Is it worth starting a company in college?

forbes.com

2 points·rajat1996··4 comments

Like Bill Gates did? Like Steve Jobs did? Like Michael Dell did? No, I suppose it isn't worth it.

Those founders are interesting, but they're not typical. They're outliers. If you want to assess whether or not the distraction of a business is worthwhile you need to look at a lot more data - I have no idea whether or not it'd be a good idea, but I woulnd't be very surprised if the majority of businesses founded during college fail (because the founder tries to do their degree as well) or the founder drops out of college and the business subsequently fails in the first few years (because 50% of businesses do).

But that isn't to say it's not worth it. It depends on the founder, the idea, the market, the funding, the timing, and more.

This is not a simple 'sure, because look at these billionaires!' question.

Hm. Outliers. Lets calculate the 'expected value', the average return we can expect statistically. Thousands of college startups. Three sucessess valued in tens of billions.

Taking the market cap of three hugely successful companies and dividing it across all the moderately successful and failed businesses doesn't mean everyone in that set is a success. It just means you're abusing statistics to pretend they're saying something they aren't.

To draw an analogy, averaging the value of those companies between all the companies started is like saying "Onion2k and Usain Bolt ran 100m, and on average Onion2k ran it in 15s!" That doesn't mean I did, and it wouldn't mean I qualify for the World Athletics Championship.

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