A Student's Guide to Startups
If you've ever thought about starting your own business, these excerpts from a recent Paul Graham essay are particularly inspiring. - Ed
Link: A Student's Guide to Startups
As well as preventing you from being intimidated, ignorance can sometimes help you discover new ideas. Steve Wozniak put this very strongly:
All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.
When you know nothing, you have to reinvent stuff for yourself, and if you're smart your reinventions may be better than what preceded them. This is especially true in fields where the rules change. ... Who knows what obsolete assumptions are embedded in the conventional wisdom? ... Someone ignorant but smart will come along and reinvent everything, and in the process simply fail to reproduce certain existing ideas.
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Even more important than living cheaply, is thinking cheaply. One reason the Apple II was so popular was that it was cheap. The computer itself was cheap, and it used cheap, off-the-shelf peripherals like a cassette tape recorder for data storage and a TV as a monitor. And you know why? Because Woz designed this computer for himself, and he couldn't afford anything more.
We benefitted from the same phenomenon at Viaweb. Our prices were daringly low for the time. The most expensive level of service was $300 a month, which was an order of magnitude below the norm. In retrospect this was a smart move, but we didn't do it because we were smart. $300 a month seemed like a lot of money to us. Like Apple, we created something inexpensive, and therefore popular, simply because we were poor.
A lot of startups have that form: someone comes along and makes something for a tenth or a hundredth of what it used to cost, and the existing players can't follow because they don't even want to think about a world in which that's possible. Traditional long distance carriers, for example, didn't even want to think about VoIP. (It was coming, all the same.) Being poor helps in this game, because your own personal bias points in the same direction technology evolves in.[...]
One of the things employers expect from someone with "work experience" is the elimination of the flake reflex—the ability to get things done, with no excuses.
The other thing you get from work experience is an understanding of what work is, and in particular, how intrinsically horrible it is. Fundamentally the equation is a brutal one: you have to spend most of your waking hours doing stuff someone else wants, or starve. There are a few places where the work is so interesting that this is concealed, because what other people want done happens to coincide with what you want to work on. But you only have to imagine what would happen if they diverged to see the underlying reality.
[...]So the most important advantage 24 year old founders have over 20 year old founders is that they know what they're trying to avoid. To the average undergrad the idea of getting rich translates into buying Ferraris, or being admired. To someone who has learned from experience about the relationship between money and work, it translates to something way more important: it means you get to opt out of the brutal equation that governs the lives of 99.9% of people. Getting rich means you can stop treading water.
Someone who gets this will work much harder at making a startup succeed—with the proverbial energy of a drowning man, in fact. But understanding the relationship between money and work also changes the way you work. You don't get money just for working, but for doing things other people want.
