Essays

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Another thing you can do is learn skills that will be useful to you in a startup. These may be different from the skills you'd learn to get a job. For example, thinking about getting a job will make you want to learn programming languages you think employers want, like Java and C++. Whereas if you start a startup, you get to pick the language, so you have to think about which will actually let you get the most done. If you use that test you might end up learning Ruby or Python instead.

But the most important skill for a startup founder isn't a programming technique. It's a knack for understanding users and figuring out how to give them what they want. I know I repeat this, but that's because it's so important. And it's a skill you can learn, though perhaps habit might be a better word. Get into the habit of thinking of software as having users. What do those users want? What would make them say wow?

This is particularly valuable for undergrads, because the concept of users is missing from most college programming classes. The way you get taught programming in college would be like teaching writing as grammar, without mentioning that its purpose is to communicate something to an audience. Fortunately an audience for software is now only an http request away. So in addition to the programming you do for your classes, why not build some kind of website people will find useful? At the very least it will teach you how to write software with users. In the best case, it might not just be preparation for a startup, but the startup itself, like it was for Yahoo and Google.

Notes

[1] Even the desire to protect one's children seems weaker, judging from things people have historically done to their kids rather than risk their community's disapproval. (I assume we still do things that will be regarded in the future as barbaric, but historical abuses are easier for us to see.)

[2] Worrying that Y Combinator makes founders move for 3 months also suggests one underestimates how hard it is to start a startup. You're going to have to put up with much greater inconveniences than that.

[3] Most employee agreements say that any idea relating to the company's present or potential future business belongs to them. Often as not the second clause could include any possible startup, and anyone doing due diligence for an investor or acquirer will assume the worst.

To be safe either (a) don't use code written while you were still employed in your previous job, or (b) get your employer to renounce, in writing, any claim to the code you write for your side project. Many will consent to (b) rather than lose a prized employee. The downside is that you'll have to tell them exactly what your project does.

[4] Geshke and Warnock only founded Adobe because Xerox ignored them. If Xerox had used what they built, they would probably never have left PARC.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this, and to Jeff Arnold and the SIPB for inviting me to speak.


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