Lessons from Start-Up School

Y-Cominbator’s Start-Up School put the spotlight on some of tech’s most successful entrepreneurs, giving them an open mike to talk about their experiences and give advice to new start-ups. There are a ton of videos online, and the advice is almost all applicable to the start-up scene (or lack thereof) in sub-Saharan Africa.

Mark Bao has a great round-up. Highlights I found particularly relevant to my experiences here:

Paul Graham (Founder, Y Combinator): “Quitting your job to start a startup depends on the age. Harder at 35 with wife and kids, but at 21, your entry-level job is useless anyway, so go start a startup.”

Greg McAdoo (Sequoia Capital): “Startups that gain revenue early are disciplined earlier, and get used to being an actual business earlier, and generally are better and more recession-proof.”

Jason Fried (CEO, 37signals): “Price forces you to be good and better than the rest. the pressure of price is very, very good….I promise you’ll still be using post-it notes in 20 years. Usefulness trumps innovativeness; usefulness stays while coolness deteriorates over time.”

Chris Anderson (Editor-in-Chief, Wired): “Bill Gates didn’t crack down much on Chinese piracy because they were a developing country. They much rather would have people pirate their software than other peoples’ software, and Gates believed that they would pay later because of the then-majority of software being Microsoft. and—they did pay later and is now a huge market for Microsoft.”

Mark Zuckerberg (Founder and CEO, Facebook): “If a ‘technology’ company has a management that isn’t really technical, it’s not a tech company.”

The talks were really diverse, but seemed to have a few common themes:

1. Keep control of your business.
2. Don’t let the business side of things lower the quality of the technical side.
3. If your product is useful, people will pay for it.

Photo of Mark Zuckerberg: Courtesy of Laughing Squid used under the Creative Commons.