Paul Graham talks about entrepreneurship

Note: The U.S. national conditions are not necessarily suitable for China.

Should college students start a business? What is the best age for entrepreneurship? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this age group? In this article, the author analyzes these problems one by one. According to him,
A 25-year-old college student is the most suitable for entrepreneurship. They are energetic, have nothing to do, have no worries, and have the like-minded people. They have the spirit of being a newbie and not afraid of tigers. To be honest, after reading this article, I can't help but hide it and sigh: I already belong to the old man in the eyes of the author and miss the golden age of entrepreneurship. However, I am not willing to do it either: I am old, and it is true to drag my family, but it may not be late. What's more, there is an ambition in it. If you have good teachers and friends outside, you can bring back the game. Therefore, in the spirit of self-criticism, we still have the advantages to carry forward, and we must find a way to make up for the lost advantages in other aspects. Subjectively, things are done by people; objectively, things are done by people. In this way, the book is helpful, and everyone is happy, Amida Buddha ....... The original Article is long and posted twice .)

(This article is based on the lecture at MIT .)

Not long ago, undergraduates had two options when they were about to graduate: finding a job or doing research. In my opinion, more and more people are considering the third option: creating their own business. How common is this situation?

I believe that finding a job will always be the first choice for graduates, and start-ups may become the same option as reading and researching. In the late 1990s s, some of my professors and friends complained that they could not recruit graduate students because all of their undergraduate graduates had gone to work in startup companies. I would not be surprised if this situation is reproduced today (TRANSLATOR: Due to the burst of the network bubble, the trend of graduates choosing to study has rebounded in the past few years. But this is a little different: graduates will start their own business, rather than working in another startup company.

Those most ambitious students will further ask: Why do we have to wait until graduation? Why can't I start my own business in college? Why do I go to college? Why cannot I start a business directly?

A year and a half ago, I mentioned in a speech that Yahoo and Google
The average age of Microsoft entrepreneurs is 24. If graduates can start their own businesses, why cannot they? I am glad that I used a question at the time, so that I can pretend that it was not a positive expression. At that time, I still couldn't figure out why the age of an entrepreneur cannot be lower than a lower limit. Graduation is just a form change. There must be many students who are technically able to compete with the vast majority of graduates. So why can't students start a business like graduates?

Now I realize that one thing has changed after graduation: You can no longer find a good excuse for your failure. No matter how complicated your life is, you will find that all the people around you, including your family and friends, will ignore other details and regard you as a person with a unique identity symbol at any time. If you are engaged in software writing during the summer vacation at school, people still regard you as a student. But if you find a programming job after graduation, people will immediately regard you as a programmer.

When you start a business at school, you have a natural retreat. If you try to start a business in the middle of the third and fourth grades, people will regard this as your summer internship. Even if you cannot start your own business, it's a big deal to go back to school to continue reading your fourth grade in the fall. No one will think of you as a loser, because you are a student, and as a student, you have no failure. However, if you start a business one year later, that is, after graduation, as long as you have not been admitted to any school as a graduate student before the start of the fall semester, your identity is an entrepreneur. You must do this well.

For everyone, the opinions of people around them are the most powerful motivation, even more powerful than the apparent goal of entrepreneurs-to get rich [1]. About one month after the start of each investment cycle (TRANSLATOR: Author: a member of a venture capital organization, the Fund regularly holds review activities for entrepreneurial projects to determine investment targets, we will hold a prototype
Day. Every startup company should show others how much they have done. You may think they have enough motivation. They are working hard for their new and cool ideas; they get the money to support recent developments; and the game they play has only two endings: rich or failed. You may think that these powers are enough. The fact is that most of them are even more desperate to deal with this demonstration.

Even if you start a business simply to get rich, most of the time, the money you may get is just a castle in the air. What really motivates you to work hard day after day is that you don't want to make yourself look bad.

You may not be able to change this. Even if possible, I think you will not do that. A person who does not care about others' opinions may be mentally ill. So what you can do is to regard this external force as a kind of wind and adapt to it to manipulate your boat. Since you know that people around you will influence your direction, you should carefully select the circle you are going to communicate with and adjust yourself so that they can push you in the direction you like.

Graduation has changed your prevailing
Winds) will also affect your startup process. Entrepreneurship is a very difficult task, and even for those who are successful, it is often a success. No matter how high a startup company is, its landing gear is likely to contain several leaves, when it is at the end of the runway, it is taken from the top of the trees that have been wiped. In such a game that is very close to success and failure, any increase in anti-force is enough to make you fall into the abyss of failure.

At the beginning, we started Y Combinator.
We encouraged college students to start their own businesses when I joined the venture capital organization. This is partly because
Y Combinator
It was a summer program at the beginning. We will keep the form of this project-everyone has dinner once a week-but we decided to persuade college students to start their own business after graduation.

Does it mean that college students cannot start a business? No. Sam Altman, loopt
One of the founders of loopt, who just finished their second year of study when we invested in their company
It is probably one of the most promising start-ups we have invested in. However, Sam Alman
Is a very unusual person. During the three minutes I met him, I thought, "Ah! Bill
Gates must have been like this when he was 19 years old. "

If it is possible to start a business in college, why should we persuade people not to do that? When asked about others' performances, a versatile violator always says they don't have enough talent to make their performances better. This is also our rhetoric. Being a successful musician requires not only a strong will, but also a talent. This sentence is a good suggestion for anyone. Those who are not very firm give up after listening to this sentence; those who are very firm will think: "Go to it. I will succeed in any case. "

Therefore, our policy currently is to only support students who cannot persuade them. Frankly speaking, if you are not sure, you should wait. If you don't do it now, it doesn't mean you miss all the opportunities. Some of your current ideas may not be tried, but they will never be your final idea. Old Ideas are out of date, and new ideas will come out again. Historically, entrepreneurial opportunities have increased over time.

So, you may ask, why does it wait longer? Why don't I start a business after I work for a while, or I am a graduate student? Indeed, this may be a good idea. If I have to set a best choice for entrepreneurs, I would say it's about 25 years old. We're most excited by applicants of this age. Why? What are the advantages of 25-year-olds over 21-year-olds? Why not be older? What can a 25-year-old person do that a 32-year-old person cannot do? These problems are worthy of in-depth analysis.

Advantages

If you start your business immediately after graduation, you are a young entrepreneur according to the current standards. You should know the advantages of young entrepreneurs. They may not be as you think. As a young entrepreneur, you have the following advantages: Energy (stamina), poverty, rootlessness, and colleagues ), and the Ignorance (ignorance ).

There is no doubt about the importance of being energetic. If you have heard of a startup company, you will have heard of timeout. This is a general rule. I can't imagine which successful startup company is working nine to five. For young entrepreneurs, timeout is even more necessary, because they may not be very efficient.

Your second advantage is nothing. It doesn't sound like one thing, but in fact it is a huge advantage. Poverty means you can live a simple life, which is crucial to start-up companies. Almost all startup companies fail because the money is spent. Of course, this may be a bit exaggerated. There are other causes that may lead to failure. However, no matter where the root cause of your problem is, if the cost is slow, you will have more opportunities to solve the problem. Since most startups make various mistakes at the beginning, it becomes very valuable to have enough time to fix them.

Most startups ultimately do different things from what they initially imagined. Successful start-up companies are constantly trying to find a feasible path. The worst thing a startup company can do is to have a strict and unchangeable plan, and then spend a lot of money on it. It is wise to spend a little money on operations to give your ideas enough time to improve.

Graduates who have just come out of school can survive even if they have nothing, which gives them the advantages that older entrepreneurs cannot possess, because in software startups, the most important cost is people. A person who has children and wants to pay for a house loan is absolutely at a disadvantage. That's why I prefer to place my treasure on a 25-Year-Old instance instead of a 32-Year-Old instance. A 32-year-old person may be a better programmer, but at the same time may need higher living expenses. A 25-year-old person has a certain degree of work experience (and will grow over time) and can live the simplest life like a student.

What is more important than living a simple life is to carefully calculate your thoughts. One reason why Apple II is popular is that it is cheap. Not only is the machine itself cheap, but its peripherals are also cheap, such as recording data with tapes and using televisions as monitors. Do you know why? Because
Woz designed the machine for him, but he couldn't afford anything more expensive.

We also benefit from nothing. At that time, our prices were almost as low as possible. The top service is USD three hundred a month, which is an order of magnitude lower than the normal price. It seems that this is a very clever move, but at that time, we did not do this because of intelligence. $ Three hundred a month is a lot of money for us. Like Apple, we are able to create cheap things and become more popular, just because we are poor.

Many start-ups have similar situations: when someone makes something, the cost is only a tenth of the cost. As a result, the current players cannot follow up, because they have never thought about this possibility. For example, traditional long-talk operators have never imagined
VoIP (the result is VoIP, and the call effect is the same ). In this game, poverty is helpful because your personal orientation is consistent with the goal of technological development.

The advantages of nothing are similar to those of nothing. When you are young, you can move a place at any time-not only because you have no house or too many things, but also because you are not likely to have a serious relationship with someone. This is very important because many startups are moving in.

For example, Kiko
The founding people now moved to the Bay Area to start their next startup company. The Bay Area is a better place for what they want to do. It's easy for them to make a move decision, because as far as I know, no one of them seriously talks about their girlfriends, and all the things they own, A car can be taken away-or, more specifically, it can be carried in a car or left alone.

Before that, they were at least in Boston. If they stay in Nebraska like Evan Williams
What will happen to the state? Someone wrote recently that Y Combinator
The disadvantage is that if you want to participate, you must move. There is no other way. We must have face-to-face conversations with entrepreneurs. We invest in more than a dozen startups at the same time, but we cannot appear in more than a dozen places at the same time. Even if we are so enlightened, we do not want to do so. We will not make it easy for entrepreneurs to stay
Nebraska
State. If a place is not a gathering place for start-up companies, it is harmful to start-up companies. In this case, there is indirect evidence. It is very difficult to start a business in a place like Houston, Chicago, or Miami. This can be seen from the number of poor successful startups in these cities. I don't know which factors in these cities constrain startups-maybe a lot of things-but there must be a reason. [2]

This may change in the future. As the cost of start-up is getting lower and lower, it may be possible for start-up companies to take root anywhere, not just those with the most suitable soil and climate. Maybe
37 Signals: 37 signals is located in Chicago and its main business is Web
Design and Application) will become a future model. But maybe not. Historically, any industry has a specific central city. If you are not in these central cities, you are at a disadvantage. I guess
37 signals is only a special case. We are talking about a relatively traditional model.

The reason for having more startups in the bay area than in Miami may be that there are more entrepreneurial people in the Bay Area. Successful startups have never been pulled up by one. They usually started like this: Someone talked about something one day and thought it could be a good entrepreneurial idea, while his friends said: "Yes, this idea is really good. Let's try it. "If we don't have anyone who says" let's try ", there won't be any start-up companies. This is another advantage for students. There are many people around them who want to say this. In a good school, there are many ambitious and technical people with you-I'm afraid you will never have such an environment again. Your passion is easy to get responses from others.

In Y Combinator
The most frequently asked question is: Where can we find a startup partner? This is the biggest problem for a 30-year-old entrepreneur. At school, they knew many excellent entrepreneurial partners, but when they were 30 years old, they lost contact with them, or these people have been bound to a position and cannot be moved.

Viaweb
This is also a special case. Even though we were older at that time, we were not bound by any work. I wanted to be an artist.
Robert, although 29 years old, is still studying in graduate school-his studies have been interrupted for a short time in 1988. It can be said that his academic progress is slow but he has achieved it.
Viaweb. Otherwise, he should have been a young professor at that time.

For Y Combinator
The question we raised is basically a question and answer, but the question of entrepreneurial partners is an exception. This question is hard to answer. Start-up partners should be people you know. So far, the school is the best place for you to explore entrepreneurial partners. You have a large group of very smart people. You can compare their different performances on the same thing, and everyone's life is still unstable. Many start-ups have broken through the school. There are Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. They are all created by a group of people at school (Microsoft entrepreneurs even know each other in high school ).

Many students think they should gain some work experience before starting a business. This may be true if all other conditions are equal. But the problem is that some conditions are not equal. Most students do not realize how scarce their entrepreneurial partners are. If you wait too long, you will find that all your friends have already invested in a project, and no one is willing to start a new job. The better your friends are, the more likely this situation will happen.

Maybe one way to solve this problem is to obtain the so-called n
Years of work experience, while actively planning your own business. You can do your best to work, study, or do anything else, but you must often meet with friends and plan. In this way, the idea of entrepreneurship will always be active in everyone's mind. I don't know if this method works, but there is always no harm in trying it.

Understanding the advantages of being a student is very helpful. Some of your classmates are likely to be very successful entrepreneurs. In a top-tech college, this is almost certainly a thing. Who will it be? If I were you, I would look for people who are not only smart but also practical. Pay attention to those who initiate the project and finish at least some of them. These people are what we are looking. It is more important than learning achievement or even thinking, and it is a hands-on ability.

You can also find entrepreneurial partners at work. Although it is less than the school, you can make up for it in other ways. The most important thing is to work in a place where smart young people are gathered. In addition, it is necessary to work in the gathering place of startup companies. When startups are everywhere, it is easier to persuade your colleagues to quit their current job with you.

When you sign a contract for employment, read the employment agreement carefully. Most agreements mean that all your ideas during your work are owned by the company. In fact, it is hard to prove when your ideas started. Therefore, this is actually for the code. If you want to start a startup company, do not write any code when you are still in the employment relationship. Even if you write them, give up them and start from scratch. This is not because your employer will find something and sue you in the future. There is no need for that step; investors, buyers, or shareholders (if you are lucky enough) will first keep an eye on this issue. Before you make a fortune, someone will ask if you have other people legally held ownership of your code, and you must be prepared to say "no ". [3]

So far, the most fraudulent employment agreement I have ever seen is Amazon's. In addition to the usual ownership of your idea, your startup company cannot include any entrepreneurial partner that once worked on Amazon-even if you didn't know them before, or never worked together at the same time. I suspect that Amazon will be difficult to execute this article, but their attempt itself is a bad sign. There are many other places in the world where you can work. You can select a place with a greater degree of freedom.

Speaking of good places to work, Google
Of course. But I have noticed a worrying sign: no startup company comes from
Google. From this point, Google is a black hole. People seem to like Google too much.
No one is willing to leave after work. Therefore, if you want to have your own startup company one day, the evidence so far shows that you should not
Google works well.

I know this suggestion is strange. If Google
It makes your life better than you don't want to leave. Why don't you work there? In fact, what you reach is a local maximization. Entrepreneurship requires some motivation. An employer that makes you feel very happy will paralyze you and stay forever, even if your departure may bring you more benefits. [4]

If you want to start a business, the best work environment may be a startup company. Aside from getting the most similar experience, this experience usually ends soon. Or, you will make a fortune, and the problem will be solved. or, if the company is acquired, it will become boring to continue to stay, and you can leave easily. Or, if everything is turned to nothing, then you will gain a new freedom.

The last advantage is the fearlessness of the ignorant. It does not sound very useful. I chose this controversial word. In fact, ignorance is a powerful force. On
Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y Combinator
Soon I will publish a book that records interviews with many entrepreneurs, and I have noticed an obvious feature. Entrepreneurs have said that if they knew it would be so difficult at the beginning, they might be scared.

Ignorance is a useful one compared to other forms of stupidity. When you start a business, ignorance is good because your potential exceeds your understanding. Entrepreneurship is harder than you think, but at the same time, you can do more than you think, so that you can even get rid of each other.

When many people see companies like Apple, they will think: How can I achieve this? Apple is a huge institution, and I am just a small individual. But don't forget that every big company had only a handful of people at the beginning, discussing what to do in a single room. A large company is also made up of two people.

I am not saying that everyone can start a business. In fact, I'm sure most people are not suitable. I don't know much about a wide range of people. If you are specific to people I know, such as hackers, I think I can talk more accurately. In those top schools, I guess there will be about 1/4 people learning computer science. If they want to, they may become entrepreneurs.

"As long as they think" is a very important premise-it is no longer a condition to be important, it is a decisive factor-as long as your intelligence exceeds a certain threshold (most computer students in top schools exceed this threshold ), the factor that determines whether you can become a successful entrepreneur is how strong your desire is. You don't need to be smart. If you are not a genius, choose a less competitive field to start a business, such as the management software of the Human Resources Department. I would like to give this example at will, but I can say with confidence that, no matter how far this field is achieved, it may not take a genius to do better. There are countless people working there all day on tedious and boring businesses, and these people are crazy about wanting a better software. Even if you think that
Larry and Sergey
The two founders). You can reduce your goals to make up for your gap with them.

While preventing you from being overly scared, ignorance can sometimes help you discover new ideas. Steve Wozniak
This is very important:

The most beautiful jobs I have done at Apple are all done without capital or experience. All the work in this situation is very beautiful, and I cannot do it at other times.

When you know nothing about it, You must create it independently. If you are smart enough, your creation may surpass those that already exist. Especially in some fields, when the rules change, this one is even more of a famous saying. All of our software concepts are built when the processor speed is slow, and the memory and hard disk capacity are small. Who knows what outdated assumptions are implied in the extended wisdom? Instead of eliminating them purposefully, the method to correct these assumptions is closer to a garbage collection method. A person who does not know much about this problem, but is very smart, invented everything from the ground up one day. In this process, some old concepts are naturally eliminated.

Note:

[1]
Even the desire to protect their children seems to be less intense than this, which can be seen from the comparison of how people treat their children and how to carefully protect their reputation in society. (I think what we are doing will also be seen by future generations as brutal acts. In this way, people are always more aware of historical mistakes .)

[2] for Y Combinator
The worry that entrepreneurs may be forced to spend three months moving reflects from the other side that people generally do not estimate the difficulty of starting a business. In fact, the inconvenience you may face is far greater than this.

[3]
Most employment agreements state that any ideas related to the company's current or future potential business belong to the company. The "future potential business" clause may include any possible start-ups, and investors or acquirers usually make the worst assumptions.
For the sake of safety, or do not use any code you have written in your previous work, or give your employer a written waiver of your freetier projects. Many employers may compromise to avoid losing valuable employees. But the trouble is that you have to clearly tell them what your project is doing.

[4] geshke And Warnock founded Adobe because Xerox ignored them. Assume that
Xerox uses what they do, and they may stay in Parc all the time.