Or rather, the most commonly cited reasons for not starting a startup, and why most of them are bad reasons. The new article by Paul Graham. Some highlights:
- The median age of a founder is 27. Actually, that's how old the founders of Sun were when they started their little company.
- Knowing nothing about business is not a good reason to avoid starting a startup. Just worry about making something people like. When you've got lots of people looking at your site, you can always figure out how to monetize it. On the other hand, if your site is a piece of useless crap all the business knowhow in the world will not help you.
- Investors do not hold past failed startups against you. In fact, this is viewed as good experience.
Paul Graham is a fellow filled with good advice about startups, and occasionally drops these inexplicable, indecipherable, bizarre opinions on things (like Lisp, in which he says Lisp is the most awesome of the awesome, the badassingest of the programming languages, the tool that will give you the unfair business advantage. However he can't tell you why, because it's inexpressible in your "words", for some reason. Pah, I say.) However, you can't argue with the fact that he's a successful entrepreneur, with the investment organization Y Combinator that has a success rate of something like 25%. So, there you have it.