Mistakes business students make when founding a startup
A couple of comments here:<p>1. I don&#x27;t agree with the general premise of the author.<p>a) I&#x27;m of the opinion that successful people are successful. Regardless of their background, if they have an idea, a goal, a desire, they&#x27;ll make it happen.  They make the leap from, &quot;Want to go skydiving tomorrow?&quot; to, &quot;We&#x27;re going skydiving tomorrow. Obviously this can&#x27;t be true for <i>everything</i> they do, but they always demand success from themselves.<p>b) I can speak from personal experience going in the opposite direction. I started out technical, ended up biased towards the business side of the work when we sold. Business is tricky because the knowledge required (and applied) runs the full gamut of being so boringly easy (payroll and accounting) to mind-numbingly tricky (payroll and accounting). Jokes aside, the author seems to be herding all business students into the &quot;marketing and sales role&quot;. There, you can only be good at your job if you have the guts to go out and get experience. For those who don&#x27;t have the guts, networking is the alternative. It&#x27;s much easier to pitch an idea to a group of friends than it is to pitch to an audience of strangers. As such, an MBA from Stanford makes perfect sense. Half of your friends from B-school are already VCs or Angels, why would you have to cold-sell to anyone else? (The converse is true also, an MBA from Stanford lets you get in on tech deals earlier.)<p>2. &quot;The almost obligatory ‘I have a great idea, where can I find a developer to build it for me for X% equity?’ Facebook post.&quot;<p>The fourth option, not listed, is convincing the technical side that the idea is wonderful and that <i>both</i> sides are willing to sacrifice to get the job done. If the non-technical side is any good, that should be one of their primo skills. I&#x27;ve interacted with lots of amazing salespeople and by-golly they are amazing at making <i>anything</i> sound fun.<p>3. Writing a business plan.<p>Oh god. Please do it. There is nothing worse than seeing a promising company wander around in circles with no idea what&#x27;s going on.<p>Not having a business plan may work out if:<p>a) You already have a secure source of funding and you don&#x27;t care how long it&#x27;s going to take to get to market.<p>b) Working on your idea has no opportunity cost (instead of playing video games, you&#x27;re working on your idea).<p>4. Applying to startup competitions<p>I actually agree with the sentiment by the author here. I think that applying (or just working on an application) to a single, established competition&#x2F;incubator is really useful (see business plan) because it <i>forces</i> the team to know their stuff. Applying to 50 just for publicity&#x27;s sake is useless.<p>5. Hiring too quickly.<p>This may be different in Europe because laws there are very biased against the business when it comes to employment, but in the United States, debt is not a bad thing at all. In fact, using debt correctly allows for a win-win-win (business - investment - customer) situation. The business wins because it can bring product &quot;x&quot; to market 1 year earlier. It then uses revenue generated by &quot;x&quot; to fund &quot;y&quot;. Repeat. The bank wins because interest collection is a thing. The customer wins because product &quot;x&quot; -- something which helps their life -- makes it to market a year earlier.<p>So yes, hiring <i>too</i> quickly is bad. Hiring quickly is really, really important. What&#x27;s the difference between the two? I have no clue.<p>6. Your wage.<p>Most founders I know don&#x27;t really care what they&#x27;re being paid. They just want to see their idea take root. This applies to both technical and non-technical. You don&#x27;t need school to teach you that: &quot;Me need money to get food to eat&quot;. There are people from both sides who value a $400,000 luxury car over the success of the company, but those folks don&#x27;t make it too far.<p>7. Lack of perseverance.<p>This applies to <i>everyone</i>.<p>The author&#x27;s example of &quot;scientists working for 3 years on research...without feedback&quot; is certainly wrong. Along the way, their RA moderates their thinking, they publish papers and grants, they present at conferences. If that&#x27;s not constant feedback, I have no idea what counts.<p>I didn&#x27;t respond to all the points, but I didn&#x27;t agree with most of them, the ones I named were just the <i>most</i> wrong in my opinion.