On Thursday Morning, I was fortunate enough to sit down with Alan Webber over an early morning coffee, who founded Fast Company over a decade ago.
We were talking about some of the skills young people should have in order to launch successful ventures.
Alan noted that while someone is trying to get a startup going there are often two competing needs: The need to make enough to pay the bills and the need to invest a lot of hours to get an idea off the ground. In order to circumvent these challenge he suggested that people learn how to quickly make money on the side, like doing social media consulting on the side for older people who don’t understand for $50 an hour. In launch Fast Company he and his co founder launched a side business called Fast Company Knowledge Exchange or FCKE to finance their work getting their business going.
While I agree that is a very good skill and may be something Force For the Future needs to develop, it’s not the best solution if we want to maximize for impact. Let me draw an analogy from nature. Humans have the biggest brains of any creature that has walked the earth. We also have one of the longest maturation periods of any animal. The more space in the formative years you give an organism to develop the greater it’s potential. That’s what society should be doing, providing longer intellectual incubation periods for its young people. Universities occupy the space where this is supposed to happen yet most young people are at school just because it feels like what they are supposed to do. And they get out of school take an average job, get used to the money and sacrifice their dreams.
The best time to do a startup is in that period of 18-23. You’ve got the least to lose, are capable of functioning autonomously in the adult world and succeed or fail, it’s an amazing learning experience that will push you into a world of possibility, with plenty of interesting opportunities for your next job/venture whatever it may be.
Here I’ll let Seth Berger, who founded And1 while he was in college, do the rest of the talking for me again (besides you probably didn’t read my other posts anyway), because I’m tired of seeing college students go down the corporate route, flush their dreams down the toilet and never leave because double quilted TP is too nice a luxury to sacrifice.
Q: As a successful entrepreneur, what advice do you have for students who are interested in starting a business?
Berger: Start a business before you go get a job. Here is the reason. If you go get a job, you are going to succeed…. If you come out and work, what are you going to make? 50K to start? You tell me.
So let’s say you are 21 and you get out of school making $60,000. You do real well and three years later they say, “I am going to send you back to grad school. I am going to pay for you. Then, come back to work. When you come back you are making $175,000.” Five years after that, you are going to be making a half million bucks. You are going to have a husband or a wife, two kids, nice car, summer home, country club. At what point are you going to say, “I am going to go start my own company.”? The answer is never.
What you will do is work until you have made enough money, somewhere in your 50s, to go do something you really want to do, instead of now, when you are broke…. When I got out of graduate school and I drove a Honda Civic Hatchback. I was broke. I didn’t care. It just didn’t matter. But once you get used to the good life, you won’t go back. So if you are thinking about starting a business, start the day you graduate. You don’t need experience. You don’t need money. You don’t need someone else to tell you that you can do it. Just go start it before you get used to making all that money.
Networking is like planting seeds. But the goal is foliage not a seed. Planting is easy. Consistently watering is hard.