There are easier ways to impress people than spending years trying to keep a company alive, says Paul Graham.
“If you want to seem cool, like starting a startup is just about the least efficient way to do it,” Graham, the cofounder of Y Combinator, said in an interview with the accelerator that was released on Thursday. “It’s brutally hard, and you won’t seem cool for years.”
Graham is one of YC’s four founders and a prolific startup sage whose 2024 “founder mode” essay quickly entered the Silicon Valley zeitgeist. Launched in 2005, YC has backed some of 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 pushed back on the idea of treating a startup as another credential to add to a résumé.
If 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, and said that it is harder 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 sort of slide through. You’ll get a Harvard degree, and everybody will be impressed with you,” Graham said. “With startups, there’s no easy major, right? It’s like applying to Harvard and being forced to study theoretical physics.”
Top tech 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 they should “never start a startup just for the sake of doing so.”
“There are much easier ways to become rich, and everyone who starts a startup always says, always, that they couldn’t have imagined how hard and painful it was going to be,” The OpenAI CEO said in a lecture. “You should only start a startup if you feel compelled by a particular problem and that you think starting a company is the best way to solve it.”
Elon Musk, too, has discouraged some people from launching companies.
“If you need encouragement to start a company, don’t do it,” the Tesla and SpaceXAI CEO said in a 2023 interview. “The probability of failure is very high, so you really should not if you need encouragement.”
He has previously described starting a company as “staring into the face of death.”
