this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Here’s a secret I wish someone had told me:
Start a company. It’s really not that hard, and even if you fail, you will be seen as more valuable than you were before you started the company.
Come up with a good idea. There are a million of them.
Read books on startups.
Learn to pitch investors. Investors actually want ideas from young people because they know that sometimes they have a better idea of the zeitgeist. They also will help you because they were once young and want to pass on the help. Really.
Build your company.
Again, you may fail, but even if you do you will now be the CEO/founder of a company, which is worth way more than an average grad. You will learn a ton in the process and make a lot of useful connections.
Seriously - best career advice out there.
You'd also need a lot of your own money and time to invest to get a proof of concept to present. Plus, something like 90% of startups fail, so you're probably going to be out a load of money and time.
You can do it on your evenings and weekends. I realize people think I’m being elitist, but that was the point of my post - way more people could do it than think they can.
And failure is not the huge disaster in startups that people think. Even successful entrepreneurs have failures. Also, even running a failed startup elevates you to management if you go work at a big company.
You think people don't work weekends? Anyway, that doesn't solve the money problem. And you'll need a lot of information, a college degree would definitely help, especially to give credibility to investors. Which takes even more time people don't have.
My friend is running a startup pretty much exactly like you're saying. But it's taking him 2 or 3 years of full time work just to get full go ahead. He has enough savings to do that, and parents house to live in. Plus lots of connections from college. And even him I'm not confident won't go bankrupt. But most people aren't in such a privileged position that they can just decide to not work for several years to start a startup.
I think you forgot a few steps such as have connections with rich investors, and having the time to devote to developing your idea into a business. If you're born poor, then statistically speaking you're never going to get the opportunity to even try to start a business because you're going to be too busy making sure you have food to eat and you can put a roof over your head. In US, your zip code is a good predictor of your success because early opportunities play a big role. Rich kids get far more of them than poor ones.
My point is that rich kids get funded partly because they are rich and have connections, but also because people tell them they can do it.
Almost all investors will accept emails with pitches. You can build a pitch on nights and weekends while holding down a full time job.
I am just trying to encourage people to realize it’s more possible than they think because I wish people had told me that.
Cold calling investors with a pitch is about as likely to get you funding as buying a lottery ticket. Sure, once in a while somebody will get lucky, but it's an astronomically unlikely scenario. The reality is that investors are highly unlikely to throw money at an idea from a person they've never met before who just randomly sent them an email with a pitch. They're much more likely to get a return investing in a business from somebody they know and have confidence in. You're far better off making a Kickstarter campaign for your idea than trying to pitch to an investor.