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.
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.
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.
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.
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/ .
Being a jackass does not make you a better coder, it just makes you a jackass.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
Is it just me that finds this quite funny. I feel like David Beckham (except I can't play football).
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.
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!
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 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.
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."
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... :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
If you guys want to talk about your idea with someone, email me, I could sign an NDA if you want.
