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|  **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator.  
  
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October 2014  
  
 _(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman'sstartup class at
Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to
potential founders at other ages.)_  
  
One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you
can ask yourself "what would I tell my own kids?" My kids are little, but I
can imagine what I'd tell them about startups if they were in college, and
that's what I'm going to tell you.  
  
Startups are very counterintuitive. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just because
knowledge about them hasn't permeated our culture yet. But whatever the
reason, starting a startup is a task where you can't always trust your
instincts.  
  
It's like skiing in that way. When you first try skiing and you want to slow
down, your instinct is to lean back. But if you lean back on skis you fly down
the hill out of control. So part of learning to ski is learning to suppress
that impulse. Eventually you get new habits, but at first it takes a conscious
effort. At first there's a list of things you're trying to remember as you
start down the hill.  
  
Startups are as unnatural as skiing, so there's a similar list for startups.
Here I'm going to give you the first part of it — the things to remember if
you want to prepare yourself to start a startup.  
  
**Counterintuitive**  
  
The first item on it is the fact I already mentioned: that startups are so
weird that if you trust your instincts, you'll make a lot of mistakes. If you
know nothing more than this, you may at least pause before making them.  
  
When I was running Y Combinator I used to joke that our function was to tell
founders things they would ignore. It's really true. Batch after batch, the YC
partners warn founders about mistakes they're about to make, and the founders
ignore them, and then come back a year later and say "I wish we'd listened."  
  
Why do the founders ignore the partners' advice? Well, that's the thing about
counterintuitive ideas: they contradict your intuitions. They seem wrong. So
of course your first impulse is to disregard them. And in fact my joking
description is not merely the curse of Y Combinator but part of its raison
d'etre. If founders' instincts already gave them the right answers, they
wouldn't need us. You only need other people to give you advice that surprises
you. That's why there are a lot of ski instructors and not many running
instructors.   
  
You can, however, trust your instincts about people. And in fact one of the
most common mistakes young founders make is not to do that enough. They get
involved with people who seem impressive, but about whom they feel some
misgivings personally. Later when things blow up they say "I knew there was
something off about him, but I ignored it because he seemed so impressive."  
  
If you're thinking about getting involved with someone — as a cofounder, an
employee, an investor, or an acquirer — and you have misgivings about them,
trust your gut. If someone seems slippery, or bogus, or a jerk, don't ignore
it.  
  
This is one case where it pays to be self-indulgent. Work with people you
genuinely like, and you've known long enough to be sure.  
  
**Expertise**  
  
The second counterintuitive point is that it's not that important to know a
lot about startups. The way to succeed in a startup is not to be an expert on
startups, but to be an expert on your users and the problem you're solving for
them. Mark Zuckerberg didn't succeed because he was an expert on startups. He
succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups, because he understood his
users really well.  
  
If you don't know anything about, say, how to raise an angel round, don't feel
bad on that account. That sort of thing you can learn when you need to, and
forget after you've done it.  
  
In fact, I worry it's not merely unnecessary to learn in great detail about
the mechanics of startups, but possibly somewhat dangerous. If I met an
undergrad who knew all about convertible notes and employee agreements and
(God forbid) class FF stock, I wouldn't think "here is someone who is way
ahead of their peers." It would set off alarms. Because another of the
characteristic mistakes of young founders is to go through the motions of
starting a startup. They make up some plausible-sounding idea, raise money at
a good valuation, rent a cool office, hire a bunch of people. From the outside
that seems like what startups do. But the next step after rent a cool office
and hire a bunch of people is: gradually realize how completely fucked they
are, because while imitating all the outward forms of a startup they have
neglected the one thing that's actually essential: making something people
want.  
  
**Game**  
  
We saw this happen so often that we made up a name for it: playing house.
Eventually I realized why it was happening. The reason young founders go
through the motions of starting a startup is because that's what they've been
trained to do for their whole lives up to that point. Think about what you
have to do to get into college, for example. Extracurricular activities,
check. Even in college classes most of the work is as artificial as running
laps.  
  
I'm not attacking the educational system for being this way. There will always
be a certain amount of fakeness in the work you do when you're being taught
something, and if you measure their performance it's inevitable that people
will exploit the difference to the point where much of what you're measuring
is artifacts of the fakeness.  
  
I confess I did it myself in college. I found that in a lot of classes there
might only be 20 or 30 ideas that were the right shape to make good exam
questions. The way I studied for exams in these classes was not (except
incidentally) to master the material taught in the class, but to make a list
of potential exam questions and work out the answers in advance. When I walked
into the final, the main thing I'd be feeling was curiosity about which of my
questions would turn up on the exam. It was like a game.  
  
It's not surprising that after being trained for their whole lives to play
such games, young founders' first impulse on starting a startup is to try to
figure out the tricks for winning at this new game. Since fundraising appears
to be the measure of success for startups (another classic noob mistake), they
always want to know what the tricks are for convincing investors. We tell them
the best way to convince investors is to make a startup that's actually doing
well, meaning growing fast, and then simply tell investors so. Then they want
to know what the tricks are for growing fast. And we have to tell them the
best way to do that is simply to make something people want.  
  
So many of the conversations YC partners have with young founders begin with
the founder asking "How do we..." and the partner replying "Just..."  
  
Why do the founders always make things so complicated? The reason, I realized,
is that they're looking for the trick.  
  
So this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups:
starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. Gaming the system
may continue to work if you go to work for a big company. Depending on how
broken the company is, you can succeed by sucking up to the right people,
giving the impression of productivity, and so on.  But that doesn't work
with startups. There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about
is whether your product does what they want. Startups are as impersonal as
physics. You have to make something people want, and you prosper only to the
extent you do.  
  
The dangerous thing is, faking does work to some degree on investors. If
you're super good at sounding like you know what you're talking about, you can
fool investors for at least one and perhaps even two rounds of funding. But
it's not in your interest to. The company is ultimately doomed. All you're
doing is wasting your own time riding it down.  
  
So stop looking for the trick. There are tricks in startups, as there are in
any domain, but they are an order of magnitude less important than solving the
real problem. A founder who knows nothing about fundraising but has made
something users love will have an easier time raising money than one who knows
every trick in the book but has a flat usage graph. And more importantly, the
founder who has made something users love is the one who will go on to succeed
after raising the money.  
  
Though in a sense it's bad news in that you're deprived of one of your most
powerful weapons, I think it's exciting that gaming the system stops working
when you start a startup. It's exciting that there even exist parts of the
world where you win by doing good work. Imagine how depressing the world would
be if it were all like school and big companies, where you either have to
spend a lot of time on bullshit things or lose to people who do.  I would
have been delighted if I'd realized in college that there were parts of the
real world where gaming the system mattered less than others, and a few where
it hardly mattered at all. But there are, and this variation is one of the
most important things to consider when you're thinking about your future. How
do you win in each type of work, and what would you like to win by doing?   
  
**All-Consuming**  
  
That brings us to our fourth counterintuitive point: startups are all-
consuming. If you start a startup, it will take over your life to a degree you
cannot imagine. And if your startup succeeds, it will take over your life for
a long time: for several years at the very least, maybe for a decade, maybe
for the rest of your working life. So there is a real opportunity cost here.  
  
Larry Page may seem to have an enviable life, but there are aspects of it that
are unenviable. Basically at 25 he started running as fast as he could and it
must seem to him that he hasn't stopped to catch his breath since. Every day
new shit happens in the Google empire that only the CEO can deal with, and he,
as CEO, has to deal with it. If he goes on vacation for even a week, a whole
week's backlog of shit accumulates. And he has to bear this uncomplainingly,
partly because as the company's daddy he can never show fear or weakness, and
partly because billionaires get less than zero sympathy if they talk about
having difficult lives. Which has the strange side effect that the difficulty
of being a successful startup founder is concealed from almost everyone except
those who've done it.  
  
Y Combinator has now funded several companies that can be called big
successes, and in every single case the founders say the same thing. It never
gets any easier. The nature of the problems change. You're worrying about
construction delays at your London office instead of the broken air
conditioner in your studio apartment. But the total volume of worry never
decreases; if anything it increases.  
  
Starting a successful startup is similar to having kids in that it's like a
button you push that changes your life irrevocably. And while it's truly
wonderful having kids, there are a lot of things that are easier to do before
you have them than after. Many of which will make you a better parent when you
do have kids. And since you can delay pushing the button for a while, most
people in rich countries do.  
  
Yet when it comes to startups, a lot of people seem to think they're supposed
to start them while they're still in college. Are you crazy? And what are the
universities thinking? They go out of their way to ensure their students are
well supplied with contraceptives, and yet they're setting up entrepreneurship
programs and startup incubators left and right.  
  
To be fair, the universities have their hand forced here. A lot of incoming
students are interested in startups. Universities are, at least de facto,
expected to prepare them for their careers. So students who want to start
startups hope universities can teach them about startups. And whether
universities can do this or not, there's some pressure to claim they can, lest
they lose applicants to other universities that do.  
  
Can universities teach students about startups? Yes and no. They can teach
students about startups, but as I explained before, this is not what you need
to know. What you need to learn about are the needs of your own users, and you
can't do that until you actually start the company.  So starting a startup
is intrinsically something you can only really learn by doing it. And it's
impossible to do that in college, for the reason I just explained: startups
take over your life. You can't start a startup for real as a student, because
if you start a startup for real you're not a student anymore. You may be
nominally a student for a bit, but you won't even be that for long.   
  
Given this dichotomy, which of the two paths should you take? Be a real
student and not start a startup, or start a real startup and not be a student?
I can answer that one for you. Do not start a startup in college. How to start
a startup is just a subset of a bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to
have a good life. And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for
a lot of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it. Starting a
startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search. Most people should still
be searching breadth-first at 20.  
  
You can do things in your early 20s that you can't do as well before or after,
like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travel super cheaply with no
sense of a deadline. For unambitious people, this sort of thing is the dreaded
"failure to launch," but for the ambitious ones it can be an incomparably
valuable sort of exploration. If you start a startup at 20 and you're
sufficiently successful, you'll never get to do it.   
  
Mark Zuckerberg will never get to bum around a foreign country. He can do
other things most people can't, like charter jets to fly him to foreign
countries. But success has taken a lot of the serendipity out of his life.
Facebook is running him as much as he's running Facebook. And while it can be
very cool to be in the grip of a project you consider your life's work, there
are advantages to serendipity too, especially early in life. Among other
things it gives you more options to choose your life's work from.  
  
There's not even a tradeoff here. You're not sacrificing anything if you forgo
starting a startup at 20, because you're more likely to succeed if you wait.
In the unlikely case that you're 20 and one of your side projects takes off
like Facebook did, you'll face a choice of running with it or not, and it may
be reasonable to run with it. But the usual way startups take off is for the
founders to make them take off, and it's gratuitously stupid to do that at 20.  
  
**Try**  
  
Should you do it at any age? I realize I've made startups sound pretty hard.
If I haven't, let me try again: starting a startup is really hard. What if
it's too hard? How can you tell if you're up to this challenge?  
  
The answer is the fifth counterintuitive point: you can't tell. Your life so
far may have given you some idea what your prospects might be if you tried to
become a mathematician, or a professional football player. But unless you've
had a very strange life you haven't done much that was like being a startup
founder. Starting a startup will change you a lot. So what you're trying to
estimate is not just what you are, but what you could grow into, and who can
do that?  
  
For the past 9 years it was my job to predict whether people would have what
it took to start successful startups. It was easy to tell how smart they were,
and most people reading this will be over that threshold. The hard part was
predicting how tough and ambitious they would become. There may be no one who
has more experience at trying to predict that, so I can tell you how much an
expert can know about it, and the answer is: not much. I learned to keep a
completely open mind about which of the startups in each batch would turn out
to be the stars.  
  
The founders sometimes think they know. Some arrive feeling sure they will ace
Y Combinator just as they've aced every one of the (few, artificial, easy)
tests they've faced in life so far. Others arrive wondering how they got in,
and hoping YC doesn't discover whatever mistake caused it to accept them. But
there is little correlation between founders' initial attitudes and how well
their companies do.  
  
I've read that the same is true in the military — that the swaggering recruits
are no more likely to turn out to be really tough than the quiet ones. And
probably for the same reason: that the tests involved are so different from
the ones in their previous lives.  
  
If you're absolutely terrified of starting a startup, you probably shouldn't
do it. But if you're merely unsure whether you're up to it, the only way to
find out is to try. Just not now.  
  
**Ideas**  
  
So if you want to start a startup one day, what should you do in college?
There are only two things you need initially: an idea and cofounders. And the
m.o. for getting both is the same. Which leads to our sixth and last
counterintuitive point: that the way to get startup ideas is not to try to
think of startup ideas.  
  
I've written a whole essay on this, so I won't repeat it all here. But the
short version is that if you make a conscious effort to think of startup
ideas, the ideas you come up with will not merely be bad, but bad and
plausible-sounding, meaning you'll waste a lot of time on them before
realizing they're bad.  
  
The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of
making a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your mind into the
type that startup ideas form in without any conscious effort. In fact, so
unconsciously that you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas.  
  
This is not only possible, it's how Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all got
started. None of these companies were even meant to be companies at first.
They were all just side projects. The best startups almost have to start as
side projects, because great ideas tend to be such outliers that your
conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.  
  
Ok, so how do you turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in
unconsciously? (1) Learn a lot about things that matter, then (2) work on
problems that interest you (3) with people you like and respect. The third
part, incidentally, is how you get cofounders at the same time as the idea.  
  
The first time I wrote that paragraph, instead of "learn a lot about things
that matter," I wrote "become good at some technology." But that prescription,
though sufficient, is too narrow. What was special about Brian Chesky and Joe
Gebbia was not that they were experts in technology. They were good at design,
and perhaps even more importantly, they were good at organizing groups and
making projects happen. So you don't have to work on technology per se, so
long as you work on problems demanding enough to stretch you.  
  
What kind of problems are those? That is very hard to answer in the general
case. History is full of examples of young people who were working on
important problems that no one else at the time thought were important, and in
particular that their parents didn't think were important. On the other hand,
history is even fuller of examples of parents who thought their kids were
wasting their time and who were right. So how do you know when you're working
on real stuff?   
  
I know how _I_ know. Real problems are interesting, and I am self-indulgent in
the sense that I always want to work on interesting things, even if no one
else cares about them (in fact, especially if no one else cares about them),
and find it very hard to make myself work on boring things, even if they're
supposed to be important.  
  
My life is full of case after case where I worked on something just because it
seemed interesting, and it turned out later to be useful in some worldly way.
Y Combinator itself was something I only did because it seemed interesting. So
I seem to have some sort of internal compass that helps me out. But I don't
know what other people have in their heads. Maybe if I think more about this I
can come up with heuristics for recognizing genuinely interesting problems,
but for the moment the best I can offer is the hopelessly question-begging
advice that if you have a taste for genuinely interesting problems, indulging
it energetically is the best way to prepare yourself for a startup. And
indeed, probably also the best way to live.   
  
But although I can't explain in the general case what counts as an interesting
problem, I can tell you about a large subset of them. If you think of
technology as something that's spreading like a sort of fractal stain, every
moving point on the edge represents an interesting problem. So one guaranteed
way to turn your mind into the type that has good startup ideas is to get
yourself to the leading edge of some technology — to cause yourself, as Paul
Buchheit put it, to "live in the future." When you reach that point, ideas
that will seem to other people uncannily prescient will seem obvious to you.
You may not realize they're startup ideas, but you'll know they're something
that ought to exist.  
  
For example, back at Harvard in the mid 90s a fellow grad student of my
friends Robert and Trevor wrote his own voice over IP software. He didn't mean
it to be a startup, and he never tried to turn it into one. He just wanted to
talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan without paying for long distance calls, and
since he was an expert on networks it seemed obvious to him that the way to do
it was turn the sound into packets and ship it over the Internet. He never did
any more with his software than talk to his girlfriend, but this is exactly
the way the best startups get started.  
  
So strangely enough the optimal thing to do in college if you want to be a
successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational version of
college focused on "entrepreneurship." It's the classic version of college as
education for its own sake. If you want to start a startup after college, what
you should do in college is learn powerful things. And if you have genuine
intellectual curiosity, that's what you'll naturally tend to do if you just
follow your own inclinations.   
  
The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. The
way to become Larry Page was to become an expert on search. And the way to
become an expert on search was to be driven by genuine curiosity, not some
ulterior motive.  
  
At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity.
And you'll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive toward the end of
the process.  
  
So here is the ultimate advice for young would-be startup founders, boiled
down to two words: just learn.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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