Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice | Hacker News Reader

Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice

16 pointsabiek61 comments

Thanks in advance for any advice you give.

I don't know how to program but I love startups and am dedicated to becoming an entrepreneur.

I have read all of PGs essays (some many times) and "Founders at Work". I came to realize that the hackers are the core of any good startup team. Thus, I want to learn. I have tried and am making progress but it has been a slow and hard process. I am not to the point where I can actually make stuff yet.

But, I have an idea that I really like. I feel like Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail (excepts I can't program). I have my best friend signed on and he is so behind the idea (and not into high school) that he is willing to drop out to pursue this idea full time. He is ahead of me on the hacking learning curve but is still in the process of learning.

I don't know if we are the rock star founding team that PG talks about but we have heart, are incredibly optimistic and want to work like hell to make it happen. I don't want to wait until finishing college. I don't even want to wait until finishing high school.

I have always been somewhat interested in startups but my interest has grown this summer. I now know entrepreneurship is my calling. I am doing a 3 week internship and am meeting really cool people and doing research. It has probably been the best 3 weeks of my life.

So my tentative plan is to apply to Y-combinator and similar programs for next summer's session after spending a year trying to get as far as possible in the development of the project.

My co-founder and I will split the coding (he will probably do more) and he will do the design interface and I will do the market research and corporate stuff. We have a lot of focus on product vision (even though we are yet to have a product).

So does our plan make sense? Any advice.

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Don't drop out of school. You've got all the time in the world, what's the rush? Your early twenties (let alone the time before you're even 20) are there to be enjoyed, not spent hacking away at a start-up 15-hours a day.

Here's how it will happen if you start up now. Your first start-up will be an unmitigated disaster. Your second one will be slightly less so, but still fail. Your third will break even. Your fourth will finally make you a reasonable sum of money. Then your fifth will make you rich. Allow for 1-3 years per start-up - with this, you'll probably be very wealthy by the time you're 27. However, you'll also have wasted the best years of your life working your ass off.

Wait a little, and chances are you might even be able to skip one of those failed start-up - after all, life experience does count for something. Finish school. Go to a cool university. Learn lots of interesting stuff. Meet lots of really interesting people (that you'll be able to recruit into your future ventures, among other things - but more importantly, some of them will be your best friends for the rest of your life - money cannot buy that). Sleep with lots of girls. Get drunk. Enjoy life. Wear sun-screen. Erm. Anyway, you can always start up after uni. If anything, it will be easier, since a) you'll be wiser to the ways of the world; at the moment your inexperience pretty much guarantees dismal failure, b) maybe we won't be in the middle of a credit crunch then.

We will work that much harder to prove doubters wrong.

The rush is to learn. If we fail now, oh well. We are that much closer and had a reason and motivation to learn.

A startup doesn't mean we can't have fun.

A credit crunch has very little effect on our idea.

You're spending a lot of time arguing against any negative opinion that's given. It's great to see that you have a positive attitude, but you did post asking for advice ;)

Perhaps you have your mind made up already- But part of the criticism process is taking in what everyone says; I hope you wouldn't just argue against an opinion because it disagrees with what you've already decided.

I do hope things work out well for you and the startup.

You are 17 years old and about to drop out of high school...I personally would advise you to at the least, finish school and get into a cool university and experience life outside the comfort zone of your parents' house. There's still a lot to learn, see and experience out there.

However, that does not necessarily mean that you completely stop working on your startup. While being committed is important, there is a right time for everything and it may not be the best time to drop out of school... suppose an year down the line, you change your mind- it will be a lot harder and for you to get into good universities. The risks vs. benefits at this stage may be out of whack.

The important thing is that the idea should not die and should always be on the backburner until the time is right and you have the matured view of the world [and how cruel it can be] to make the whole scheme of things to work in your favor.

Just my 2 cents...

Honestly curious- have you experienced bringing an idea on the backburner back to life? I've always felt like if immediate action isn't taken and maintained to move an idea forward it dies.

I'd love to hear your perspective here, I'm interested.

I've done that a number of times. I have to, because in my life, ideas are constantly jostling for first place, and falling to the side.

I'm blessed with an ability to focus very sharply on one idea and do great things with it, but that blessing is a curse too since while I'm focused, I tend to ignore all the other stuff.

On the other hand, I've also got a bad habit of starting many more things than I can finish. As a result, most of my ideas have been on the backburner for some time. Eventually, they have to become the focus, but being on the backburner doesn't mean they're gone (though some of them certainly do change and evolve and even die while on the backburner... but I don't get too attached to a single idea).

I just brought one back a couple weeks ago (http://eve-language.blogspot.com/). I'd started it 3 weeks before my startup, and then let it die to focus on something that might actually make money, and am now bringing it back as a hobby project.

If you're really passionate about something, it's not going to die just because you spend some time on other stuff.

I think the "strike while the anvil is hot" phenomena is largely because of survivorship bias. Most of the time, if you drop an idea after 2 weeks, you're not going to come back to it. But that's because most ideas that are only 2 weeks old aren't very good and should probably be abandoned anyways. While if you've been turning the idea over in your head for 2-3 years (as Eve had been, before I started working on it), another 18 months isn't going to make much difference.

We will work that much harder to prove doubters wrong.

No one here's doubted your ability to deliver eventually. Just the wisdom of dropping out of school to start a start-up at 17.

A top quality for any entrepreneurs is the ability to judge risk accurately. If you drop out of school now, you probably lack that ability, because you're taking a risk with an unlimited downside potential, and those are never good.

Learn to program. Deciding at 17 that you're "nontechnical" is premature optimization, without the optimization. At that age you're not non-anything you don't want to be. And if you're going to be in a world where people make software, there's nothing more valuable you could learn than how that's done, even if it's not what you ultimately spend most of your time on.

I don't know. At 17 I had been programming for 5-6 years, which is pretty normal for most decent coders I know.

In my experience, if someone does not have the mindset for coding (anal retentive, OCD, borderline autistic, you know the type ;)), then trying to make them is an excercise in frustration.

Maybe better to focus on the things you are good at, such as business development, marketing, sales and whatever else is crucial in a startup.

I'm close to getting my PhD in Computer Science. I consider myself a pretty good programmer, and the first time I did any programming, it was my senior year of high school. The first time I really understood code was my freshmen year of college.

When I entered college as a CS major, there were a lot of kids who already had programming experience, and they had an edge. After four years, that edge faded, and what mattered was the individual.

> the mindset for coding (anal retentive, OCD, borderline autistic, you know the type ;))

Sounds like you've been reading too much Slashdot, not enough HN.

Seriously, I'm a hacker and not any of those things (not that I am or ever was Mr. Popular either). I think there likely is some cognitive secret sauce that makes some people much more likely to be competent programmers, but I don't think it's maladjustment. [The Camel Has Two Humps](http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf) paper I saw linked somewhere (probably here) seemed like a promising approach for showing who has the sauce.

The authors are now working on describing the sauce more carefully, and it looks like they're providing some of the testing materials they're using at http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/ .

>> (anal retentive, OCD, borderline autistic, you know the type ;))

Being a jackass does not make you a better coder, it just makes you a jackass.

Thin skin much? It was a (possibly lame) attempt at self-deprecating humor.

I was trying to say that not everyone is cut out for coding, and if you haven't had an interest in it (or that type of thing) before, you probably won't be very good at it. I have seen this with a bunch of people who thought they'd get into IT and be millionaires.

I know it's hard to tell in type, but I wasn't offended. I know people who fit the stereotype, but I also know gregarious, social, coders.

I didn't start programming till I was 17. Heavy math focus before that though.

i didn't start until i was 22... i'm 24 now. am i doomed?

You learn by doing. So keep doing it.

I started when I was 10, but I didn't get seriously into programming (like deciding it was going to be a profession) until I was 23. Also had a heavy math focus, though it was more because I enjoyed math than because I knew I wanted to do something that needed math.

There's plenty of time to try things out in high school and college, and it doesn't make sense to specialize until you have a sense of what's out there and what you might enjoy. The world is much, much broader than it seems in high school.

I am in the midst of learning to program in PHP. I am working hard and loving it. I realize the value of the skill. I met with one of the founders of a YC company and got inspired. I now plan on graduating early and working full time on my startup at that time.

Public high school in the USA is indeed a waste of time. And, there is no time like the present to start a company. However dropping out can really mess up your life, and I don't mean 5 years down the road. I mean it can immediately mess up your life. A hacker friend of mine in high school did just what you are proposing, but 10 years ago. As soon as he dropped out of high school his parents kicked him out of the house. Being homeless at age 16 really puts a damper on getting anywhere with your startup.

I'm voting for finishing up high school. But, if you're going to drop out anyway, be sure you have some plan to cover all the basic life essentials type stuff.

I don't mean to suggest dropping out, but it's not necessarily as bad as you imply. I dropped out at 16 (12 years ago) and still managed to go to a good college, and have had a series of good jobs.

More problematic things that I see:

You'll need an older co-founder. Justified or not, business folk and investors aren't going to take you seriously at 17. Not to mention that you won't be able to rent hotel rooms for business travel, or cars where need be, won't be able to open a business bank account, etc.

If it doesn't work out in the first go, which realistically speaking is probably for any first-off startup, you're not going to have a lot to show for it when you're, say, 18 or 19 and throw in the towel. Actually the worst case is it just stringing you along but not really going anywhere and it getting frustrating late to start college.

In my case, despite "making it", I still view dropping out as more or less a mistake. It didn't really screw up my life in any significant way, but looking back on it, it's just nine months of part-time, easy work. Nine months is nothing. I spent six months (while working full-time) just trying to learn what I'd need to know to jump into a start up before going full-time on it.

My brother was smarter about it. He just decided to not take any honors classes, set up about half of his time senior year to be internship hours and skimmed by putting in almost no effort. You could probably intern in your own company if you had an older co-founder...

I didn't mean to suggest that you're automatically out on the street if you drop out of high school - I just wanted to point out a worst case scenario. Dropping out and being successful requires some sort of support team, since you're starting out with a huge social disadvantage.

Go to college for at least one year. The act of finishing high school with decent grades and getting admitted to a decent college (a state university, at least) is a basic badge of competence that will serve as a useful social signal for the rest of your life. Among people who went to college, high school dropouts get zero respect; even the ones who are rich get only the respect they can buy. I know that's unfair, but that's society for you.

Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs went to college. They dropped out after a year, but I assure you that the first year is important. Among other things, you might decide that you really like college: It's completely different from high school, not merely because you're no longer in a minimum-security prison, but also because some of the smartest people on earth are literally eating lunch in the seat next to you.

OTOH, college is very expensive and you might decide you don't need it. But first go for a year and get the best grades that you can, given that you intend to spend every available hour hacking on your part-time startups. :) After you've been admitted to college and done a year of decent work, it will be that much easier to get readmitted to college, one or two or five years down the road. It will improve your maneuvering room, it will place you in the college-student social class (which might very well be the one you're marketing to, and the one your coworkers are in...) and it will be that much easier to tell the story of your life to a future employer, customer, or bank manager: "I did well in school and went to college, but then got distracted by my startup company and took a year off, but then the startup tanked so I went back to school for a couple of years before my second startup hit it big."

Along with majority of comments, I agree, stay in high school. I would go even further to say, go to college because it is like elven paradise and will help in your startup adventure. Here's why:

A) Smart people. It's not a perfect filter (not everyone is smart), but you'll find some folks in there who might be willing to join your fellowship. Oh, and everyone lives really close to each other- and perhaps you could even live together.

B) Resources. You'll be blessed with many gifts- economies of scale to help you out here. You can work with professors on cutting edge nerdy stuff, get free bandwidth from the school, be able to snag a few servers, get the school's PR department to work for you, and get some money to start a "startup club" to pay for your pizza when you're working.

C) Education. You can't program. Neither can I, but for god's sake I wish I had just taken a few classes to get me started because self-starting is tough and you hit some road blocks. If you do that, then you will be learning from people better than you and perhaps can make more friends for your quest.

D) Time. Instead of partying like Bilbo Baggins, work on your startup. School does get in the way, but you have more vacation time and free 3-day weekends to get you going. If you do just school and your startup, you'll find your startup will take up more of your time. You can time public release to the school year- 3 months (about the same as YC). You should be able to make something each semester and get progressively better.

F) Failure. You might find out that you don't like this startup trip to Mordor. In fact, you may find you don't like the software task at all. Well, you have a lot of other things to learn and to enjoy.

G) Success. If you're successful, then you can easily leave college. In fact, many colleges let you defer indefinitely. I think Sam Altman is on leave from Stanford still... :)

> We will work that much harder to prove doubters wrong.

I imagine you may be getting a far amount of backlash from older people in your life, namely your parents. I am much older than you and I entertain a fantasy of quitting my job and going to Latin America. At one low point during work, I almost booked non-refundable tickets with a co-conspirator. To show how serious I am about this fantasy (to my family and to myself), I am indulging in 3-5 hours a week of private tutoring in Spanish. The odd thing is that I can foresee myself in a middle ground of not quitting my job but learning Spanish in the States and taking the initiative socially.

I do not think your plan makes sense. The odds of success are against you. Most businesses on the Internet are unfortunately or fortunately, all about marketing, only partially about innovation. I'd like to advise you against it, as an older and not necessarily wiser person. Life does not always have to be dive-in, you can dip your toes in the water, wade - if you dive-in, you can drown. In this country, unfortunately, a GED degree is condescended upon and will hurt your academic prospects.

Build your startup part time. You have one of the most important ingredients, chutzpah, faith in yourself. But at the same time, L'Chaim ("To Life"). There is more than life than saying "I did it". If your parents are serious about you not leaving school, they will cut off funding. And in this country, money is important to maintain a lifestyle. And, if you do drop out and go back to school, you'll fall behind (disconnect with/lose your peer year/cohorts).

Maybe some of us are wrong. And we'll read about you in the 3rd edition of Founders at Work. But if we aren't wrong, you might be torpedoing your long-term life with short-term half-constructed disconnected realities.

Stay in school. Yes, you and your cofounder could get a GED, but I think you're missing a lot of the advantages of high school. It's hard to see them when you're there, but when you're in high school you have:

1) Large amounts of free time. You've got a six to eight hour or so block of time every night, every weekend. You can probably pull programming books into class with you if you're that insatiable. If not, just carry around a notebook with you dedicated to the startup, it'll be chalk full of ideas whenever you have a spare moment.

2) No responsibility. Granted, high school is tough, but it's also inconsequential. If you've studied the PG essays as much as you think, you'll remember the concept of a day job in "What You'll Wish You'd Known". Here's the link, it's worth a reread in your situation. http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

3) Your parents are funding you. They pay for your housing, food, and are probably quite open to the idea of buying you and books you want to pursue your goals. You can afford to take the time to learn right now. If you drop out, are your folks going to want to keep feeding you while you sit around the house? You'd probably be expected to get a job, which cuts into all that free time you'd be gaining by dropping out.

Delay University if you want, but honestly you can get a lot of the same deal out of it if you approach it well. Right now you've got an idea and no skills with which to execute it. Don't create a situation that's more hostile to you getting those skills.

"I feel like Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail (excepts I can't program)"

Is it just me that finds this quite funny. I feel like David Beckham (except I can't play football).

I think his sentence was reasonable - like Sabeer, he feels he has a great idea and is willing to quit school (Apple for Sabeer) and work on it night and day.

ps to the OP: don't quit school. You might have the best idea in the world, but if it doesn't work (and there are many reasons that are not under your control for this to happen), it may be hard for you to return to school... School is generally lame, but it is the 'gateway drug' to better experiences in University.

Don't drop out of high school, just bullshit your way through it and do enough to get by- this isn't hard stuff, and you get food, shelter, and a good internet connection. I know, in high school, that might not seem like a lot, but it's huge when you're out in the real world.

Put as much time as you can into your startup and learning to program, just don't fail out. If you're smart enough to write as lucidly as you do then you're smart enough not to fail high school. Find some loopholes to make the classes easier, figure out what the easiest way to make 70% is, and execute.

Like someone else said, hack morning, hack lunches, hack nights- put your time into moving your startup forward.

Skip college, it doesn't sound like you need it- if you do need it down the line you can do it then.

However, experience does matter- and you can pack a ton of experience into a short amount of time if you're ok with taking risks, which it sounds like you are.

Check out Inside Steve's Brain if you get the chance, this quote stuck out at me a lot:

"For Jobs, innovation is about creativity, putting things together in unique ways. "Creativity is just connecting things," Jobs told Wired magazine. "When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."

Also:

"I wish Bill Gates the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." -- Steve Jobs

With all that said-- you've got a great opportunity. You've got a co-founder, you (hopefully) have a good idea, so execute and give it a shot. If it doesn't work, bone out to Argentina or Eastern Europe for awhile, regroup, come back, and give it another shot.

And, on college, there's a great article by Sean Nelson of Harvey Danger about the merits of dropping out of college:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=12087

Good luck!

re: Getting by in high school - my last year of high school I was able to spend all of my time in the teacher's lounge or around the school (I helped paint a mural) as long as I got A's on all my tests. Perhaps you can work out something similar.

Finish high school...but feel free to work on your startup after hours and on weekends. You'll probably never have more free time for the purpose...unless/until you raise money in order to pursue a startup full-time (which, let's face it, is going to be a major uphill battle for a 17 year old). You'll probably also be better served by going to college--maybe taking a light load--and using the opportunity to meet additional co-founded and people you can work with to bring your vision to life.

You know far less than you think you do at 17. Confidence is wonderful, and I certainly encourage you to start a startup right away...today (I had a business in high school, and I learned a lot from it). But don't let it get in the way of having fun, going to college, and learning some stuff. Travel is also probably wise.

Looking over your responses, sounds like your plan is a thinly veiled excuse to drop out, and you were posting in the hopes that you'd see enough "ra ras" to drown out the voice in your head that knows better. Dropping out of high school at this point is phenomenally foolish and a lot like quitting a marathon in the last quarter mile. Being a good entrepreneur is about making good decisions, and most importantly, about not quitting.

Please read carefully what i will write. Unlike other people i will not give you advice like "Go for it dude" or "Wait, don't be stupid". Instead i will give you my point of view.Im 18 and i have one year left in school. I started programing years ago, but never got any deep. Started with pascal, then c++ in school, but never learned anything. In December last year i started learning python and i am now quite knowledgeable of the language. I started learning Django a while ago and i also read a lot about other languages. I view my self as an entrepreneur, although i have no business ideas, or even anything close to a product(or anything that can evolve in to a product). My goal in life if for spiritual balance. Its my philosophy. I don't care about money, or people that much. I like learning and solving puzzles. I'm poor. My family has no money, we live in Bulgaria and even by local standards, we are below average. I don't mind at all, all i need is about 20 cents(euro cents) for the coffee automate in school and a running internet connection at home(we are not that poor) I love technology and stuff like that, i love science, all kinds of it, biology, math, physics. i love it all. What's my point you will ask? I am lazy. I hate doing things unprepared. I hate having to do things the hard way. If i go start a company now it will be very hard, it will be almost impossible(not completely impossible) I will have to learn so much on the run, it will not be business, it will be home school. Its not worth it, so i just enjoy being 18. I play football(European football, soccer is a stupid name), i drink beer with friends(its legal here ha ha) I draw stuff, i listen to music, and i learn. I learn as much as i can, i prepare my self. I don't like failure. I know how to fail, I've failed a lot of times in my life and I've learned to prepare my self for what i want to do. You do what you want. Drink beer if you like too(don't mind the illegal part, i drink since 13) just think about stuff. Don't do stupid stuff you know are stupid, that way you don't have an excuse of being ignorant. Learn from peoples mistakes and think about stuff. Try to understand your self and the world. And read Sun Tsu's Art of War, its going to help you to a lot. It helped me understand the situations in which my actions matter, and i use it as advice every time i have to make a hard decision. Good luck, from a fellow entrepreneur and wannabe hacker.

I'm not trying to flame you, but in what usage of the word can you call yourself an entrepreneur?

I will explain. I work on my self. Most people around me waste their time. They just want to go get drunk or something. Some of them are ambitious, but most of them just say they are. A girl from my class says she wants to become a layer ant thinks that she can become one without any understanding of rhetorics or any other essential theory needed for that job. She doesn't even try to get good grades in the classes that she will need(she got some good grades but that is through obedience in school, not knowledge or any understanding of the subject). A lot of people around me are like that. They try to go the easy way. I am more ambitious. When i was a kid, me and my friends tried to make ice cream money through a lot of different means(some of them illegal too) Like selling sandwiches or cleaning houses and stuff like that. Most kids just watched TV, i was learning about the world, understanding my surroundings and looking for options. I knew from an early age that i had potential. My plan is simple. Go through school, and get in to a good university(all i have to do is get through a few math tests and i have a whole year to get ready) Then just study, have fun and meet people. Then if i actually get somewhere i might not graduate, but i think that i will get to the end probably(as a safety net) Then start a startup in Bulgaria, probably will not make a lot of money, but my hope is that it will be enough to move to the USA(or any other startup hub that may be existing in 8-10 years) and make money there. Of course it might not happen that way, so i don't make strict plans, i just try to learn to hack, its hard, because there are not a lot of good hackers near my town.

>I came to realize that the hackers are the core of any good startup team.

Only software startups need them, but there are many kinds of startups.

First think of your idea, then see if you need programmers.

By reading those sites you are causing yourself to ignore all the other kinds of businesses in the world, and especially since you are not a programmer, that's a mistake.

Those sites are written by hackers, so they will of course laud hackers, but it's perfectly possible to create a startup that does not need hackers. Just a hired, regular, programmer or two.

I'm kind of surprised to see this down-modded. There's nothing wrong with casting a wider net, especially if you're not a technologist.

If you're smart enough for starting-up, then the time spent on school is pretty much the time spent at school. Also, if you're smart, you've probably taken a lot of extra classes the first 2 years, so you only have 5 or less classes now? Seems to me you can be at home and coding by 1-2PM, leaving a lot of time. Plus weekends. If you think I'm provocative, I'm just trying to convince you not to drop out of HS.

Also, talk to people about your idea. You can probably even post it here. Ideas are supposed to be worthless anyways. Per your description of yourself, you're young and not a programer, so an older and wiser programer may be able to tell you in 5 minutes that your idea stinks (for real) or has been tried n times before.

I was involved in a startup when I was 17, and let me tell you, it was chaotic. Dropping out of any school over it would have been a huge mistake. Fortunately I didn't.

Test your chops. I wrote my first contract program when I was 17 on an Apple IIe for a local bookkeeper. Once I did that I finally realized that I could take my skills and make something of value (Instead of just playing at programming where you never actually deliver value to anybody)

There's a difference between idle and productive dreaming. I had a hard time with this when I was your age. Productive dreaming is envisioning something just outside of your reach and then making it happen. You string together enough of these and you can go anywhere. Idle dreaming, on the other hand, is thinking about some ideal future state with no idea at all how to begin. It's a lot more fun -- but it doesn't take you far.

So test you chops. Prove you can code something somebody likes. Then prove people will pay you for it. Continue along this pattern.

My advice only -- good luck!

Lots of people will tell you lots of different things, but as always take it w/ a grain of salt.

The thing about dropping out is that you have to be willing to figure out everything on your own (which is sounds like you are). However, you'll find that you'll end up learning alot, but there will be holes in your basic knowledges and skill set. Unless you really dig deep into things you don't understand, you'll end up with just a shallow broad knowledge of what you need to know. And that at times can make or break your project.

I'd say, wait until you can make stuff to drop out.

Can you do independent study to finish high school? Don't drop out and don't do GED. Either will put you in such a low educational caste it may be hard to break out of later in life. Finish, get a real diploma for the reasons everyone has already stated. Think of yourself as a guerrilla warrior and right now you're biding your time and building strength.

It sounds like you aim to be the CEO type. If that's the case, you've got to train yourself to be a CEO. No one is going to do it for you, at least not if you're an entrepreneur. A CEO wears a lot of hats, but mostly a CEO is a salesman, especially in a startup. So learn about that and get good at it, even if it means you take a job selling someone else's crap for a few months just to know what that's like.

Yes, you definitely should learn to program to the point where you can build real things. It's not hard. If it seems hard try a new language or technology, or find a mentor. A CEO needs a pretty good bullshit detector, so having some tech knowledge is critical if you're doing a tech startup.

One final thing: People often emphasize that failure is ok and that is how you learn and find your weaknesses and build strength. All of which is true. But you get to choose your failures, probably more so than your successes. Make sure the projects you pick will teach you valuable things and let you make a lot of contacts. You'd be amazed how many happy coincidences happen when you just happen to have learned some unique thing or you just happen to know so-and-so from the last project you worked on.

Stay in school. Do the startup thing over the evenings and weekends. If things take off (you can live off the earnings full time for the foreseeable future), then consider leaving school and doing it full time.

It sounds like you are looking for a reason to leave school and startup may not be the right thing. Have you considered getting a job at a tech firm to develop your tech skills which you can apply on your startup.

Don't drop out of high school: Hack nights. Hack early mornings. Hack at lunchtime. Allot some time to party/chase girls/work out. Most of all make sure you're having fun.

Before long you'll find you've built something of substance. It might be something people want. It might not. Either way you'll have both a startup and have/be-on-your-way-to a high school diploma.

Best of all you'll have options.

At 17, you probably don't have a very realistic idea of your capabilities. Most 17 year olds are a lot better at dreaming than they are at accomplishing difficult things. (Some 37 year olds too, ahem.)

If you have a track record of completing long term projects that you wanted to do (not your teachers, not your parents) that's evidence that you're an exception. If you don't have that kind of track record, take a little warning.

Either way, you should still go for it.

School truly sucks, but I'd get the HS diploma at least, and encourage your friend to do the same. If your venture doesn't work out, you'll be a lot less stuck if you've graduated. Treat school as a system to be gamed and worked around.

Learn to program. See "realistic assessment" above. If you can't program at all, you're not likely to do well running a code based start up. You don't have to be a brilliant coder, just reasonably capable.

(On the other hand, I've heard Ryan Carson doesn't code. Don't know much about the guy. Exceptions, rules.)

Good luck.

Contact Christopher Blizzard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Blizzard , who dropped out of high school, got a GED later, and is now working for Mozilla. Find out what he would advise after having gone the high school dropout route himself.

College is a LOT of fun, and getting rich is no replacement for enjoying life moment-by-moment.

I'd finish school, AND go to college. Try your hand at being a CS major. You really do have enough free time at college to start a business if you want. If your buddy is really so determined, go to the same school together. Drop out only if you get traction.

Walking a tightrope is safer if you have a safety net (education) to fall back on. Not only that, but reading these startup stories, you get the mistaken impression that quitting/dropping out is some mystical talisman that leads to success, but there's a selection bias. The people who burned their bridges and failed aren't in any founders at work stories, they're often stuck in relatively menial/low paying jobs or back in school.

First ask yourself do you really need 24 hours in a day, if not go back to school. You should have a very good reason to drop out. If you are not interested in education or if you think you can survive without it, then drop out. Remember it is all about knowledge, you will have to know more than an educated guy and always be a step ahead of the college educated people to win. If you are lucky you might hire some of the more educated people to work for you.

Sounds like a lot of fun; I wish you a lot of luck.

I would highly advise that you work on the startup outside of existing school hours- While I can certainly understand why you might not find finishing HS as fulfilling as the potential of a startup, there are several mitigating factors:

1) Highschool is not (easily) deferrable. You can put off a Master's degree, or even a Bachelor's.. You can put off taking a new job, and find a new one later. Highschool is not deferrable in the same way though. Once you're out of the system, it's very difficult-to-impossible to re-enter.

2) Most startups fail, even ultra-determined ones.

I understand that some entrepreneurs might advocate throwing yourself into the wind and hoping for the best- The theory behind their advice is that if you eliminate your backup plan, you have no choice but to succeed. The difficulty comes in that many shortfalls are outside of your control- The market could change dramatically, you could become sick, or burned out, or a major player could release a stronger, slicker, competitor. It's not to say that you couldn't work around these problems, but you shouldn't ensure that you have to.

3) Many people, not only future jobs, but VCs and Angels included, view HS graduation as a necessary filter. Unfortunately, you're age will make it more difficult to get meetings with a great many investors- Not finishing HS will further exacerbate this.

4) You don't yet have the background you need to go full-time on the project. Right now, your team needs to beef up their programming skill. You're job, as the producer and business guy will be to make sure that happens, even when it's boring for both of you.

You're other job is to be looking out for the long-term survival of the partnership and the company; Everyone else might panic from moment to moment and want to rush into things, but you're the one with the calm, reasoned plan, and the wherewithall to see it through.

As annoying as it is, that means that you probably should focus on developing your programming skill and finishing the degree. They'll both be crucial later.

You should each work to pick up whatever language you're going to be writing in; Even if he'll be doing most of the coding, you can't do a reasonable job of helping where necessary, and eliminating roadblocks if you don't understand what's going on.

I find that pair-programming, or at least reviewing together and discussing design together, will greatly improve the quality of the code, as well as making sure that any design decisions get a second set of eyes.

I think you're on the right track with your plan, but would recommend that you take the time while you're each in school to focus on getting to KNOW the technology.. Not just "I sort of understand it", but really knowing it, and knowing it's limitations.

Again, as the business-guy, one of the things that you'll need to do is think three steps ahead of where the code is right now- You want to make sure that your programming language/framework won't cause you major problems, and then you want to start to tackle the business planning and revenue side.

If everything goes well, the two of you should be able to put together a prototype just before graduation, at which point you'll be in Great shape to apply to YC, Techstars, and CloneOfTheWeek.

Best of luck to you and the team- You sound like you've figured out what you want to do, now it's matter of executing.

1) Despite high school not being easily deferrable he can get a GED instead and go to community college

2) We are not most startups. We may still fail and we accept that. We believe the process has inherent learning value. So we win regardless of financial gain.

3) Due to our youth we will have to prove our competence in other ways. We will work extra hard to make people take us seriously. Age is only a biological number. Maturity is different.

4) I am making sure we both work hard to learn. Learning is part of the process. There is always more to do so we want to work as hard as possible.

I will do my best to remain calm and keep the team level headed. That is some important insight.

I agree with you about the importance of collaboration on the different elements and we will check and help each other.

Time to execute

I started up when I was 18, and ended up going to uni when I was in my mid 20s - "these people are so much younger than me!". It was a mistake (for me) not to go when I was 18.

But in your heart you know what it is you want to do. You can always change track later. Richard Branson didn't finish high school.

>> Richard Branson didn't finish high school.

Neither did the guy who served me fries this afternoon.

Dude, you are only 17 so go for it. I would NOT drop out of school yet. You're doing the rightthing, apply for programs for next summer, but I would add one task between now and next year. Learn how to code! Its fun, you seem like you guys both want to be hackers, so just jump in. Even though knowing how to code is not a game breaker, it certainly helps when you are lean and small, so just take the leap of faith.

Thanks for the encouragement.

I am taking the leap. I am working on learning to code but am having some difficulty but I will persevere.

If my co-founder dropped out he would get his GED and could always go the community college transfer route.

Do you have funding for a year or two? What about your partner? If your parents say OK, go for it, we'll support you for two years (as mine did), it may be the right thing to drop out.

Second thing is, you absolutely must gain the technical skills as quickly as possible. A startup of two cannot support one business guy. But you already know that I take it.

I wish you luck!

It is great that you are enthusiastic! I recommend seeing if you can find someone who can serve as your mentor and who can give you some advice when you hit whatever bumps your business will encounter. Having the ability to call on someone who has already been tripped up will help immensely.

drop out only if it can quantify something. odds are you can finish high school. dont just drop out because "gates and jobs" did it. Yes, I "stopped out" of college with one semester left. Before, you call me hypocritical realize that I had spent a good 2 years working up to that point. Take it one step at a time, fuck up a lot, learn from it, go fuck up some more, learn more, and eventually it will work out well. As long as you don't factor in "give up" into those plans, you will be fine. Hope this helps.

give up means, give up all together. odds are your first idea or vision or even company will not be "what makes it". Flexible people never get bent out of shape.

Good luck, I hope your idea is really hotmail level. The world needs more paradigm shifts.

If you guys want to talk about your idea with someone, email me, I could sign an NDA if you want.

dude learn programming.. dont fall into the trap of thinking you are an "X" kind of guy, where X is "programming", "marketing", "design" and so on... keep learning as much as you can and build what ever you can.. you may not make it into an app but you will learn heaps to propel you forward...

its summer you dont go to school so make your attempt now and see how you do. If you cant see that and talking about dropping then its obvious you are not ready to evaluate your resources and time so allow me to question at least the validity of the idea.

High school is evil. It is satanic. I hated it too. Still, I'd at least get a GED. Also, I myself did not finish college, but to "offset" that resume-wise, I got a couple of those COMPTIA certifications. If one doesn't do much on the education side, balancing it with a couple of certifications is always a good thing. At least that is what I have heard from other people, and is what I did myself. (I got the A+ and Network+ certificatons). As for programming I started with a "teach yourself java" book myself, but if I had to do it all over again I would have started with c/c++. Currently I have a job writing test scripts in silktest which has similarities to both java and c, so it all works out, lol. Good luck.

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