Posted on March 28th, 2007 by Wayt King.
If you haven’t tuned in to Paul Graham’s essays, you’re missing out on a guy who (1) is a really really great writer (i.e. communicates clearly) and (2) IMHO really understands the new “capital-light” web services startup paradigm. We need to get something like his YCombinator going in Atlanta. His latest essay is another gem; here are my favorite excerpts:
So now I’d advise people to go ahead and start startups right out of college. There’s no better time to take risks than when you’re young. Sure, you’ll probably fail. But even failure will get you to the ultimate goal faster than getting a job.
You don’t need to know anything about business to start a startup. The initial focus should be the product. All you need to know in this phase is how to build things people want. If you succeed, you’ll have to think about how to make money from it. But this is so easy you can pick it up on the fly.
So here’s the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. Find something that’s missing in your own life, and supply that need—no matter how specific to you it seems. Steve Wozniak built himself a computer; who knew so many other people would want them? A need that’s narrow but genuine is a better starting point than one that’s broad but hypothetical.
I’m told there’s a lot of stigma attached to failing in other places—in Europe, for example. Not here.
One reason people who’ve been out in the world for a year or two make better founders than people straight from college is that they know what they’re avoiding. If their startup fails, they’ll have to get a job, and they know how much jobs suck.
Now we look back on medieval peasants and wonder how they stood it. How grim it must have been to till the same fields your whole life with no hope of anything better, under the thumb of lords and priests you had to give all your surplus to and acknowledge as your masters. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day people look back on what we consider a normal job in the same way. How grim it would be to commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, and be told what to do by someone you had to acknowledge as a boss—someone who could call you into their office and say “take a seat,” and you’d sit! Imagine having to ask permission to release software to users. Imagine being sad on Sunday afternoons because the weekend was almost over, and tomorrow you’d have to get up and go to work. How did they stand it?
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Hi Wayt,
I’ve heard about a YCombinator-like fund that’s being put together for Atlanta start-ups. I believe it will be ready to go around September.
I’m going also going to plug HackAtlanta, a uncoference/code jam, that’s going to happen sometime (I think) in the early part of August. It’ll be interested to see what comes out of that.