Live from Silicon Valley!
Entrepreneur Office Hours - Issue #232
For the past week, I’ve been hanging out in Silicon Valley as the instructor for Duke in Silicon Valley. It’s a program where a group of 24 students spend four weeks living and learning in the Bay Area.
This is my first trip to the Valley in seven or eight years, which is kind of crazy to think about considering how often I was in the area back when I was building startups full-time. My biggest observation is that not a lot has changed. It’s still… well… Silicon Valley. The entire place feels like one giant co-working space.
I mean that in a (mostly) good way. There’s definitely a startup energy in the Valley that feels like it permeates everything, and it’s very motivating for people who love the grind of building and creating.
Still, my problem with the Valley is the same problem I’ve always had, which is the casualness with which everyone talks about startups as though it’s all simple work. It gives the impression that startup success is an inevitability.
But startup success isn’t inevitable. It requires enormous amounts of commitment, effort, time, money, and luck. And even with all of that, the odds of success are miniscule. But you’d never know that by talking with people in Silicon Valley, and that ethos of inevitability makes me skeptical.
In my experience, nothing about startups is inevitable, and the people who think/act otherwise are the people most likely to struggle.
Whether you’re in the Bay Area or Sheboygan, Wisconsin, always remember that location isn’t nearly as important to an entrepreneurial outcome as finding and pursuing the right market opportunity. Ultimately, finding the right market opportunity is going to be a much bigger influence on the outcome of a startup than the number of venture capitalists within a 60 mile radius.
-Aaron
This week’s new articles…
What If a Half-Billion-Dollar Startup Exit Isn’t as Great as You Think?
Every aspiring entrepreneur should learn the real math of a startup exit before launching a new company.
A Powerful New Metric for Evaluating a Startup’s Potential for Success
Lots of factors impact a startup’s ultimate outcome, but one important aspect is being overlooked by nearly everyone.
Office Hours Q&A
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QUESTION:
NOTE: For this issue’s Q&A, I’m borrowing a question my students have been asking a lot of the entrepreneurs we’ve met in Silicon Valley. The question is:
Do you recommend launching a startup directly out of college, or would you suggest working for a big company for a few years first?
Selfishly, I’ve been wanting to give my thoughts on this question to my students, but, since they haven’t been asking me, I figure I’ll just share my thoughts with all of you.
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As you’d expect, in Silicon Valley, everyone and their mom answers this question by saying, “You should absolutely launch a startup! You’re going to learn a ton and, even if it fails, the experience is going to be incredibly valuable for your career going forward.”
In principle, I agree with this sentiment. And, to be fair, it’s also the story of my career. But, my personal experience with this pathway is also what makes me want to encourage young, would-be entrepreneurs to do the opposite.
Don’t start a company immediately after college. It’s almost certainly going to fail because you have no clue what it means to build or run a company since you’ve never worked for one.
Instead, go get jobs at three or four big companies for the next 10 years, and use those jobs as opportunities to get a paid masterclass in how businesses can operate. All the insights you’ll gain during those 10 years are going to be hugely valuable for two important reasons:
First, you’ll develop a sense of what kinds of operational strategies work and which ones don’t work.
Second, your experiences in those companies are likely going to lead you to discover a more valuable entrepreneurial opportunity than whatever idea you’ll come up with as a college senior.
To be clear, I don’t mean to belittle college seniors. I just mean that, by definition, someone who just graduated college isn’t going to have the same insights into the world as someone who spent a decade working at big companies.
In other words, a smart entrepreneur is someone willing to play the long game and appreciate that a “job” is a form of market research. It’s an opportunity to learn, and an opportunity to identify a valuable startup problem. Plus, you get paid to do it.
Compare that to me… someone who went directly into entrepreneurship. I spent the first 10 years of my startup career making stupid mistake after stupid mistake. Even worse, I did it while struggling to pay my bills.
To be fair, I realize my opinion here could be a simple case of “the grass is always greener” syndrome where I think working for a big company is a better option because I know how much I struggled starting a company immediately out of college. Still, I have to imagine, if leveraged properly, the security and knowledge that comes from working at an established company for a few years will almost certainly accelerate a founder’s trajectory in meaningful ways.
Got startup questions of your own? Reply to this email with whatever you want to know, and I’ll do my best to answer!
