16 Reasons People Have To Not Start A Startup

Entrepreneurship | April 12th, 2007

Paul Graham of the successful venture firm, Y Combinator, wrote a great essay that highlights 16 excuses people have to not start a startup. Many of them are the common excuses that you will hear from typical naysayers such as being too young, lack of family support, and lack of smarts.

What is interesting is that Paul manages to list each reason and debunk them as mere myths than actual valid reasons. Let’s be serious; if you really want to run your own business, then let’s not offer excuses. You either do it or you don’t. As a wise man once told me, you can make money or you can make excuses but you can’t do both. How true, how true.

Let’s take reason er myth #5: Know nothing about business. Paul elaborates;

This is another variable whose coefficient should be zero. 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.

I get a fair amount of flak for telling founders just to make something great and not worry too much about making money. And yet all the empirical evidence points that way: pretty much 100% of startups that make something popular manage to make money from it. And acquirers tell me privately that revenue is not what they buy startups for, but their strategic value. Which means, because they made something people want. Acquirers know the rule holds for them too: if users love you, you can always make money from that somehow, and if they don’t, the cleverest business model in the world won’t save you.

Business is usually won in the mind before it’s won on the battlefield. Our biggest obstacle is usually ourselves rather than anyone else.

And here are the other 16 reasons that people have to not start a startup. Sound familiar to anyone?

1. Too young
2. Too inexperienced
3. Not determined enough
4. Not smart enough
5. Know nothing about business
6. No Cofounder
7. No idea
8. No room for more startups
9. Family to support
10. Independently wealthy
11. Not ready for committment
12. Need for structure
13. Fear of uncertainty
14. Don’t realize what you’re avoiding
15. Parents want you to become a doctor
16. A job is the default