would talk to them about entrepreneurship when they go to college," he said. So, here's what I'm going to tell them.

Often, startups are counterintuitive. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just that knowledge about entrepreneurship is not in our culture. Whatever the reason, in short, starting a company is something you can never trust your intuition.

It's like skiing. When you first ski, you want to be able to reduce the speed, you instinctively want to lean back. But if you rush down the hill and lean back, you're going to lose control. So part of learning skiing is learning how to suppress instinct. In the end, you will learn new habits, but first you have to pay a cognitive effort. When you start to fall from the top of the mountain, you are afraid to make a long list of what you need to remember.

Entrepreneurship, like skiing, is not natural, so there is a similar list for startups. Next, I'll give you the first part of the list.

Counter-intuitive

The first of the list is the fact that I am always mentioning: entrepreneurship is quite bizarre, and if you trust your intuition, you will make a lot of mistakes. You only know this, you will make a lot less mistakes.

I've joked that YC's one function is to tell entrepreneurs something they don't care about. That's true. YC Partners always warn a group of entrepreneurs about some of the mistakes they make, but the latter always disagree, until a year later they come back and say, "It would be nice to hear those words." ”

Why do entrepreneurs ignore their partners ' opinions? Well, this is about "counter-intuitive": these opinions contradict your intuition and they look wrong. So your first impulse is to ignore them. As a matter of fact, my description of YC joking is part of the reason for its existence. If the founders ' instincts have given them the right answer, they don't need us. The only thing you need is someone who can surprise you. That's why there are so many ski coaches and not so many running coaches.

But then again, on the person, you can trust your intuition. In fact, one of the most common mistakes that young founders make is not enough at this point. They make people who look impressive but at the same time give them a little bit of doubt to join the team. When things went wrong, they said, "I actually knew he was wrong, but because he looked so impressive, I ignored the ' wrong '." ”

If you're thinking about making someone your co-founder, employee, investor, or buyer, and you have some doubts about them, trust your instincts. If anyone looks a bit sly, hypocritical or eccentric, don't overlook these little feelings.

This is an exaggerated reminder: work with someone you really like.

Expertise

The 2nd thing about counter-intuitive is that the knowledge of entrepreneurship is no big deal. The way to win is not to become an expert on entrepreneurship, but to become an expert on your users and solve their problems. Mark Zuckerberg is not successful because he is a pioneering expert, in fact, although he is a novice, he also succeeded, because he really very good understanding of his users.

If you don't know anything like how to melt angel money, don't worry about it at all. These are things you can forget when you need something you can learn and then finish.

In fact, learning and delving into entrepreneurial technology is not only unnecessary, but may be dangerous in a sense. If I meet a college dropout who knows all sorts of things about convertible bills, employee agreements and FF stocks, I certainly don't think he's an outstanding person, but I think it's a warning. The other mistake that young entrepreneurs often make is to seriously and carefully show-wise the "instruct" of a company. They went to comb and construct seemingly reasonable ideas to finance at a good price, rent a cool office, hire some people. By appearance, this seems to be a start-up company to do. But I rented a cool office, after hiring someone, the next step to greet them is that they come to realize that they are really failing, because when they have the kind of imitation of all those startups, they ignore a really basic thing: make what people want.

Opportunistic

We've seen too much of this, and have a special name for it: Playing house. Now I finally know why it happened. The reason young entrepreneurs study the IPO is that all of their life before they start a business is trained to do so. For example, think about what you have to do to go to college: extracurricular activities, right. Even in college courses, most of the learning is not from the heart, like running laps.

I am not attacking the existing education system. The truth is that when anyone is taught something, there is a certain amount of false ingredient in the learning process. And when you evaluate a student's performance, inevitably leads to such a situation, the difference between students is often the result of false behavior.

I confess, I did it myself when I was in college. I have found that in many subjects, there may be only 20 to 30 knowledge points that apply to exam subjects. In the preparation of these subjects, I did not master the content taught in the classroom, but listed a potential test title list, and prepare the answer in advance. When I entered the examination room of the final exam, I was most curious about what issues on the list would appear on the final exam. It's like being opportunistic.

The whole life of young entrepreneurs has been trained to be an opportunistic model, and it's no surprise that when they start a company, their first reaction is to get smart.

From the outside, financing seems to be one of the criteria (and a typical stupid mistake) in judging the success of startups, and young entrepreneurs are always looking for a knack for persuading investors. We tell them that the best way to convince investors is to build a really good startup and achieve rapid growth, simply by telling investors this. Then young entrepreneurs want to know what the trick is to achieve rapid growth, and we have to tell them that the best way to do that is to develop the products that people want.

There have been so many conversations between YC partners and young entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurs ask "How are we going to ..." the partner replied "As long as ...".

Why do entrepreneurs always have to complicate things? Behind the reasons, I realised that they were actually looking for tips.

This is the 3rd thing to remember about starting a business: If you want to start a business, it's not going to work here. If you go to a big company, you may continue to do that. It also depends on how bad the company is, you can find the right person to be flattering, show a lot of credit, and so forth. But it doesn't work for startups. Startups have no boss to flatter you, only users, and users only care about your products can not meet their needs. Entrepreneurship is as impersonal as physics, you have to produce the products people need, and the company's prosperity can only be achieved after it has been satisfied.

The dangerous thing is that pretending that it sometimes works for investors. If you're particularly good at bragging about yourself, as if you know what you're doing, you might be able to cheat investors once or even two rounds of financing. But it doesn't do you any good. Your company is destined to fail in the end. What you've done is just wasting your time.

So stop looking for tips. There is a "knack" in entrepreneurship, in all industries, but they are not as important as solving real problems. An entrepreneur who is completely unfamiliar with financing, but is able to create a product that users like, and an entrepreneur who is familiar with all the financing knocks but has a flat growth curve, the former is easier to finance. More importantly, an entrepreneur who can build a user's favorite product can continue his success after raising money.

In a sense, one of your most important weapons is ineffective, which is bad news. And I think it's exciting that when you start a company, there's no point in being opportunistic. It's exciting because there is another place in the world where you can win with your outstanding work scores. Imagine how frustrating it would be if the world were working in a school or a big company, and you would either spend a lot of time on meaningless things or just lose to those who spent a lot of time in meaningless things. I would be very happy if I realized at school that a part of the real world would not work so well and that some of them were totally useless. When you think about your future, this possibility is one of the most important things to consider. How do you win in different jobs and how do you want to win?

I can't stop.

Entrepreneurship simply can't stop. If you start a company, it will occupy your life at a level you can't imagine. If you are successful in your business, the company will take up a long time in your life: at least for a few years, maybe ten years, or all of your future work is for this company. So here's a real opportunity cost problem.

Larry Page's life may be enviable, but there are no enviable aspects. Basically he's been fighting hard since he was 25 years old, and he hasn't stopped after that. The Google Empire has a daily problem that only CEOs can handle, and he has to stand up as CEO. If he had taken one weeks off, a whole week of trouble would have been accumulated. He had to endure without complaint, partly because as the boss of the company, he could not show fear or weakness, and partly because, as a billionaire, no one would sympathize with him if he complained that life was too difficult. This leads to a strange result, the hard work of successful entrepreneur seems to be apart from himself, no one will know.

Y Combinator has already invested in a handful of companies that can be called big successes, and each company's founders have the same story. Entrepreneurship won't get easier. The nature of the problem is changing. You'll worry about the progress of the London office, but don't bother to repair the air-conditioning at home. What needs to be feared has never diminished.

Starting a successful start-up is like raising a child, once your life becomes irreversible. Although parenting is a wonderful thing, there are a lot of easy things to do before you start. Many things will make you a better parent. And you can choose to have children later, as many people in rich countries do.

But when it comes to entrepreneurship, it seems that many people think they should start a business when they go to school. Are you guys crazy? What are the universities thinking? They teach the students comfortably, but they set up entrepreneurial projects and incubators everywhere.

Frankly speaking, university institutions are also responsible. Many freshmen are interested in starting a business. Universities are seen as a place to help students prepare for their careers. The students who want to start a business are certainly interested in learning entrepreneurship at university. Whether or not universities can do this, there is pressure to claim that they can do it, not to mention the risk of competition among universities.

Can university institutions teach students to start a business? can also not. They can teach students something about entrepreneurship, but like I said before, those aren't the things you need to know. Entrepreneurs need to understand the needs of their users, but you don't know that if you don't actually start a company. Entrepreneurship is essentially learning through practice. In school can not do this, the reason I also explained above: Entrepreneurship will occupy your life. When you're a student, you can't really start a company, because if you're serious about starting a business, you're no longer a student. Maybe you can still be a student for a while, but that's not going to last a long time.

In this dilemma, which path should you choose? Do you want to be a real student or are you serious about starting a business? I can answer this question for you. Don't start a business when you go to college. How to start a company is just part of the problem, the big question you have to try to solve is: How to live your life well. Although for many ambitious people, entrepreneurship can be a good part of life, but the 20-year-old is not the most appropriate time to do this. Starting a company is like a depth-first fast search, and most people are 20 years old when the first is breadth-first search.

You can do things you can't do before or after when you are 20 years old, such as an impulse to dive into a project, or go backpacking without a timeline. For the ambition, these are all distressing "things to do", but for ambitious people, they can be an invaluable exploration experience. If you start a company at the age of 20 and the company is successful enough, you never get a chance to do it.

Mark Zuckerberg has never travelled abroad. But he can do other things that most people can't do, like taking a private jet to travel abroad. The success of entrepreneurship occupies many of his pleasures in life. Facebook drives him the same way he manages Facebook. It's cool to invest in a project that you think is a lifetime job, but the fun of life exploration can be beneficial, especially when you're young. It can give you more choices and see what you want to do.

There is no question of choice. If you give up your business at the age of 20, you are not sacrificing anything, and if you wait for the future, the chances of success are higher. The chances of a 20-year-old entrepreneurial project being as successful as Facebook are not high. You have to face a choice, whether to devote fully, the reasonable choice is to devote fully. But the usual way for startups to succeed is for entrepreneurs to succeed, and to start a business at the age of 20 is an unnecessary folly.

Try

Can you start a business at any age? I realized that I had made my business difficult. If you think I haven't done that yet, let me try again: it's really hard to start a business. What if it's difficult to accept? How do you know if you can handle the challenge?

This comes to our fifth question: You have no way of knowing. Your current life experience will only give you a general idea of what it would be like to be a mathematician or professional football player. But unless you have a very special life experience, you certainly haven't done anything like starting a company. Starting a company will drastically change you. The estimates you are trying to make are not just your present, but the way you might grow. Who can answer it?

For the past nine years, my job has been to predict whether entrepreneurs can bring the company to success. It's easy to know how smart they are, and most people who read here may be smarter. The hard part is predicting how strong and ambitious these entrepreneurs can be. Maybe no one has ever predicted such a thing, so I can tell you how much an expert knows, which is: not much. I always maintain a completely open mind as to which company can achieve great success.

Entrepreneurs sometimes think they understand. Some people feel that they can easily take care of Y Combinator, because they are easy to handle in the past life test. Others want to know how they were enrolled by Y Combinator and Hope YC won't find out it was a mistake that led to their admission. There is little correlation between the initial attitude of the entrepreneur and the performance of the start-up company.

I have read that the same is true in the military--there is no higher likelihood that a talking recruit is truly strong in front of a test than a quiet recruit. Most likely the reason is one: the test of the future is quite different from what they experienced in their past life.

If you're scared of starting a company, maybe you shouldn't start a business. But if you're just not sure if you're going to start a business, the only way to do that is to try. But not now.

Idea

So until one day you want to start a company, what should you do in college? At first you only need two things: an idea and a partner. The realization of these two points is the same. That's the sixth question we're going to talk about, and the last question: the way to get started is not to think about entrepreneurial ideas.

I have written a passage on this. So I'm not going to repeat it here. In simple terms, if you're thinking calmly about starting a business, getting creative is not just a bad question, but a bad one, but it sounds good, which means you'll waste a lot of time before you realize it's a bad idea.

The way to get good entrepreneurial ideas is to take a step back. Instead of consciously thinking about it, turn your consciousness into a model of entrepreneurial thinking, without any conscious effort. In fact it can be very unconscious, even if you initially did not realize that this is an entrepreneurial idea.

That's not impossible, as Apple, Yahoo, Google and Facebook started. None of these companies wanted to be a company at first. They are just amateur projects for entrepreneurs. The best startups almost certainly start with amateur programs, because great ideas are often unconscious, and your mind tends to repel it as an entrepreneurial idea.

So how do you turn your consciousness into a model of entrepreneurial thinking? Learn more about important things. Second, start the question you are interested in. Work with people you like and respect. 3rd, it's often the way you find your partner and discover your entrepreneurial ideas at the same time.

When I first wrote a paragraph, "Know more about the important things" I wrote "good at Technology". But the description, though expressed in meaning, is too narrow. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia special place, not that they know the technology, they are also good at organizing the team, let the project implement. So you don't have to deal with technical problems in nature, as long as you're dealing with enough problems to keep yourself busy.

What are the problems? This is a very difficult question to answer in general. There are many examples in history where young people delve into questions that no one else at the time felt important, especially when their parents didn't feel important. On the other hand, there are many examples in history where parents think their children are wasting their time and the parents ' ideas are right. So how do you know you're doing something that really matters?

I know how I know that. The real question is always interesting, I always want to solve the interesting problem, at this point I am very generous to myself, even if no one else care (in fact, especially when no one cares about these issues). I find it hard to devote myself to boring things, even if it seems to be something important.

I always choose to go in for something interesting, and my life is full of examples. It turned out to be a useful thing in the secular sense. Y Combinator Incubator Yes, I started doing it just because it looked interesting. So I have some kind of own compass to help. But I don't know what other people think. Maybe I think more about this and I'm more inspired to identify really interesting questions, but the best advice I can offer right now is that if you have your own insights into really interesting questions, it's the best way to prepare for a startup. And it's probably the best way to live.

Although I can't explain what is interesting in general, I can give a lot of examples. If you think that technology is an irregular pattern in some kind of diffusion, then every change in the pattern edge represents an interesting problem. A reliable way to change your mind is to put yourself at the cutting edge of a technology--to make yourself, as Paul Buchheit said, "living in the future." When you get to this state, the things that other people can't figure out are obvious to you. You may not realize that it's an entrepreneurial idea, but you know it's something that's definitely going to exist.

For example, in the middle of the 90, a graduate student at Harvard University, my friend Robert and Trevor, wrote his own sound transfer software. He didn't want to start a company, nor did he want to turn the technology into a company. He just wants to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan through the Internet without having to pay for long-distance calls. Because he is an expert on network technology, obviously the best way for him is to turn the sound into a packet and transmit it over the Internet. He's just using his own software to talk to his girlfriend, but that's exactly how the best startups start.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, the most important thing to do in college-albeit oddly-is not a new, professional version of a college course that focuses on entrepreneurial skills. It's a classic version of college education. If you want to start a company after graduation, what you should do in college is to study powerful things. If you have a real knowledge curiosity, this is something you should naturally do if you follow your inner passions.

What's really important about entrepreneurial skills is industry expertise. The way to be a Larry Page is to be a search expert. The way to become a search expert is to be driven by real curiosity, not with any other hidden motives.

Ideally, the motive behind the startup of a company is curiosity alone. If you can keep this motivation to the end, you will do your best.

So finally, I put some advice for young people who will be entrepreneurs in the future, down to three words: to learn.