In one of Stanford's teaching classes — this time in Sam Altman’s lessons — Paul Graham gave a lecture that would be included in the annals without any doubt. Despite the fact that information is focused primarily on college students, Paul himself notes that most of the material is applicable to potential founders of all ages.

One of the advantages of children in the family is the constant posing of the question “what would I say to my children?” To myself at the very moment when you are asked to give advice. My children are still small, but I can easily imagine what I would tell them about startups if they were already in college. That is why I am going to tell you this.

Startups are counter-intuitive. I myself am not sure why. Perhaps because the knowledge of them has not yet permeated our culture deeply. Regardless of the reasons, starting your own business is a task in which it is not always possible to trust your own instincts.

In this sense, the process is similar to skiing: when you get up on them for the first time, drive and want to slow down before descending, the instincts tell you: "lean back." But if you do this, then fly out of the track. Therefore, part of the ski learning process involves suppressing this impulse. Over time, you have new habits, but the first attempts require a serious concentration of consciousness. That is, there is a list of things that you must remember before you go down the road.
')
Startups are as unnatural at first as skiing. And what I’m doing now is writing a list of things that you can’t “not learn” before you begin.

Counter-intuitiveness

I already mentioned the first fact - startups are so strange, in general, that if you trust your own instincts, you will make a lot of mistakes. If you do not know anything other than this, it is better to pause before starting.

When I was closely involved in Y Combinator, I often joked that our main function was to tell the founders what they would ignore in any other case. It really is. Set-by-set, YC partners warned the founders about the mistakes they would make, the founders ignored these words, and then, a year later, would come with the words: " We'd rather have listened ."

Why do the founders ignore the words of partners? This happens with all the counter-intuitive ideas - they do not correspond to what intuition tells you. They seem wrong. Therefore, of course, the first impulse is simply not to take these words into account. In fact, my humorous explanation of our own activities is by no means a curse of the Y Combinator - this is the reason for its existence. If the instincts of the founders did not let them down and always gave the right answers, we would never need them. Other people are only needed to give advice that surprises you. This is one of the reasons why there is a huge number of coaches in skiing and almost none of them in running along the ground.

But, oddly enough, you can trust your instincts regarding other people. And one of the typical mistakes of many founders is that they are not strong enough in this: they are involved in common processes with people who seem to be impressive, but intuitively repulsive. Later, when everything goes wrong, the founders justify themselves: " I know that there was something wrong with him, but I ignored it for the reason that it impressed me ."

If you are thinking about entering into a long-term relationship with someone, as a co-founder, employee, investor or buyer, and you have doubts about this, trust them. If someone seems to you a slippery type, freak, scam - do not ignore this feeling.

This is one of the cases when indulging one's own weaknesses is not shameful. Work only with those people with whom you have no problems and with whom you have long believed in the absence of communication and other difficulties.

Expertise

The second counter-intuitive point is that it doesn’t matter what extent you know about startups. The path to success with your own innovative project is not to be an expert in it, it is to solve the problem of users at the expert level. Mark Zuckerberg did not succeed because he was a know-it-all. He succeeded even though he had no experience at all, but he understood his future users very well.

If you do not know anything about, for example, angelic investments in the first round - you should not feel unhappy. This is the type of knowledge that you can acquire when it is necessary and forget after the need has passed and you have done everything.

Actually, I think that it is not just unnecessary - to know everything about the “mechanics” of the work of startups, it can even be dangerous. If I met a student who knows everything about convertible bonds, agreements with employees and, God forbid, FF class promotions, I wouldn’t think: “ This is someone who is seriously ahead of their peers .” This will rip off all alarms in my internal system. Because what characterizes young founders is the need to go through all the events of the foundation of their own company, along with mistakes. First, someone realizes the idea, which seems to be quite good, removes the office with a cool look and hires several people. From the outside, it seems to everyone that this is exactly what startups do. In fact, inside, the next step after the office and hiring people will be the simple fact of realizing how far they have fallen. Because in the process of imitation of start-up activities in all external manifestations, one thing is often forgotten, which is the key - to do something that people want to use.

A game

We so often observed how this happens that we even came up with the name of this phenomenon: the gaming house. Over time, I understood why this was happening at all. The reason why young founders come to a conclusion about the need to found a startup is that they have been trained and taught to follow this path since childhood. Such extracurricular activity. Even in colleges, most of the work is as artificial as running a hamster in a wheel.

I do not pounce on the educational system because it is so. In your work, there will always be a certain percentage of fake, especially when you are taught something. If you try to measure the result of such work, you will find a large number of artifacts associated with such a pseudo-activity.

I admit - I did it myself in college. I quickly discovered that in many classes there are 20 or 30 ideas that shaped the final exams in a subject. After that, I realized that the best way to prepare for such exams is not cramming the material that is being sorted during class, but working out specific issues that form the final test. When I came to the exam, my main feeling was curiosity - which of my questions would I get in the form of a ticket. It was a lot like a game.

It is not surprising that after we train to behave in this way, playing similar games, all the founders of startups try to do the same with them - to understand and learn the “tricks” that allow them to play this “game” without loss. Since raising funds has become the measure of start-up success (although this is a stupid mistake), everyone wants to know the tricks to convince investors. In Y Combinator, we say that the best way to convince investors is to realize that everything works out for you, which means that you are growing rapidly. This can be said to them in simple words. After that, everyone wants to learn the tricks to grow quickly. And we say again that the best way to do this is to just do something that people need.

The huge number of dialogues of YC partners with young founders begins with the question: “ How are we ... ” and the answer to it: “ Just ... ”

Why are the founders constantly complicating things? The reason, as I understand it, is to constantly look for a "trick."

Therefore, this is the third counter-intuitive fact that needs to be remembered about startups: the game system based on tricks and hacks does not work here. It could work if you go to work in a large corporation. Depending on how “broken” processes are in it, you can succeed simply by “clinging” to the right people, or by imitating activities, and so on. But this does not work with startups. There is no boss who can be deceived - only users, each of whom worries first of all about whether your product performs its task and solves the problem. Startups are also impersonal, just like physics. You just have to do something that the user needs, and depending on how well you did it, you will flourish.

The dangerous thing is that imitation to some extent may work for investors. If you are very good at saying what people want to hear and make an impression of a professional, you can fool investors into at least one, and possibly more, rounds of investment. But this is not in your interest, as the company will be doomed, and, ultimatum. The only thing you do is spend your time and other people's money on a very fast downhill.

So stop looking for tricks. In startups, they can sometimes occur, as in any other industry or activity, but this does not help you solve a user's problem. The founder, who does not know anything about raising funds, but has several users who love his product, will find those means with much greater efficiency, in comparison with a person who knows everything about it, but does not have users and their love. And, even more importantly, the one who has the users will succeed after receiving the necessary funds.

And despite the fact that in some sense this is “bad news” - the inability to “beat” the system of successful startups, I am extremely pleased that the gaming system does not work in them. I am glad that there are still such parts of the world and people who can win by doing a good job. Just imagine how depressed this world would be in a situation, if everything was like in a school or corporations, where you would have to spend a huge amount of time doing frank crap or losing to people who do not know anything else. I can’t even imagine where I would be today, if at college time I realized it with the same force that there are places in the world where gaming systems mean less than others, or do not mean anything at all. Today I am convinced of their existence and I offer this knowledge to you, especially when you think about the future. How can you be successful in any job, and what do you want to accomplish by doing it?