In the essays from Paul Graham this week, he focuses on creating wealth and criteria for success. He is particularly big on startups as THE way to create wealth. I think his optimism and encouragement to create a startup is misleading on how difficult it is to actually found a startup or join an early stage one. He never actually says it was easy creating his, or that it would be an easy process to start one, but I think missing from his suggestion is the consideration of money, resources, and time it takes to launch a startup – successful or not.
Sophomore year, I was apart of a startup based in London. It was me and two other people. This guy reached out to me over LinkedIn which was honestly a little sketchy, but at the time I was stressed about not having enough on my resume and I was like sure I’ll join. The idea for the startup was an platform for interview preparation that utilized AI for custom feedback and to provide individual-specific questions. We were trying to solve the problem of the generalized questions and solutions provided by sites like Wall Street Prep, and provide more resources for students looking to get into fields like quant (where the prep resources severely lack in terms of practice questions).
Eventually I pitched it to the NDVC club and the pitch was pretty good based on the feedback I got. In the end though I really was not passionate about creating this product. I also was a little creeped out by the guy who invited me to work on the team (he planned a trip to the United States and wanted to meet up and I got scared). It was a good experience in terms of learning to work as part of a team, getting exposure to different technology, and working on my communication skills. So I don’t regret being apart of it, but it was definitely an interesting side quest where I got to learn and experience a little bit about startups.
That experience, combined with my experiences in the Case Studies and Entrepreneurship class I took sophomore year, have contributed to my decision that I don’t think I would consider starting or joining a startup again. I don’t think I’m passionate enough about something new to devote all of my time and resources with no certainty of success on the horizon. I’d be much more comfortable at a regular job making a regular salary due to the guarantee of an okay amount of money. Now these days who knows if that’s even attainable, but I think that would be worth avoiding the insane amounts of stress a real startup causes. I used to be recruiting for quant and then after a series of personal experiences I decided that an unreasonably and unnecessarily stressful job is simply not for me. I think quant and founding a startup (and things like investment banking) fall in the category of unreasonably and unnecessarily stressful.
Circling back to Paul Graham and his essays, perhaps it is good advice to found a startup if one is pursuing wealth. But I would only recommend it to people with a great stress tolerance, with a lot of money, and a lot of time. I say power to the people who actually do attempt to do a startup – I admire their risk-taking abilities. I guess “great risk great reward” really applies here. I’m alright without the great reward though I have never been much of a risk taker.
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