Summary:
Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, advises high school students to focus on learning and skill-building instead of starting startups prematurely.
Startups can hinder learning due to the pressure to succeed, as their primary goal is to make something people want, not to educate.
Graham suggests that the fastest way to learn is to pursue personal curiosity, which is often restricted in a startup environment.
He provides a maturity test for young founders, warning against the "kid flake reflex" and emphasizing adult-like responses to criticism.
Examples like Sam Altman, funded at 19, show that youth isn't a barrier, but maturity and readiness are key factors for success.
Paul Graham's Advice for Young Entrepreneurs
Sorry, high schoolers, your dreams of pitching that dream start-up on Shark Tank will have to wait. Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator—the start-up accelerator behind Silicon Valley giants like Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, and Reddit—advises not to rush into entrepreneurship before graduation.
"If you’re in high school and you want to start a startup one day, you might think the best thing to do now is to start startups. But it probably isn’t," Graham wrote on X.
Instead, Graham highlighted the importance that Gen Zers should focus on learning and skill-building while they’re young. "Startups are rarely the optimal way to do this," he continued, adding that startups can get in the way of learning because of the pressure to succeed.
"The point of a startup is to make something people want, not to learn," he added. "You will learn things in a startup, of course. But the way to learn the fastest is to work on whatever you’re most curious about, and you don’t have that luxury in a startup. In a startup, you have to work on whatever users want most."
But don’t worry, you don’t have to wait too long after high school to start the founder path: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was funded by Y Combinator at just 19, and Graham previously wrote that, "when he was 19, he seemed like he had a 40-year-old inside him."
How to Test If You’re Old Enough to Start a Startup
It’s not the first time the "Founder Mode" startup guru has warned against prematurely becoming a self-starter. In a separate essay in 2007, he even outlined how he looks for maturity in founders.
In it, Graham writes that the lower age limit for being founder-ready may be as young as 16, though Y Combinator typically does not look at anyone younger than 18 who can’t legally enter into contracts. And although Altman was the youngest and most successful founder Graham backed, he wrote "there are other 19 year olds who are 12 inside."
So if you’re an ambitious student who thinks they’ve cracked the code for a new product or idea, he shared exactly how to test if you’ve passed his maturity threshold.
One example is making excuses of being "just a kid" and relying on your youth to escape complex situations. Adults typically could allow you off the hook, but Graham emphasizes the importance not to rely on this "kid flake reflex" when things get too hard if you want to be taken seriously as a founder.
Another way to measure if you’re ready is by taking note of how you react to criticism. When people pose challenges to an idea, instead of walking away from your idea when given critiques, or rebelling, Graham says the adult reaction would be to ask "Really? Why do you think so?"
"What you don’t often find are kids who react to challenges like adults. When you do, you’ve found an adult, whatever their age," he wrote.
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