I listened to Paul Graham’s 48 minutes lecture and this is his advice on Startup
I’ve summarized 48 minutes of lecture into points. Enjoy :)
“Startups are so weird that if you follow your instinct, they will lead you astray” — Paul Graham
Paul recalled that founders tend to persistently ignore the advice given by the Y Combinator partner because the advice was counterintuitive with the founder’s idea that those advice contradict with the founder’s intuition.
“Founders can and should trust their instinct on PEOPLE” — Paul Graham
The mistake that founders do is that they meet someone that seems impressive but somewhat misgivings and ignore their “hunch” on that person. Work with people you genuinely like and respect and you have known long enough to be sure.
“What you need in a startup is not an expertise on startups” — Paul Graham
What young founders often make mistake is that they
“go through the motion of starting a startup”
young founders rent offices, hire their friends, raise money with a good valuation and they forgot one thing that is most important above all that which is to MAKE SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE WANT.
“Startups are all consuming” — Paul Graham
“If you start a startups, it will take over your life and if it succeeds it will take over your life for a long time maybe a decade or the rest of your working life”. If your startups succeeds the number of problems and worries will increase.
“Do not start a startup when you’re 20” — Paul Graham
If you start a startup at 20 and you succeed, you won’t have “vacation” time because if you do when you comeback from “vacation” the problems will stack up and you got to deal with it. It’s better to wait and he suggested that you are most likely to succeed.
“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas” — Paul Graham
if you make a conscious effort to think of a startup idea, you are most likely to come up with a bad idea. You and your co founders will come up ideas that are not only bad but also plausible sounding. You and your co founders will waste time just to find out that your idea is not as valuable as you think.
According to Paul, the best startups are the ones that started as a side project. He advices future startup founders should turn their mind into the kind that can develop startup ideas consciously. HOW? here are the tips to do that
- Learn a lot about things that matter
- Do things that interest you
- Work with someone you genuinely respect and like
I’m also going to pick some questions from the audience that i think future startup founders should know.
Audience : “ How can a non-technical founders effectively contribute to a startup ? ”
Paul : “ If it’s not a pure technology startup for example Uber if the non-technical are experts in the limousine business the non-technical will be doing most of the work like regulation, finding drivers, whatever else Uber has to do and the technical founder will develop the app. But if the startup is purely a technology startup then the non-technical founders will do sales and bring coffees and cheeseburgers to the programmer”
Audience : “ Do you see any value in Business school for people who want to pursue entrepreneurship and if so what value? ”
Paul : “Basically No. Business schools was design to teach people management and management is a problem you only have in a startup if you are sufficiently successful so really what you need to make a startup success early one focus on developing product. The mistakes that i made early one is that i advice people who want to startup a startup is to work for somebody else then start a startup but honestly the only way to learn to start a startup is to start a startup. Not really ”
Audience : “ When is a good time to turn a side project into a real startup? ”
Paul: “ You will know it when it takes over an alarming percentage of your life ”
Hope you guys enjoy it and this the link for the lecture
Have a good day
