Inspiration from this essay comes Ash Identity’s Ranting’s post about Paul Graham’s Essay Why to Not Not Start A Startup

Paul Graham of Y Combinator comes up again with compelling reasons on why one should and should not start a startup - me? I did one a long time ago with MIB but I think it’s time to start one within the next few weeks - so look out world! Check out the audio here.

Anyway, Paul’s post got me shaking my head and laughing at myself and at his essay many times. I’ve never read a more challenging and at the same time funnier post than his essay. Funny, you say? Because I felt that he was not only talking to me but talking to a whole new generation of Filipino entrepreneurs that stand to make a lot of money and respect from the confluence of great IT talent, creativity and entrepreneurship that God has blessed our nation with. I’ll try to go through the reasons why I (or you dear reader) shouldn’t start a startup and see if it applies to me:

1. I’m too young - by Paul Graham’s standard doesn’t apply to me, I’m already 33 and the median age of the world is 27. I think I started by first start-up by accident in 1999 and I was 26 that time. So I actually beat the average by one year. I think after a 7 years of that first start-up I should start another one.

Score: 1 point that I should do a startup.

quote: There’s a reason we have a distinct word “adult” for people over a certain age. There is a threshold you cross. It’s conventionally fixed at 21, but different people cross it at greatly varying ages. You’re old enough to start a startup if you’ve crossed this threshold, whatever your age.

2. Too inexperienced - I’ve had experience in starting companies in the Philippines, Burma, UAE and Kabul. So I guess this doesn’t apply to me.

Score: 2 points that I should do a startup.

quote: So now I’d advise people to go ahead and start startups right out of college. There’s no better time to take risks than when you’re young. Sure, you’ll probably fail. But even failure will get you to the ultimate goal faster than getting a job.

3. Not determined enough - I think I’m more comfortable working on my own projects than on projects that are not my own.

Score: 3 points that I should do a startup.

quote: How can you tell if you’re determined enough, when Larry and Sergey themselves were unsure at first about starting a company? I’m guessing here, but I’d say the test is whether you’re sufficiently driven to work on your own projects. Though they may have been unsure whether they wanted to start a company, it doesn’t seem as if Larry and Sergey were meek little research assistants, obediently doing their advisors’ bidding. They started projects of their own.

4. Not smart enough - Paul says that “If you’re smart enough to worry that you might not be smart enough to start a startup, you probably are”. Well by taking that test, I think I’m smart enough. I’ve learned that I would need a team of people who can do the stuff that I can’t do if I’m going to succeed at what I want to put together.

Score: 4 points that I should do a startup.

quote: Silicon Valley can warp your perspective on this, because there’s a cult of smartness here. People who aren’t smart at least try to act that way. But if you think it takes a lot of intelligence to get rich, try spending a couple days in some of the fancier bits of New York or LA.

5. Know nothing about business - I’ve had enough experience trying to make money and making money from businesses that I had almost zero experience. Some businesses that I tried to do were so new that the people I was partnering with were telling me that we had no mentors because we were the only ones doing what we’re doing at that time. So I guess, I have fun NOT KNOWING anything about the business I’m getting into.

Score: 5 points that I should do a startup.

quote: So why do so many people argue with me? I think one reason is that they hate the idea that a bunch of twenty year olds could get rich from building something cool that doesn’t make any money. They just don’t want that to be possible. But how possible it is doesn’t depend on how much they want it to be.

6. No cofounder - I tried to do this once but by circumstance I got a cofounder. My take on this? It’s good to have a cofounder that you can bounce your ideas to and also to rescue you from your mistakes or crises every now and then.

Score: 6 points that I should do a startup.

quote: Not having a cofounder is a real problem. A startup is too much for one person to bear. And though we differ from other investors on a lot of questions, we all agree on this. All investors, without exception, are more likely to fund you with a cofounder than without.

7. No idea - Most of my thinking time is spent on trying to think through on how something can be made more efficient. With localization, there are many Silicon Valley startups whose processes can be contextualized to apply for a very specific local settinng. Language and culture are a natural barrier for one startup’s processes to be adopted into another. You could probably do a Wiki to have intensive localization but I’m thinking of what Neurona does for the Spanish and Italian speaking business communities in the world.

Score: 7 points that I should do a startup.

quote: So even if the problem is simply that you don’t have a date on Saturday night, if you can think of a way to fix that by writing software, you’re onto something, because a lot of other people have the same problem.

8. No room for more startups - I’m a firm believer that the world is an open syste, that you don’t need a piece of the pie because you can have your own pie and that it’s better to swim in a blue ocean rather than a red ocean.

Score: 8 points that I should do a startup.

quote: A lot of people look at the ever-increasing number of startups and think “this can’t continue.” Implicit in their thinking is a fallacy: that there is some limit on the number of startups there could be. But this is false. No one claims there’s any limit on the number of people who can work for salary at 1000-person companies. Why should there be any limit on the number who can work for equity at 5-person companies?

9. Family to support - This is the reason I’m probably still single! Yahihu!

Score: 9 points that I should do a startup.

quote: What you can do, if you have a family and want to start a startup, is start a consulting business you can then gradually turn into a product business. Empirically the chances of pulling that off seem very small. You’re never going to produce Google this way. But at least you’ll never be without an income.

10. Independently wealthy - I’m not yet THIS independently wealthy so I guess this doesn’t apply to me!

Score: 10 points that I should do a startup.

quote: There is a bit of a problem with retirement, though. Like a lot of people, I like to work. And one of the many weird little problems you discover when you get rich is that a lot of the interesting people you’d like to work with are not rich. They need to work at something that pays the bills. Which means if you want to have them as colleagues, you have to work at something that pays the bills too, even though you don’t need to. I think this is what drives a lot of serial entrepreneurs, actually.

11. Not ready for a commitment - Frankly, I’d rather be committed on something I own that on just doing a job.

Score: 11 points that I should do a startup.

quote: If you start a startup that succeeds, it’s going to consume at least three or four years. (If it fails, you’ll be done a lot quicker.) So you shouldn’t do it if you’re not ready for commitments on that scale. Be aware, though, that if you get a regular job, you’ll probably end up working there for as long as a startup would take, and you’ll find you have much less spare time than you might expect.

12. Need for structure - I prefer to be organic about my processes at this point in time and I’d rather have people in my team to just focus on what they’re good at.

Score: 12 points that I should do a startup.

quote: 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.

13. Fear of uncertainty - I like the adventure of doing something new and most of the time I do learn a lot and also make money on the side so far.

Score: 13 points that I should do a startup.

quote: I asked managers at big companies, and they all said they’d prefer to hire someone who’d tried to start a startup and failed over someone who’d spent the same time working at a big company.

14. Don’t realize what you’re avoiding - I realize what I’m avoiding and the last thing I want is a job.

Score: 14 points that I should do a startup.

quote: 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.

15. Parents want you to be a doctor - I used to want to be a doctor but after learning about a doctor whose first few patients died and people started calling him Dr. Death, I changed my mind. I then dreamed of being an aeronautical engineer or an aircraft mechanic when I realized that if you messed up, you actually kill more people in one instance than if you’re Dr. Death. So I decided to get a computer science degree instead. Hah!

Score: 15 points that I should do a startup.

quote: The parents who want you to be a doctor may simply not realize how much things have changed. Would they be that unhappy if you were Steve Jobs instead?

16. A job is a default - I’m so used to starting businesses instead of being employed that my default is to start a business. If I can start a business WHILE being employed then it’s much better because you have a safety net. Later on, you find out if you start businesses that your job is to START UP businesses.

Score: A perfect 16 points out of 16 that I should definitely start a startup.

quote: It’s exciting to think we may be on the cusp of another shift like the one from farming to manufacturing. That’s why I care about startups. Startups aren’t interesting just because they’re a way to make a lot of money. I couldn’t care less about other ways to do that, like speculating in securities. At most those are interesting the way puzzles are. There’s more going on with startups. They may represent one of those rare, historic shifts in the way wealth is created.

What would happen if the hundreds of thousands of Filipino IT practitioners decide to bootstrap their own startups and tap into the wealth of creativity and artistry of their fellow Filipinos? I think there’s new business and revenue model that can be made about this and solve the equation Art=Money. I’ll give it a try for the next few years and hopefully I don’t need to be single by then.

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