I wasn’t very good at college. Truth is, I attended classes only when I had to—which, now that I look back on it, probably had something to do with why I failed twelve of them.
Luckily, the startup world is nothing like school. No matter how many course credits you accumulate, no matter how impressive your GPA is, you will not be ready. This is a good thing: You’ll enter the game not knowing the rules, so you’ll make them up as you go. You’ll get it wrong sometimes—and if you’re really smart, you’ll get it wrong a lot and very quickly, so you can eventually start getting it right.
There’s something to be said for learning things the hard way: The hard lessons are, after all, the lessons we never forget. Still, as you get ready to go out into the world next month, next year, or a few years from now, it seems only fair to send you off with the knowledge I wish I’d had when starting out. Maybe it’ll save you from the mistakes I made—but more likely, I hope that when you make wonderful, fascinating mistakes of your own, you’ll remember this letter and know that you’ll be alright.
First, read more.
In college, I built two businesses—the first of which scaled up to 35 employees overseas. This was huge, I thought. Never mind that I had no girlfriend and exactly zero dates: I was the smartest guy in school.
Eventually, both businesses flatlined. I had enough users to keep on scraping by, but no real growth, and worst of all, I was too proud to ask for help. Instead, I quietly shut both of them down—even though there was a whole world of help in books at my fingertips, whole generations worth of advice on growing businesses, managing teams, and inspiring people.
My advice to you is this: Seek help in books. Read more, read widely, and if you don’t know where to start, read The Hard Thing About Hard Things, an unfiltered, unglamorous book about all the crap that goes down in startups—plus how smart founders deal with them. When you begin to suspect you know much less than you thought, that’s what we call wisdom.
Second, meet people you admire.
Meet professors, alumni, and founders a few years ahead of where you are. The only mistake you can make here is limiting yourself: You’d be surprised who you can reach with social media and a little persistence.
(Case in point: While bumming around hostels in San Francisco, I used Twitter to get a coffee meeting with one of my personal heroes, Andrew Chen of Uber.)
Right now, you’ll mostly look to your network for advice and maybe your first customers. Do that. Your startup needs both of those things to get off the ground. But know that one day, your network will be more than the number on your LinkedIn profile—it will be your lifeline. When you’re stuck on a problem, that’s where you’ll find the answer. When you’re running out of capital and the ship is going down, that’s where you’ll find investors who still believe you.
Not every founder can land that first check. Even fewer founders can get the second, third, or fourth. In the end, the difference between those who raise and those who can’t is the strength of their relationships. The time to start building those relationships for yourself is now.
Third, solve interesting problems.
With my first dev shop, I was a micro-manager. I insisted on overseeing every single aspect of the company, even though there were 35 other people who could do it just as well as I could. It was, for everyone involved, exhausting. Funny thing is, I found out that when I delegated a task, when I gave my team members a reason and context and let them run with it, the results were incredible.
You can’t learn that—and I mean really learn it—from your MGMT 101 class. This is the kind of real-world experience that only comes from building something and failing a whole bunch along the way.
So, go ahead: If you have an idea right now, build it. If there’s a problem that keeps you up at night, solve it. Get into the habit of executing—because there are people who dream about doing things and people who do them. Which kind of person you are is entirely up to you.
Lastly, give yourself room to make mistakes.
You will make them. This much is a given: Even if you read all the advice in the world, you’d still hire the wrong people. Maybe you’d go bring on the wrong investor or try the wrong idea or burn through capital too fast. Give yourself room to mistakes, as long as you have these two things:
- The mental flexibility to learn from your mistakes
- Enough runway (a.k.a. money) to do it
If you have both mental flexibility and runway, you stand a good chance at being among the 10% of startups that survive. And even if you’re not sure you have them, solve interesting problems anyway. Maybe you’ll fail, but you’ll have chipped away at a solution. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll win, and you’ll leave the world better for it.