For startup founders Paul Graham’s essay “Why to not not start a startup” is probably the most inspiring and encouraging post ever written.

Here are just a few quotes to “get you started”…

If you’re smart enough to worry that you might not be smart enough to start a startup, you probably are.

How do you tell if you’re independent-minded enough to start a startup? If you’d bristle at the suggestion that you aren’t, then you probably are.

You don’t need to know anything about business to start a startup. The initial focus should be the product. All you need to know in this phase is how to build things people want. If you succeed, you’ll have to think about how to make money from it. But this is so easy you can pick it up on the fly.

One reason people who’ve been out in the world for a year or two make better founders than people straight from college is that they know what they’re avoiding. If their startup fails, they’ll have to get a job, and they know how much jobs suck.

This leads us to the last and probably most powerful reason people get regular jobs: it’s the default thing to do. Defaults are enormously powerful, precisely because they operate without any conscious choice.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one day people look back on what we consider a normal job in the same way. How grim it would be to commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, and be told what to do by someone you had to acknowledge as a boss—someone who could call you into their office and say “take a seat,” and you’d sit! Imagine having to ask permission to release software to users. Imagine being sad on Sunday afternoons because the weekend was almost over, and tomorrow you’d have to get up and go to work. How did they stand it?

Which, obviously, turns into the follow-up question: if your startup succeeds, will you become that kind of boss everyone says makes dumb decisions, is prone to run the company into the ground, doesn’t know what he’s doing, and on and on and on … ?

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Last Modified: May 10, 2009 @ 21:19