If this is your first time reading, I recommend you start with my 6-month challenge and table of contents of weekly posts for the past 16 weeks.
tl;dr This week was kind of slow. I got a little bit sick and wasn’t feeling very well half this week (probably from staying up too late the previous weeks) and was feeling very overwhelmed and slightly burned out with my own unrealistic expectations. I’m going to try to take a little breather.
Since I soft launched Cusoy last week, I’ve been feeling really burned out, not to mention getting sick, and wasn’t able to make good progress at all last week.
This is going to be a short and sweet post.
I. Do the best entrepreneurs blog?
II. The 20 Mile March
III. Next week and key lessons learned
In an essay I wrote a couple years ago I advised graduating seniors to work for a couple years for another company before starting their own. I’d modify that now. Work for another company if you want to, but only for a small one, and if you want to start your own startup, go ahead.
The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediately was that I felt most would fail. And they will. But ambitious programmers are better off doing their own thing and failing than going to work at a big company. Certainly they’ll learn more. They might even be better off financially. A lot of people in their early twenties get into debt, because their expenses grow even faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school. At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be zero rather than negative.
We’ve now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company. The people who’ve worked for a few years do seem better than the ones straight out of college, but only because they’re that much older.
The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of conservative. It’s hard to say how much is because big companies made them that way, and how much is the natural conservatism that made them work for the big companies in the first place. But certainly a large part of it is learned. I know because I’ve seen it burn off.
– Paul Graham, You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss
[Read more…] about Week #17 – Overwhelmed, slightly burned out