There are easier ways to impress people than trying to keep a company alive for years, says Paul Graham.
“If you want to seem cool, starting a startup is about the least efficient way to do it,” says Graham co-founder of Y Combinatoraccording to an interview with the accelerator released Thursday. “It’s super hard, and you won’t seem cool for years.”
Graham is one of the four founders of YC and a prolific startup sage whose 2024 “founder modeThe essay quickly entered the Silicon Valley zeitgeist. Launched in 2005, YC has backed some of the best-known tech companies, including Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, DoorDash, Dropbox, Reddit and OpenAI. YC says its companies have a combined valuation of $1.3 trillion.
In the interview, Graham also returned to the idea of treating a startup as an additional qualification to add to a resume.
When a startup succeeds, he said, “it’s like your life’s work.”
“What kind of badge is a failed startup? Not much of a badge,” he added.
Graham also compared applying to YC to applying to elite universities like Harvard, saying it is more difficult in some ways.
“If you apply to Harvard and get in, you should do it because no matter how stupid you are, there are easy majors you can choose and glide through. You’ll get a Harvard degree and everyone will be impressed with you,” Graham said. “There’s no easy degree in startups, right? It’s like applying to Harvard and being forced to study theoretical physics.”
Top technology leaders agree that no one should build a startup for superficial reasons.
In a 2014 Stanford University course on startups, then-YC president Sam Altman told students to do this:never start a startup just to do it.”
“There are much easier ways to get rich, and everyone who starts a startup always says they couldn’t have imagined how hard and painful it would be,” the CEO of OpenAI said in a talk. “You should only start a startup if you feel compelled by a certain problem and think starting a company is the best way to solve it.”
Elon Musk has also discouraged some people from launching companies.
“If you need encouragement to start a business, don’t do it,” the CEO of Tesla and SpaceXAI said in a 2023 interview. “The chance of failure is very high, so if you need encouragement, you really shouldn’t do that.”
He has previously described starting a business as “staring into the face of death.”
