Should you start a startup?

Hey, everyone. I'm Hart Shtagr, one of the group partners at Y Combinator. Today, I'm gonna talk about whether you should start a start up. Because YC invests in start ups so early, I've spent a lot of time with people who aren't yet sure if they should start a company or not. I've helped many people, including my own friends and family, think about this decision.

And my intended audience for this talk is anyone who doesn't feel ready to start a start up today, but thinks they may want to one day in the future. I'm gonna break down the topic of whether you should start a start up into two parts. First, we'll talk about which types of people seem best suited to being start up founders and help you figure out if you might be one of them.

Second, we'll talk about how you might best prepare yourself for becoming a startup founder in the future. Let's start by helping you figure out if you're the kind of person who should become a startup founder or not. I really wish there were simple tests you could take that would give you a clear and correct answer to that question.

I've now worked with almost a thousand startup founders as a group partner at YC, and I still get surprised by which people take to startup life like a duck to water and which ones struggle to adapt. Now you might find this surprising if your image of startups is based on the way famous founders are often depicted in books or movies.

These depictions can make it seem that if you're not a ruthless, brilliant programmer like Mark Zuckerberg in the social network movie or a charismatic product genius like Steve Jobs in one of the many books or movies about him, you probably aren't cut out to be a startup founder.

Now I can't deny that being brilliant programmer or a charismatic product genius will certainly make it easier to be a successful startup founder. But I can say that after working with many successful founders, there are many more different types of people who succeed at startups with different strengths than just those stereotypes.

As an investor, my job is to pick which people will make great startup founders. And yet, even after fifteen years of starting and investing in startups, I still get surprised by who turns out to be a great startup founder. That means it's gonna be hard for you to know for sure if you're suited to being one.

You might think you could just look at how well someone has done in school or at work and assume success there would lead to success at start ups. That's definitely what I thought when I first started working at YC in 2010 and began reading YC funding applications for the first time.

After I started working with more start ups though, I realized that these signals mattered much less than I'd expected they would. When you're working on a startup, you have to put in blood, sweat, and tears to convince even a single user to care about trying your product, let alone convincing the first ten or a hundred. You have to push through a lot of rejection to get there.

And because this is your startup, all of that rejection feels very personal in a way it doesn't when you're working at a fan company building a product for someone else. It takes a lot of resilience to make it through this initial struggle to get your early users, and that's the quality I think is most important for startup founders to have.

Resilient people are suited to startups and should definitely become founders. But how do you know if you have enough resilience to be a startup founder? When I first started working at YC, I thought I could use confidence as a proxy for resilience.

I'd assume that if someone projected confidence, like speaking with conviction or being high energy during our funding interviews, they were likely to be a resilient founder. The more founders I worked with, though, the more I realized this was also wrong. It turned out that someone could appear very confident initially, but not be resilient when their startup hit roadblocks.

Conversely, some of the quietest and least confident seeming founders at first turned out to be the most resilient founders I'd go on to work with, many eventually taking their companies public. This is Saji, the founder of BenchLink. I met him when we funded BenchLink in 02/2012. BenchLink is now worth over $6,000,000,000, and Saji has grown into a formidable founder and CEO.

But I remember when we first interviewed him and his cofounder Corey. They were both softly spoken engineers, and we were all concerned they wouldn't be suited to working on Benchling because Benchling's idea was to sell software to biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies to make money. And we weren't sure that they would be good at that kind of enterprise sales.

This concern was shared by investors at Demo Day who worried that they wouldn't be able to get those biotech or pharmaceutical companies to pay for the BenchLink software, and BenchLink struggled to raise very much seed funding at Demo Day. Sales did turn out to be a real struggle for BenchLink.

In fact, over a year after they'd graduated from YC, BenchLink was still not making any revenue, though they did have some enthusiastic grad students as free users, and the product continued getting better. It took them almost another year, that's now two years after YC, to start doing sales and making any revenue.

Now Benchling is on course to become a public company someday and has many of the world's top biotech and pharmaceutical companies as customers.

Looking back, I always had confidence that Saji was a good engineer, but I could not have predicted back when we funded him in 02/2012 that he would have the resilience to overcome that amount of rejection and transform himself into the leader of a company that took many years to become great at enterprise sales.

But what I haven't shared with you are the stories of many other founders who seemed equally talented at first when we first funded their companies, but turned out not to have the same amount of resilience as these founders did. I've thought a lot about how to tell the difference between people who have this kind of startup resilience and those who don't.

I've wondered if maybe having the right motivations or reasons to start a company mean you're more likely to have this special resilience. Over time, though, I've decided that this also doesn't matter as much as I had thought. I think there are many perfectly legitimate motivations to start a company. For example, it's become popular to say that you shouldn't start a company just to make money.

That's considered a somewhat flimsy motivation, but I actually think it's fine to start a start up to become rich. Start ups are one of the few ways to make life changing amounts of money in a relatively short period of time. If the desire to make money gets you started, then great. Go for it.

I also think that simply being curious about what it's like to found a start up is a fine initial motivation to start one. Actually, doing a start up is the only way to know for sure if you'll enjoy it. The reason I have conviction that your initial motivations don't matter so much is that I've seen motivation to change over time.

I've seen founders who started out a company with a plan to sell it within a year, change their mind as they kept working the company, and they're still working on that same startup a decade later, and it's now a public company. This means that your initial motivations to start a startup aren't as important as what those motivations might change into over time.

In order to keep working on a start up and keep going through those dark periods that every start up experiences, you need enduring motivations. And I think the best ones are to be genuinely interested in the problem you're working on and love the people you're working with. We'll talk more about finding those later.

So instead of introspecting too much on if you'll make a good startup founder, I'll offer some practical advice. If you are curious about what it'd be like to start a company, start by asking yourself, what do I have to lose? Now I mean this question not as a rhetorical one, but as a very practical one.

Figure out what the worst case scenario looks like if you started a start up and decide if you can live with that. It's probably going to take at least a year for you to have enough data to tell if the startup you're working on is promising enough to keep working on. In the worst case, you'll shut down the company without having earned much or any salary for that year.

Can you live with that worst case? The calculus here is different for everyone. If you're about to graduate college, taking a year after graduating to work on a start up is not a big deal. Those job offers will still be waiting for you in a year.

But if you've been a FANG employee for the past nine years and you're in line for a big promotion this year, then maybe you stand to lose a lot by spending the next year working on a start up instead. Asking yourself if you can handle the worst case is the best way to know if you should start a start up. Be honest with yourself.

If you can't actually handle the worst case, then your own constant anxiety will probably self sabotage your start up efforts. When you're thinking about the worst case scenario of working on a startup, you should factor something else into the equation. You will learn a lot from starting a company.

I don't think enough people factor in how valuable this learning is when they're doing their worst case scenario analysis. As a startup founder, you're responsible for making everything happen, and that means you get to do lots of different types of work. You'll have to do some amount of sales, product, and customer support all at once.

This can be very clarifying in helping you figure out what type of work you enjoy and where you might want to focus your career even if the start up doesn't work out. Some people start a company that doesn't work, and then they jump straight back into starting another one because they wanna learn from their mistakes.

Others decide they actually really enjoy specializing in doing one thing really well, and they join a company where they can do just that. The startup experience can really improve your career opportunities even if the startup doesn't succeed. My second startup, Triplebyte, use software to help companies identify and hire great people.

I work with hundreds of employers as they search for the best talent, and I found that many of them were explicitly looking to hire people who had previous startup experience. They believe this showed evidence of being a self starter and being able to take initiative and lead projects. Some of the most successful y c companies have actually built their hiring processes around this knowledge.

Rippling, a $10,000,000,000 company founded by Parker Conrad, also a y c company,.