shared from DegreeLibrary.org |
What are the strengths of young founders:
(According to Paul Graham, Co-Founder of Y-Combinator)
Stamina
College is the perfect time for all-nighters, and crazy work hours.
Poverty
Being used to poverty aligns you with the markets tendency. You may think $300 is a lot. Pricing a product usually $3000 at $300 makes you super competitive.
Rootlessness
Move where you need to, change your schedule as needed. You probably don’t have a family to take care of.
Colleagues
Early essentials that you or someone you know can do:
- Logo, wireframe mockups, site/landing page, blog, customer surveys
- Probably the largest concentration of potential co-founders you will ever experience.
Ignorance
Many successful founders say–if they had known the amount of work it would take to succeed, they would have been daunted.
What’s Step 1?
Well, before you start…
Do you have an idea? Do you know how to code? Can you fill a room with 100 people?
After your idea is fleshed out, your code is covered and you’ve won your friends over, you can start at step 1.
Step 1:
- Reject Books and Entrepreneurship Classes
- Build a Prototype.
- Talk to Your Bank, Bootstrap or Get Money from Your Parents.
- Find an Angel.
- Get Accepted to an Incubator.
- Build.
- Present it to Your Peers.
- Revise.
- Talk to an Adviser.
- Learn.
- Launch Beta.
Then…
- Revise Product.
- Public Launch.
- Find More Investors.
- Learn Some More.
- Learn a Whole Lot More.
- Mostly, Make Mistakes and Learn.
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably left school.
Starting a startup is one of the hardest things you’ll do in your life.
But there are reasons why these companies were founded around college environments:
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook.
