GETTING RICH IS DOABLE

"If you work your way down the Forbes 400 list, making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school. You don't even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50." (Written in March 2005)

[These words have been taken from an article titled "How To Start A Start-up" by Paul Graham, the author of a magnificient book named "Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age". You can also read this or his other articles (always interesting) on his website paulgraham.com.

Click on Book Image to view Details                           ....continued below.....

Lamborghini Murcielago and people : This is a photograph by 'Josh Rokman', as posted on . To view this photographer’s photostream and more, click on Image.

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If you get excited enough and wish to start your own business after reading this essay, you may also contact his venture capital firm Y Combinator.]

"You need three things to create a successful startup : to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

And that's kind of exciting, because all three are doable. Hard, but doable. And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies getting rich is doable too. Hard, but doable. There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve.

The Idea : In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people (something) better than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.

An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning. A sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route. Microsoft's original plan was to make money selling programming languages, of all things. Their current business model didn't occur to them until IBM dropped it in their lap five years later.

Ideas for startups are worth something, certainly, but...What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.

People : What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive -- a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer or a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.

Do the founders of a startup have to include business people? That depends. We thought so when we started ours. But business was no great mystery. It's not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study. You just try to get people to pay you for stuff. All you need to know about business to run a startup are commonsense things people knew before there were business schools, or even universities.

If you work your way down the Forbes 400 list, making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school. You don't even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. There is one reason you might want to include business people in a startup, though : because you have to have at least one person willing and able to focus on what customers want.

What Customers Want : I think most businesses that fail, do it because they don't give customers what they want. Can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of

When I was trying to think of the things every startup needed to do, I almost included a fourth: get a version 1 out as soon as you can. But I decided not to, because that's implicit in making something customers want. The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions. In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.

Should You? : But should you start a company? Are you the right sort of person to do it? If you are, is it worth it? More people are the right sort of person to start a startup than realize it. That's the main reason I wrote this. If you want to do it, do it. Starting a startup is not the great mystery it seems from outside. It's not something you have to know about "business" to do. Build something users love, and spend less than you make. How hard is that?"

[This is a very boiled-down and edited version of the original article, which you may read in whole at http://paulgraham.com/start.html.]

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