You’re Not Mark Zuckerberg
and your college startup is probably going to fail
Startups are the modern day “american dream,” promising an escape from the monotony of a 9-to-5 gig. If you’re a founder of a successful venture, you get to own a chunk of a company and possess the ability to lead others in the direction you choose. I’ve noticed that this prospect of “starting a startup” is especially alluring to those enrolled in university looking for their first job.
It’s hard not to be sucked into that mindset when you see all of your peers throwing ideas at each other and spitting out half-baked business plans. I can’t even count the number of times that I’ve heard a friend say “come on man, let’s just think of some crazy cool idea and get rich” after an unsuccessful job interview or a mediocre grade on an assignment. If you’re in school right now, I don’t blame you for wanting to just skip working for someone else — the media has just made it too damn appealing and academia is too damn boring.
There are shows and movies all over the place that show how “super awesome” starting a company with a bunch of your friends is. In the time slot right after arguably the most popular show on television (Game of Thrones) is Silicon Valley — an HBO series about a bunch of dudes living in a house and getting funding from venture capitalists for their ideas. Then there’s of course the glorified story of Facebook in The Social Network and how Jesse Eisenberg screwed over everyone to get to the top.
I hate to break it to you, but you’re probably not Mark Zuckerberg. You aren’t Bill Gates. You’re just someone who’s afraid of the trials and tribulations of the real world. About 90% of startups fail.
You probably can’t just drop out of college right now and make a multi-billon dollar company. No, your idea is not ‘disruptive.’ In all likelihood, another company was already getting Series B funding at some accelerator in San Francisco at the moment the idea for your startup popped into your head. Is it really worth the sacrifice of eating Ramen noodles every day and asking your parents for loans for extra servers?
Here’s a novel idea for everyone in college thinking about founding a startup: why don’t you learn what ingredients go into a cake before you turn the oven on?
Go and work for an established company that will teach you to build a product; work for one that will show you when a feature is actually going to benefit users, and how to take an idea from the whiteboard to the web. Learn how to assess the market and take note of what has failed in the past. Push your ego aside and be someone else’s apprentice for a little while because I assure you that a VC will want to fund some guy that worked at Google for three years and knows what he is doing over a kid that just graduated from a state school with a couple of data structures projects on his or her Github.
Oh, and don’t fool yourself into thinking you can have a “startup on the side.” Running a successful business isn’t a two-hour-a-day-after-work gig.
On a final note, if you are Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, here’s my email ;)
prasant90 [at] gmail [dot] com
