Excuse, high school students, your dreams in this dream startup mode shark You will have to wait. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator-The start-up accelerator behind Silicon Valley giants like Airbnband tapeand Dropbox Redait issues not to rush to entrepreneurship before graduation.
“If you are in high school and you want to start starting one day, you may think the best you can do now is to start startups. But maybe it is not.” Graham wrote on X.
Instead, Graham highlighted the importance that General Zires should focus on learning and building skills during their young. He continued, “Emerging companies are rarely the best way to do this,” adding that startups can face learning due to pressure for success.
He added: “The goal of starting the operation is to make something that people want, not to learn.” “You will learn things to start, of course. But the way to learn the fastest is to work on everything that is curious about it, and you do not have this luxury in starting. In starting, you have to work on everything that users want.”
But don’t worry, you don’t have to wait a long time after high school to start the founder’s path: Sam Altman, CEO of Openai by Y Combinator in just 19 years, was funded, and Graham wrote previously that “when he was 19 years old, he seemed to have had a 40 -year -old child inside.”
How to test if you are big enough to start starting
This is not the first time.Founder“The startup teacher has warned that the beginning of the self becomes premature. In a separate article in 2007He even showed how to search for maturity in the founders.
In it, Graham writes that the minimum age for being ready for the founder may be a young man of up to 16, although Y Combinator usually does not look at anyone under 18 years old and who cannot conclude legally contracts. Although Altman, he was the youngest and more founding founder Graham, wrote, “There are other 19 -year -old children who are 12 years old.”
So, if you are an ambitious student who believes that they broke the code for a new product or idea, then he shared exactly how to test if you have passed the threshold of his maturity.
One example is to make excuses for being “just a child” and relying on your youth to escape complex situations. Adults can usually allow you to get out of the hook, but Graham emphasizes the importance of not relying on the “child reaction” when things become very difficult if you want to be taken seriously as a founder.
Another way to measure if you are ready is to write down how to react to cash. When people offer challenges to an idea. Instead of moving away from your idea when you were given criticism, or rebellion, Graham says that the reaction of adults will be to ask “really? Why do you think that?”
“What you don’t find often is children who interact with challenges like adults. When you do it, I found an adult, whatever their age,” he wrote.
https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/GettyImages-2230174571-e1757346758402.jpg?resize=1200,600
Source link