Entrepreneur First Thinks It Can Grab The Talent Long Before YC
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Now its become a popular option its turned into selection system like a Goldman sachs graduate recruitment program. Precisely because its those type of people running these things.
Fundamentally i'm not sure they have the same character as the previous entrepreneurs. Those guys specifically chose to take the risky untrodden path. That said something about their personality. That could be the piece that makes a successful entrepreneur.
Its not like that anymore, so the people choosing to do it are a different breed. They are more like people who go to work for investment banks now.
I wonder how many realize that they could build the same business just as well on their own (assuming proper willpower, and all.)
On this theory, the balance of power has shifted to investors, who prefer founders from an institution. And perhaps a certain generation of young adults welcomes this sort of structure more than others might.
Which isn't to say that incubators don't have great value for many people. They do. But they're not the only way to go about starting many businesses, you're correct.
[^1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...
On a related point, am I the only one who notices the language coming out of the Silicon Valley ecosystem (the war for talent, the need to identify star performers) and is reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's assessment of Enron's corporate culture (http://gladwell.com/the-talent-myth/)?
Good quality founders give you access to experience and perspective that you simply cannot find elsewhere and a value that no amount of blog reading can substitute.
An incubator is definitively only as good as the founders in it (which presents an obvious catch 22) and EF has managed to attract some incredibly high quality applicants.
The EF program is too young for a large number of those applicants to yet have become experienced founders per-se but in terms of quality of people and focus on engineering, EF is streets ahead of anything else I've seen in London.
FWIW it's also far, far harder to build a quality business solo than it is if you surround yourself with other people who are also doing well and pushing you to do better. You are as they say the average of your five closest friends.
(for that matter Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, Joshua Schacter of Delicious and Sal Khan of Khan academy are all ex-investment banking as well)
The scrappy drop-out risking all to start a startup narrative is cute, but only represents a small fraction of successful startups. Many startup founders had significant financial success before founding their startups.
I know fair few guy running start ups, and some who got into YC. I can say they are not the type of people who aspire to working in IB's with perfect resumes from elite universities. One got fired a few times, because he could not cope with the lack autonomy, and ended up in arguments with senior management. His doing quite well now. I can say his attributes that made him fail there, made him a success in someway with his own co-founded startup.
I say this as someone who did go to an elite university.
Some have top-tier resumes, some are drop-outs, some have a huge amount of domain expertise in their field and some are complete newbies. Many are somewhere in between.
It's bad for the startup community to push "founder-stereotype" myths because it discourages people who don't fit the stereotype and that's bad for everyone.
But as it gets more popular(and competitive) I think diversty of startup founders will be smaller. And something will be lost because of it.
If we're not careful every startup founder will be from an elite background, from an elite family. Undiscovered talent will never be discovered.
Accelerators are going with the safe options, rather than potentials.
Start ups were one of the few ways people not from elite background could achieve massive success.
The people running EF are also elite, investment banks and management consultants. Which is probably why they hire, who they hire.
As usual though, successful founders must find their own way, and if they are dependent on being given a shot by some gatekeeper they probably never had much chance to be a successful entrepreneur anyway.
None of your examples were investment bankers.
Bezos and Khan worked at hedge funds. Thiel worked as a derivatives trader. Wales was a trader. Schacter was a quant trader.
Pincus was an investment banker.
For example see the Wikipedia article:
Programs like EF are simply helping manage that risk, and increase the chances of success by providing the right mentorship, peers and support environment.
And of course, appetite for risk is not the only great quality in startup founders, so if you give the intelligent, capable people with smaller risk appetites who would have normally chosen the safer route, the opportunity to work on their own company, it isn't unfeasible to imagine they might succeed.
What really makes a good startup founder is a prior startup founder. Ergo the more you pump into the system, the better the founders you eventually precipitate will be.
All founders are muppets at the start. The key to becoming good is doing it and then doing it again.
This article made me wretch because the last thing I want to see is a bunch of silver spoon idiots calling themselves entrepreneurs. I was in a fraternity, which has a high chance of attracting entitled heirs, and it was the dumbest choice I'd ever made. Very very few of them had a shred of originality, ingenuity, or fire...and lacking these traits kept them out of entrepreneurship.
But now...there's an organization that would look at these type of people (high grades, family connections that would count even though no one will admit it, pizaz appearance, etc) and fund them. Yeah this is no challenge to YC. I don't agree with all of their selection processes but at least they look for traction and authenticity.
In the end, startups only succeed only if enough people like their product enough to pay for it. So what if there are now accelerators targeting "non-scrappy" guys?
In 1965-80, the "risk" was working for a low salary. But there really was a talent shortage relative to what society wanted to accomplish. If your startup failed, you could resume a technical career and come out for the better because of what you'd learned.
Also, rents were low, so the only "poverty" you were worried about was having to delay your Europe vacation while working on the startup. Making rent wasn't a life-altering concern.
In 2014, the numeric financial risk is lower (most startups come close to market salary) but the career risks are huge. We have a talent surplus and a bad startup can damage your resume/reputation enough to put you out of the game.
What makes you say that?
In a real talent shortage, you don't need a PhD from Stanford to do interesting work. Where you're from doesn't matter, because there's so much demand for people to work on hard things.
There were plenty of smart state-school grads working on NASA programs with much more at stake than a fucking VC-funded web app. When demand for talent is high, that image stuff doesn't matter.
maybe it's because I'm a programmer and not a CEO, but it sure seems like at interviews people just skip the boring parts of my resume to talk about the charismatic companies I've worked at, disregarding the gaps.
I do know one company (Basho) that refuses to hire anyone who has ever had a negative experience at any job. As a result, they tend to hire young, inexperienced people.
Can you elaborate? I'm curious; I may have dodged a bullet here.
Yes, you'll exclude good people if you cop that attitude, because good people often get unlucky. However, the people you get will be terrified (and manipulable). The purpose of back channel reference checking (or age discrimination) isn't to get good people. It's to scare the shit out of the people you have, so they do what you say without question.
The gist is: you, the new founder, are grade A awesome, and you can have a successful company if you only hire other As. Unfortunately, Bs and Cs will show up, and lie about their work history! So you better scrutinize their resume line-by-line. The books teach intimidation tactics meant to flush out inconsistensies in self-reported work history. In reality, it becomes interrogation-style focus, trying to highlight "problems" of any kind.
Firstly, there's supposed to be a democratization of entrepreneurship with individuals becoming more capable (due to tech) and not needing the resources of a large company.
Secondly, there may be a systemization of entrepreneurship, as we get better at it. Analogy: in the early days of manufacturing, defects rates were high and apparently random. But over time, observation and experiment, the causes were understood and controlled, resulting in extremely low defect rates (as low as you're willing to pay for, I believe). Can the same apply to startups? Of course not! But we certainly can get better at it. "Lean", imperfect though it is, is an example of this. And every time someone writes (or reads) a "lessons learned", there's an implicit assumption that there is something to learn... that it's not totally random.
Everyone shits on bankers but the reason there's so many successful ex-bankers outside of banking is because they're goal oriented people who don't take no for an answer. Very similar to startup founders.
Someone should try 'zagging' and seek older people with this kind of enthusiasm to develop startups. With their real-world experience and domain knowledge, I bet the kinds of companies experienced people create would be a lot more interesting. And, in aggregate, more successful.
-old(er) and cranky entrepreneur.
I feel like there is undue offense being taken here
I'm not sure that older entrepreneurs are fertile ground for accelerators
not because older enterpreneurs are worse than young enterprenuers (the opposite is probably almost obviously true), but more because the types of funding that most accelerators are giving out can't really complete with what most 30+ year old can self fund
someone who's been making a programmer's salary for 10+ years, probably doesn't need the relative pittances that accelerators throw out,
they've also probably built a personal network such that what what accelerators provide isn't all that valuable
Others will probably have this issue too. If you're not, in/near the valley, your network might not count for too much when it comes to a start up.
It is possible for an older entrepreneur to not have the kind of funding you're suggesting. I'm one.
It is possible that an older entrepreneur had the kind of career that didn't encourage the development of a network of connections useful for building a business. This is (mostly) also true for me.
I count myself lucky - I'm part of an incredible program that provides me with a basic living expense (my wife makes up the rest), and access to advisors, lawyers, bookkeepers, marketers, sales people and negotiators to teach me the knowledge and skills that I lack. I could not have gotten this far on my own.
But the point I was making is that there seems to be such a focus on getting young people (what's next? high school grads?) that there's a much richer, more experienced field of opportunity being ignored.
Or at least underreported on HN :-)
everyone is diffent, there are people all over all sorts of these spectrums
also I too have experienced annoyance at marketing targeted at a population I'm not a member of
that said, if you simply look at it from a "who is it easy to add value too?" perspective
the younger you skew these things, the easier it is to add value
or inversely, the older you skew, the harder it is to add value
you have diminishing returns to covering a few months living expenses and bring in a group of contacts
that represents a good (deal/value add) for virtually all 22(?) year olds, the older you make your target, the increasing smaller percentage of people for whom that represents a good (deal/value add)
I just don't think it's particularly wise. :))
best of luck with your startup, that's an impressive undertaking at any age as far as I'm concerned
I spent a year at MIT and it was hard to avoid people that were working on cool ideas and starting up. Students chose most of their classes, and each class generally had a culture of creating something in a project. As a result, a lot of students would experience working on building something cool with a variety of people. That, combined with a very supportive environment, meant that it was much more accessible to startup if you wanted to.
In the UK (or at least Cambridge) there are fewer people considering creating a startup. The UK university system also places more focus on end-of-year exams rather than project work. It's harder to come across finding the right combination of people, ideas and motivations that is needed to create a startup. Most ‘entrepreneurial’ societies tend to be full of the bullshitty types and smartest people default to jobs in finance or consulting.
So it's partly bringing together smart people, partly the legitimacy of not feeling the need to go into a corporate job ourselves, that I think make ideas like EF broadly work. That being said, the model still has its problems. Forming teams with people you've no prior experience of only works in a handful of cases. Thankfully the programme is long enough to try several combinations of teams. Even so, I believe all the people that have gone through it but haven't ended up continuing with a company (like me) still value the contacts and learning experience thoroughly.
Disclaimer: I've just finished EF as part of their 2013 cohort.
And, yeah, doing projects, in class or outside, is a big part of what MIT is about.
- Start up your own startup
- work for a startup (silicon roundabout does an email list) I get the impression (and thats about all) that there are a lot of startups who would like experienced London developers to build them their MVP - price is probably the issue.
- Why just stick to London - everyone says Remote is possible :-)
Sorry not really answering the question - I just don't think the traditional apply for a job via a recruiter thing works anymore. I just am not sure what is replacing it.
seems the right one
Fundamentally, you have the options of selecting for demonstrated achievement and selecting for potential. You can assess potential much earlier, so it really is a good way to scoop other people looking for the same thing.
It's also less accurate. But there's got to be a business model in there somewhere.
It seems strange that he's focusing on YC if he's based in the UK? I'd imagine that YC has very limited reach in the UK. My understanding is that the startup ecosystem in the UK and Europe is still very underdeveloped (i.e. lots of opportunities for funds) so worrying about competition on a different continent seems unnecessary
Honestly, with the amount of start-ups pivoting into new spaces when their original business plan isn't fully realized, this doesn't seem like a bad plan. Build a team that can execute on ideas -- that seems to be the hard part anyway.
Basically, what he does is whine and whine about the lack of talent because most fresh graduates want to build a start-up for themselves instead of joining a company.
He tries to convince fresh graduates that they are better of joining established companies because most startups fail anyway. It seems like people distort their values when it comes to self-interest.
I said he does so because he is once the founder of a startup himself. Why would he discourage others from doing the same.
YC could pick its crowd at random (not to imply that it does; it doesn't) and it would still work. A few bozos would get in and be likely to fail, but it wouldn't be remarkable considering the statistical noise already in the startup game.
Venture capital is a feudalistic reputation economy, and YC is a case of Paul Graham monetizing his reputation. Just being YC establishes that a startup has real potential and puts it ahead of the teeming masses. Paul Graham wouldn't have to do anything to make YC a winning trade for him and the startups.
Before anyone says I'm being unduly cynical, let me fill out a few of my points. First, Paul Graham earned much of that reputation. He's a good writer, he understands Lisp at a deep level, and his technical chops are strong even by engineer standards and put him ahead of 99% of financiers. Second, I'm sure that YC's picks are better than its rejects. Third, I'm sure he worked really hard on the YC program. My point is only that he doesn't have to. He could pick startups at random, do absolutely nothing, and it'd still work, financially speaking.
Can anyone replicate this? Probably not. Paul Graham deserves credit for carrying the banner. In 2002-4, the mainstream business world had written startups off and people believed there'd never be another 1990s-style tech boom (which was mostly froth, but had a lot of genuine substance). Paul Graham pointed people back to the truths that the dot-bomb-shocked business mainstream was prepared to discard, like (a) that technology really matters, (b) small businesses can be extremely efficient, and (c) smart people require a different management style that most corporations don't get. He deserves a lot of credit for keeping the banner in the air in the gloomy early and mid-2000s. That right move, on his part, is a major reason why he has a monetizeable reputation. Is that feat replicable? Probably not.