If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else

I've done both - worked for 2 other people's startups, founded my own, worked 5+ years at Google, now founding another. My experience is that you learn something from both, but you learn different things from each, and which will teach you more depends on what skills you need to learn.

Working for someone else's startup, I learned how to quickly cobble solutions together. I learned about uncertainty and picking a direction regardless of whether you're sure it'll work. I learned that most startups fail, and that when they fail, the people who end up doing well are the ones who were looking out for their own interests all along. I learned a lot of basic technical skills, how to write code quickly and learn new APIs quickly and deploy software to multiple machines. I learned how quickly problems of scaling a development team crop up, and how early you should start investing in automation.

Working for Google, I learned how to fix problems once and for all and build that culture into the organization. I learned that even in successful companies, everything is temporary, and that great products are usually built through a lot of hard work by many people rather than great ah-ha insights. I learned how to architect systems for scale, and a lot of practices used for robust, high-availability, frequently-deployed systems. I learned the value of research and of spending a lot of time on a single important problem: many startups take a scattershot approach, trying one weekend hackathon after another and finding nobody wants any of them, while oftentimes there are opportunities that nobody has solved because nobody wants to put in the work. I learned how to work in teams and try to understand what other people want. I learned what problems are really painful for big organizations. I learned how to rigorously research the market and use data to make product decisions, rather than making decisions based on what seems best to one person.

Founding a startup, I learned the limitations of all of the above, and that even if you know in theory what can go wrong, it's quite a different matter to avoid committing those mistakes too. I learned a lot more technical skills; it turns out that no matter how well you prepared in your job, finding a workable startup opportunity requires that you do things that you don't know how to do. I learned how to talk to other people and gather information about the market from ordinary conversations. I learned to make decisions in the absence of firm information, knowing that I may be wrong but that I can't make any forward progress without trying something out that is almost certainly wrong. I learned how to take expedient shortcuts, and to un-learn many of the rigorous engineering practices that I learned working for people because they don't apply in this environment.

I've found many of these self-reinforce as well - I got farther on the first startup because I'd learned many of the basic technical skills from the two startup jobs I'd had before, then got into Google from the skills I taught myself founding that startup, then have a different perspective on what's possible for the second startup because of the work I did at Google. The overlap is less than I (or most people) would like, but one of the unfortunate facts of life you learn as you get older is that life is not a linear path of one move reliably preparing you for the next, and there are often twists of pure luck that throw a monkey wrench into all your plans.

The path I took (founded four startups previously, two exits, currently working on fifth) was to first have a go at consulting.

Working for yourself is not much different from running a startup. You have a product (yourself). You have sales (winning contracts). You have accounting (for your invoices and for your expenses) and have to keep books. You have legal (your contracts). It's a great way to learn how to run a (hopefully) profitable business and build the foundation you'll need to run a startup.

Very informative and amusing post. My favorite statistic was the 18% of entrepreneurs succeed the first time, and only 20% succeed the second time.

> The sort of person who jumps in and gives advice to the masses without doing a lot of research first generally believes that you should jump in and do things without doing a lot of research first.

Like most good polemics, this one probably overstates the case. It seems to me that if you want to pursue an idea when you're young and inexperienced then go for it; but don't go for "it" because doing so is intrinsically better than getting a job.

In my thirties I left a pretty promising career to pursue the dream of designing games and running a games company. I failed (in the ways I cared about -- we didn't lose money or go broke). I think I learned a lot. One thing I learned is that sometimes there are advantages to being young, and poor, and hungry (in the "stay hungry" sense) and sometimes there are advantages to being older, comfortably well-off, and experienced.

> It's unclear whether the average person learns anything from a startup.

> Entrepreneurs don't seem to learn much from their failures

There is a difference between not learning anything at all and not learning something from failures that will help in a future startup venture. I have learned a tremendous amount working at startups. I am closer to everything, nothing is in a silo and I have gotten exposure to all parts of the architecture whereas at an employer I would have been barred from infrastructure and operation tasks. There is also much more freedom to use whatever technology you want to try out, and thus you learn a lot about new programming languages and new libraries and new ways of doing things without having to get approval from layers of management and architects. You learn about your self too, your limits, you have to become independent, and self-reliant.

> Our most important finding is that the reward to the entrepreneurs who provide the ideas and long hours of hard work in these startups is zero.

Maybe if you only consider money. If you are into startups for the money alone, I feel like I would agree, stay away. If you're in a start up for the small team size, for controlling your own destiny, for being close to the customer, close to the product, and don't want to see your life's days waste away in meetings and products that never see the light of day then the value is actually immeasurable.

Analysis like this is interesting because it assesses entrepreneurship like a career choice. Most entrepreneurs arise out of an idea. They aren't sitting on HN dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur(not that there is anything wrong with that). You see an unfulfilled need in the marketplace, believe you have the solution and can smell the money.

The thought, "is this a good long-term career choice?" isn't in the equation. That's for people looking to build a career. This is your one great idea that will make you rich, fuck a career. You are your boss from now on.

If your thought process doesn't look like that than maybe you just haven't stumbled upon that great idea. The idea that strips every rational bone out of your body, that keeps you up at night. Or may you just don't have the risk tolerance for entrepreneurship.

It's a fairly cavalier mindset, but you have to have that kind of naivete to outlive the struggles of starting a business.

The general idea is the same in education and almost every other aspect of life: learning enough, then applied practice. You do a programming language tutorial then work on your own programs to really grasp it. If you skip the first step you'll make needless mistakes and pick up bad habits, if you skip the second you'll rarely be of much use in the real world.

Here, working at another company can be considered the first step in learning about building businesses, and I'm sure it's beneficial, but in startups I've found you can quickly learn and practice whatever you're intending or supposed to do. Let me give an example form personal experience. At one point in my life I had never sold anything before and probably would have been a lot better if I had worked in another company and observed the sales department, however, when my time came, I had to start contacting customers. I spent a while reading about sales then just went for it. I improved a lot in a short space of time... now I consider this an accelerated experience gain because I researched exactly what I needed for a particular task and applied it to a problem. In the same way I'd only learn about some particular aspect of programming because I've discovered it's what I need.

Article is confusing "startup" with "small business", if your field and your methods are old enough to be tried-and-true then, yes, by all means, apprentice yourself and learn the ropes. After spending the 7 or so years working in a social-networking company, you too can create another stable small-business in social-networking that (for example) staggers users' twitter posts or sells slightly ridiculous shirts to facebook hipsters. If you balance your books and keep at it, you'll probably make a handsome chunk of money and maybe even make it really big one day.

If your field / technology / process is dangerously new and untested because you just invented it (e.g. you're mining titanium from the moon using gravity fields, you're desalinating sea water, you're selling a headset that streams movies into your right eye checks your social feed in your left eye and sucks your dick), there's going to be preciously little other people and books can teach you. You've entered the realm of vague opinions, uncertain grey zones, and questionable futures. In that case, you're only choice is to either not do it and wait for more tests to return, or do it blindly in hopes of learning on the job.

PG and his cronies recommend the "just do it" path for startups in the second category because if you succeed, you'll find yourself in a temporary market monopoly where you'll be entitled to make astronomical amounts of money. PG and his cronies then invest maybe 1% or so of their utility while you invest around 99% of your utility. If your business succeeds, PG and friends get a 1.5x boost to their utilities, while you get maybe a 2x boost to yours. If your business fails, PG and friends shrug it off and offer you some words of encouragement as you pick up the splattered mess of your life off the floor and write a book about how the world wasn't ready for the movie-streaming-eye-sucking machine.

I would agree that if you don't intend to utterly disrupt some industry, that some experience working in another company can be helpful.

I would argue that as much good knowledge may be gained that the equal number of bad habits may be learned and turn you into an "inside the box thinker".

Working in a hardware startup is a great example of this duality, however. Old engineers know that planning, testing, and quality debugging lead to a great product and that no amount of research can beat a good test program. Young engineers are willing to try stuff because they don't know what they don't know. Some huge innovations have come from younguns trying stuff that "shouldn't" work, and become industry shaping product innovations.

Who's right in the end? Both have been.

Last, I think I am pretty sick of people saying "what the formula is". Just shut up, because there isn't one!

After working for a big multinational pay company, an investment bank, and a year-long internship at a VC firm, and now starting my own business, I really appreciate the experiences that I got from BigCo, especially when it comes to operations, managing customer service, and doing lots of manual work.

Here are my lessons: 1. MVP should be very minimal. Do not bloat it with lots of automation. Just let a human deal with it. That's when you get real user feedback, which you can later automate.

2. Track your interactions with customers (investors, angels, partners) via "Saleforce"-like software. There are cleaner and easier versions out there, which can integrate with the web or mobile apps, and the customer will not even know he or she submitted a ticket or has some reference number.

3. At startup things go really fast, however the tech is being slow to release.

I've been doing my startup and have been working in companies on and off on the side and to be honest I have a quite strong opinion towards the point of view that people need to collect experience in a company before starting their company. I think this is really bad. More specifically, every single day that you work at a company

1. The likelihood of you starting a company and the final size of your company decreases, because every day you learn more about what's not possible. Your mind becomes more restricted and corporate experience will certainly not encourage you to invent Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Uber. These ideas can only be done by people who have NO restrictions whatsoever in their minds, who think everything is possible. Corporate life will prevent you from having these ideas and that is why I want to prevent working in a company by all means as long as I can. Which brings us to our second point.

2. You get more used to corporate life, which includes receiving a pay-check, which is mostly not based on how much money you made the company, adapting your personality so that you are good in company politics, so that you look good, so that you get promoted, but that's actually not good for the company. These learnings are very bad for starting a company.

3. You come closer to having kids. I think having kids is probably the biggest factor preventing people from starting companies. Having kids is almost like starting a company, they are your own startup, so having 2 startups is near to impossible.

There is some merit in working at a company, to learn about how politics are weaved into corporate life. This helps you to understand that when you need to sell to a larger company that the person you are selling to care much more about how they look by buying your product than how good your product actually is for his/her company.

This is why working 6 months does have value, which is how long it usually takes to understand how company politics work. However everything more than 6 months will reduce your capability in starting your own startup, every single day.

It kind of drives me nuts that I've read a lot of this research elsewhere, and all of my experiences have either flew in the face of them, or there were major asterisks. It makes me wonder, who were the people being studied, because I can see all of this being true in the general population, and you can even see it in most of the valley.

There is something about the results that I don't trust, much like the way that I don't trust anything I read about what's good or bad for you. Years ago, they said fat was bad for you. Turns out, it's complicated. Then they said carbs were bad. All I can tell is that my parent's immigrant diet was healthier in ways that could not be assessed by "research."