11 years ago |
11 years ago |
Page & Brin didn't study "the art of startup". They were PhD students that created a good search engine that took off.
Neither did Jang & Filo. They started by maintaining a webpage with links to other interesting webpages, that became popular and they grew it into Yahoo.
Jobs and Wozniak didn't have any startup experience or knowledge on how to run a business. They had a good product.
Justin Frankel created Winamp when in college and sold it to AOL for $50 million.
I could go on.
I'm sure that there are successful people who did it with your mindset of "I want to run a startup, any startup" but majority of success stories that I know about follow the pattern of "good product leads to successful business".
With that as a context, I don't think there's much value in focusing on the "startup" part. If you can come up with a product that people want (the YC motto) and implement it, the "startup" part will happen. You'll grow into it. And the more successful the product, the more mistakes you can afford in the "running the startup" part and still be successful.
The other side of it is that no matter how brilliant you are at the "startup" part, if you have lousy product, you won't be successful. See how Steve Jobs failed to make NeXT a success (he salvaged the business by selling to Apple, but it was more of a very expensive acqu-hire than a potential behind NeXT).
So how to be successful at running a startup?
Come up with good idea, implement it. If it turns out to not be good (and we never know a good idea until we try to sell it), come up with another idea. Repeat until you find the one idea that strikes gold.
Get really, really good at networking. That is absolutely the #1 most important thing you can do to succeed at any type of career. Meet everyone you can and ask them lots of questions. Do what you can to help other people without expecting anything in return.
Go to a great school because that's where you'll meet likely-to-succeed co-founders. Join a social fraternity because that will teach you how to get along in the culture of a lot of companies and businesspeople (although it's not a culture you should seek out or try to replicate).
Major in a STEM field, but make sure you hang out with people in lots of different programs. If you have the opportunity to do joint projects with the business school, try to do them.
Don't just work at startups. Working in industry is a great way to meet prospective customers, which is the "unfair advantage" that investors want you to have for a B2B business.
Read a lot, but don't be obsessive about reading the "startup tips" genre of blog posts and books. One of the most common distractions I've encountered among "wantrepreneurs" is obsessively reading that stuff and never actually doing something.
Unfortunately, starting a company often costs a lot of money. Starting now, save as much money as you can. Startups are unfortunately insanely risky, and they are a terrible way to make money. Most people lose tens of thousands on them and never successfully make anything back.
Live like a monk. If you can save up about 1.5 years worth of living expenses, you can jump on a great opportunity when you see it.
Don't be arrogant. Don't think that you'll be the exception to everything. You're not the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs, and the things they did probably won't work for you.
And, finally, don't be afraid of failure. If you really want to be an entrepreneur, you're going to fail, and it's going to be embarrassing, expensive, scary, and painful.
If you want to expand on the ideas in those books there are also Innovator's Solution, Blue Ocean Strategy, Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado.