Essays

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The relationship between work and money tends to dawn on you only gradually. At least it did for me. One's first thought tends to be simply "This sucks. I'm in debt. Plus I have to get up on monday and go to work." Gradually you realize that these two things are as tightly connected as only a market can make them.

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. Someone who's figured that out will automatically focus more on the user. And that cures the other half of the class-project syndrome. After you've been working for a while, you yourself tend to measure what you've done the same way the market does.

Of course, you don't have to spend years working to learn this stuff. If you're sufficiently perceptive you can grasp these things while you're still in school. Sam Altman did. He must have, because Loopt is no class project. And as his example suggests, this can be valuable knowledge. At a minimum, if you get this stuff, you already have most of what you gain from the "work experience" employers consider so desirable. But of course if you really get it, you can use this information in a way that's more valuable to you than that.

Now

So suppose you think you might start a startup at some point, either when you graduate or a few years after. What should you do now? For both jobs and grad school, there are ways to prepare while you're in college. If you want to get a job when you graduate, you should get summer jobs at places you'd like to work. If you want to go to grad school, it will help to work on research projects as an undergrad. What's the equivalent for startups? How do you keep your options maximally open?

One thing you can do while you're still in school is to learn how startups work. Unfortunately that's not easy. Few if any colleges have classes about startups. There may be business school classes on entrepreneurship, as they call it over there, but these are likely to be a waste of time. Business schools like to talk about startups, but philosophically they're at the opposite end of the spectrum. Most books on startups also seem to be useless. I've looked at a few and none get it right. Books in most fields are written by people who know the subject from experience, but for startups there's a unique problem: by definition the founders of successful startups don't need to write books to make money. As a result most books on the subject end up being written by people who don't understand it.

So I'd be skeptical of classes and books. The way to learn about startups is by watching them in action, preferably by working at one. How do you do that as an undergrad? Probably by sneaking in through the back door. Just hang around a lot and gradually start doing things for them. Most startups are (or should be) very cautious about hiring. Every hire increases the burn rate, and bad hires early on are hard to recover from. However, startups usually have a fairly informal atmosphere, and there's always a lot that needs to be done. If you just start doing stuff for them, many will be too busy to shoo you away. You can thus gradually work your way into their confidence, and maybe turn it into an official job later, or not, whichever you prefer. This won't work for all startups, but it would work for most I've known.

Number two, make the most of the great advantage of school: the wealth of co-founders. Look at the people around you and ask yourself which you'd like to work with. When you apply that test, you may find you get surprising results. You may find you'd prefer the quiet guy you've mostly ignored to someone who seems impressive but has an attitude to match. I'm not suggesting you suck up to people you don't really like because you think one day they'll be successful. Exactly the opposite, in fact: you should only start a startup with someone you like, because a startup will put your friendship through a stress test. I'm just saying you should think about who you really admire and hang out with them, instead of whoever circumstances throw you together with.


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