Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
My advice to young entrepreneurs (jonbischke.com)
34 points by jbischke on March 17, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments



The text is okay, but it feels a little odd he keeps saying "you guys". Too much of that.

There's also one thing I could argue. Personally, I feel like I'm half entrepreneur half hacker and I wouldn't trade one half for another. So, being hacker usually means a lot of work and decreased socialization. This really makes it hard to connect with others as much as the author suggests. But still, we all know examples when this works. Maybe, those are weird exceptions and we should still try to be more socialized and sacrifice our work hours for that, I don't know. Probably I'd love to do that, but for now it feels like it's more important to come up with a good idea and build a product than to talk about. That could be a mistake, but it doesn't feel like a mistake right now.


This is great "motivational" advice. So for anyone that needs motivation, here it is!

Practically speaking though, the post encourages a lot of learning, reading, researching, networking, talking, etc ...

...at the end of the day ...

Get

Work

Done.


Definitely too much reading, not enough doing.


seems more like commencement speech motivation, then how to survive and thrive in a down market. for a young startup founder with limited resources and runway, all the time spent reading and researching would be better allocated to talking with early customers and improving the product.


going to add that the first bit regarding getting to cash flow profitability and making some short terms adjustments to reach that stage is solid, not new but def good advice.


Figure out a way to get on TheFunded.com and read every single thing everyone there has written (and realize that a lot of it is crap of course! :)).

Why should anyone waste time on reading crap? he suggests to read as much as possible, but will that not be at the expense of the time spent working on the start up. If much of it is crap, general opinions and subjective stuff, then why not just focus on the start up and find the lessons for yourself rather than waste time reading crap.


Maybe he emphasized a wee bit too much on the reading part. However, there are some good reading material he did point out in the article.

I've always said "Its good to learn from your mistakes, it's better to learn from others'". The only way to gain knowledge of other people's mistakes is to read, network and communicate.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: