This is the second part of a lecture given by Paul Graham in the Harvard class. The essay is about what is important to know before you become the founder of a startup .

All-consuming

All this brings us to the fourth counter-intuitive point - start-ups are all-consuming. If you start your own, it will take such a high place in your life that initially you cannot even imagine it. And if you succeed with your project, it will enter your life for a very long time: many years, minimally, probably a decade, and perhaps the rest of your life. Therefore, you have to pay a certain price of the prospect: its presence or absence.

It may seem that the life of Larry Page is worthy of envy, but there are aspects in it that no one would envy. By and large, at 25 he began to run as fast as he could, and since then he has not had the opportunity to stop for a breather. Every day there are problems in the Google empire that only the CEO can handle, and he has to solve them. If he goes on vacation, suppose for a week, there will be a whole stack of problems requiring urgent solutions. And he will have to deal with him without being able to complain to someone, partly because he is a “dad” who does not have the ability to show weakness or fear, and partly because everyone doesn’t care about possible problems and difficulties of billionaires. This phenomenon has a strange side effect in the form of the fact that the entire complexity of building and living a successful startup, and its founder, is hidden from prying eyes. No one knows in detail “how it was done,” except for those who did it.
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Y Combinator to date has funded several companies that can be called "successful", and in each case, the founders say the same thing: " It does not get easier ." And it will not. The nature of problems changes over time and the volume of tasks: you will think about delays in building a building for a new office in London instead of thinking about a broken air conditioner in the hot summer. The total amount of experiences will never decrease, it will be good if it does not increase.

And here again, you can compare the foundation of a startup with a conscious decision to have children - this is how to press a button that will change your life beyond recognition. And initially you do not know how exactly this will happen. And although having children is wonderful, you can do a lot of “before” with this in order to help the future for yourself. And much of this is easier to do before you have children than after. A lot of this will make you a better parent. And as you may think, it will stop before the “push the button” associated with the children and get ready, most people in rich countries and cities do so.

But when it comes to startups, a lot of people think that the younger you are, the more chances you have to succeed, and you need to start at a college or university. Are you crazy? What does the faculty think? They are concerned that students have contraceptives in order to avoid shame on campuses, and at the same time they organize entrepreneurial programs and start-up incubators left and right.

But, in truth, universities have their hands tied. A huge number of incoming students are interested in startups, and from universities, de facto, students are expected to prepare for this - a career. Therefore, those students who want to establish their start-ups hope that the school will be able to do it. And regardless of whether the university can actually cope with this task, he is forced to say that he can, otherwise the students will go to another institution - which clearly states that it can.

Can universities really teach students how to make startups? Yes and no. They can teach learners about startups, but, as I explained earlier, this is not something you need to know. What you need to know is the needs of users, but you can’t find out about it until you organize your company or project. Therefore, starting and managing a start-up business is such a fun thing that can be learned only by doing it. And in a college or university it is almost impossible to do this, for the reason that I also mentioned it - it will take your whole life. You cannot start a company as a student, because if you do this, you will no longer be a student. Nominally, you can be considered as such, but in fact this will change immediately.

Given this contradiction, which of these two paths should you take? To be a student and not start a startup, or start making a startup and stop being a student? I can answer that. Do not set up a startup at a college or university. “How to make your business and product successful” is only a small part of a larger question that sounds like: “ How can I live a better life? ". And although the foundation of a startup may indeed be the way to a better life for many ambitious people, the age of “about 20” is not the best period for this. After all, the foundation of your own startup is a search “in depth”, and in 20 with something you should look first of all “in width”.

In 20 years, you can do things that you cannot do before and cannot do after, such as immersion in spontaneous projects on any whim or travel without a sense of “boundaries”. For non-ambitious people, such things are doomed to “the fear of not being successful,” but for ambitious people this is the only way to gain valuable experience. If at 20 you make a startup that will be successful, you can never do it.

Mark Zuckerberg will never be able to roam the cities of a certain country in search of impressions. Yes, he can do what is inaccessible to many - for example, redeem a charter that takes him anywhere. But “success” took a huge amount of diversity from his life, and Facebook sets the tone for its existence, just as he set the tone for the development of Facebook. And although it is very cool to feel that you are an integral part of a project that you consider to be a matter of your own life, diversity also has its advantages, especially at the dawn of life. In addition to everything else, it is diversity that brings to your life an understanding of what exactly you would like to do for the rest of the time, something to work on in life.

There is no “exchange” or “barter” here. You donate nothing by founding a startup at 20, but you are most likely to succeed in your business if you wait a bit. In a rather unlikely event scenario, one of your side projects may take off, as was the case with Facebook, and you have to decide whether to give this project all your time or not, and in such a situation, it is really reasonable to do it. But in the usual situation, the founders have to strain very hard and work a lot, in order to achieve this, and it would be foolish to spend the brightest years of your life on it.

Try

Is it worth it to start doing this, at any age? Now I realized that from the current description it turns out that the foundation of a startup is very difficult and almost very heavy occupation. If you have not yet understood this, I will repeat: the foundation of a startup is hard work. What if too heavy? How to determine if you can handle?

The answer to this question is the fifth counter-intuitive point: it is impossible to say or guess. By the current moment, your life should have hinted at the whole array of information connected with what would have happened if you decided to become a mathematician. Or a professional footballer. But, only if you had an extremely strange and atypical life, you will never know how it is - to be the founder of a successful startup. If you start - it will change everything, and all of you. Therefore, what needs to be assessed is where you can grow and who you can grow to.

For the past 9 years, my job has been to predict whether a person can see before me as the founder of a successful business. It was always easy to tell people how smart they are and most of those who read this text have probably heard it in their address more than once. It was almost impossible, it is and will be to say how much a person becomes ambitious and demanding of himself. Probably there are few people with the same experience as me, and I say to you: you can’t guess. For myself, I have long learned to keep my mind open about which project from each set will turn out to be a real star.

Sometimes it seems to the founders that "they know." Many people come to Y Combinator with the impression that they will be able to “beat” our system as a test, with which they have already coped with this (artificial) key several times in the past. Others come, genuinely wondering how they managed to choose and trying to hide errors that may make a bad impression. But between these two, diametrically opposed, initial attitudes and the end result in practice almost no correlation occurs.

I read that in the military world this is also the place to be: it is impossible to say who will be the best officer - a quiet soldier or a brave guy. This happens for the same reason - the trials separating them from the officers and the high rank are incomparable with what each of them has faced in the past.

If you are completely frightened by the foundation of your own company, you probably should not do that. But if you’re slightly unsure, the only way to check is to try. But do not forget about time and age.

Ideas

So, if you want to make a startup one day, what should you do now? Initially, you only need two things: an idea and a team. And your modus operandi should consist in the correct time synchronization of these two parts. Which brings us to the sixth, and last, counter-intuitive point: the way to get good ideas for startups is to not think about ideas for startups.

I wrote a whole essay on this topic, so I will not repeat fully and give only a brief version of the above. The fact is that by trying to consciously think about start-up ideas, you can come up with something that looks good at first glance, but bad. What happens next? You will spend a lot of time before you realize that the idea is still bad.

The correct way to “realize” good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of making a conscious effort to generate start-up ideas, make an effort and concentrate on what does not require consciousness in order to become a start-up. Most of today's super-projects initially began as, exactly, unconsciously chosen fields of action, which at the start were not even like projects.

This is not just “possible” - this is how Apple, Yahoo, Google and Facebook started their business. None of these companies even tried to be a company — they were amateur projects. The best startups, in fact, have to start as amateur projects, because the best ideas always seem to be outsiders in the mind of any normal person and are not perceived as an idea for the foundation of a company.

How, in this case, do you set your own mind for this type of work so that start-up ideas are formed unconsciously? 1. You need to know a lot about things that matter and 2. work on issues that interest you with 3. people you like and respect. It is not by chance that the third fact forms the successful teams of co-founders working on the same idea.

The first time I wrote this paragraph, instead of “knowing a lot about things that matter,” I wrote “to become an expert in some technology.” But this description, albeit correct, is too narrowed. What was special about Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia was that they didn't own the technology at all. They were good at design, and, more importantly, they were good at organizing groups and implementing projects. Therefore, you do not need to be able to work on or with technology as such, as long as you are busy with tasks that require you to have flexibility of mind and actions.

What are these tasks? This question is really difficult to answer in a general tone. The story is full of examples of young enthusiasts who worked on ideas that no one except them even guessed or considered critical, at the same time in different parts of the world. How do you know if you are working on something worthwhile?

I know that I know. Real problems are interesting, and I encourage myself by working on an interesting thing, even if nobody cares about it (especially if nobody cares about it). I find it difficult to work with boring tasks, even if they seem important.

My life is full of examples of how I worked on something simply from my personal and subjective interest, and then it turned out that my decision was liked by someone else, sometimes by many people. Y Combinator itself was something that seemed interesting. I call it the “internal compass”, which helps me navigate through space. But I do not know what is inside other people and how they imagine it to themselves. Perhaps, if I think about it a little longer, I can come up with some sort of algorithm for recognizing truly interesting problems, but by now the only thing I can offer is as follows. If you have a goal and a desire to deal with interesting tasks, to encourage this interest is the best way to prepare yourself for the foundation of a startup. Perhaps to life too.

And although I cannot describe in general terms what is an interesting problem, I can describe a large number of sub-problems. If you see technology as something growing as a fractal, every moving point on the edge is an interesting challenge. Therefore, one of the guaranteed ways to turn your mind towards getting ideas for startups is to force yourself, as Paul Buchhayth says, to “live in the future.” When you reach this point, ideas that seem unclear to others will seem trivial to you. You may even see in one of them an idea for a startup, or not see, but you will be aware that you are thinking about something that exists or should exist.

For example, in the 90s at Harvard, one of my fellow students Robert and the Disturbation in common had written his own software VoIP software package. He did not want to create a startup, he never tried to turn it into a startup. He simply wanted to communicate with his girlfriend from Taiwan without fantastic phone bills, and since he was an expert in networking, it seemed to him that the voice could be turned into packets and sent over the Internet. He did nothing in the program except to allow him to communicate with his girlfriend, and this is how the best start-ups are born.

Therefore, oddly enough, the best thing to do in college, if you want to start your own IT company, is not thinking about how to start it. This is a classic formulation. If you want to do something after college, then in college you should be busy with all-consuming things, no matter what. And learn to perform them as efficiently as possible. And if you have intellectual curiosity, you will create a startup doing something interesting, or useful, to yourself.

The part of entrepreneurship that really plays a role is expertise in a certain area: skills + experience. The only way to become Larry Page is to be an expert in search. And in order to become an expert in the search, all you need to do is to self-realize and go “in your own mind,” in a good way. Being inquisitive, true, and not "for a reason."

Startups are not made out of greed, but because of their secretiveness in their own curiosity. When you want to learn something from “the beginning to the end”, the end is just a successful startup. Best case scenario.

Therefore, here is my last and comprehensive advice to those who want to one day become the founder of a successful IT company: just learn .