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Paul Graham the co-founder of Y Combinator, takes the class this week. He starts the session on how a startup is more like a skiing course, and gives a list of counter-intuitive stuffs that we have to remember to prevent our existing instincts from leading us astray. He recalls a joke from the Y combinator
“Our function was to tell startup founders things that they would ignore.”
But, the founders ultimately return to YC when their counter intuitive ideas fail, like seeking the help of a ski instructor. There’s one place where our intuitions become right, that’s when we’re dealing with people, be it as engineering students or as business professionals.
“What you need to succeed in a startup, is not an expertise in a startups, but expertise in your own users.”
He states example from Mark Zuckerberg life on how inspite of being a complete rookie in startups, he created mutli billion dollar company all because he was able to cater to the needs of his users. The problem that most first time entrepreneurs do is that they follow every fundamental requisite for starting a startup, but fail to do one thing that is essentially important that is to make something important. We get to understand the reason for why people go through motions of starting a startup and also get a few tips on how to get good grades with the college analogy.
“The way to make your startups grow, is to make something that the users love.”
We come across a lot of people who try to advice on growth hacks and tricks on how to convince investors and user, and all that the partners have to answer for the “how to” questions are just “just”, hence stop looking for the tricks, but work on building a good user oriented product, that will automatically attract the investors.
“If you’re a billionaire, you’ll get zero actually less than zero sympathy, if you complain about having a difficult life.”
He talks about the life of entrepreneurs who have just started up and also the successful ones which is a lot similar, except for the fact that once your company is successful, then you just can’t go back and it never gets any easier. He finally discusses on colleges conducting entrepreneurship programs to educate students on starting up.
How to get startup ideas? Can you startup while being a student? When to startup? Can universities give startup lessons? Just watch the video to know more.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-eIQ]
How to start a start up? Just wait until next week.