Balancing startup dreams with being a full-time student? | Hacker News Reader

Balancing startup dreams with being a full-time student?

3 pointssavagew2 comments

In about two months I will be starting my freshman year at MIT. I've been programming since I was a little kid, and my dream career for as long as I can remember has been to found my own startup. I'm currently brimming with ideas, and I think a few of them are legitimately commercially viable. At MIT, it seems like I'll have access to free money and nearly endless resources to pursue these ideas. Part of me wants to jump right in the moment I get to campus and start building. But on the other hand, I'm concerned about the feasibility of actually starting a company while I'm a student. I have no intention of dropping out since I'll be playing a sport that I love for 4 years, so I fear that the amount of effort I'd be able to put into any venture would be significantly constrained. I see a lot of posts on LinkedIn and such by student founders talking about their products but a lot of them seem to be worthless GPT wrappers that can be made in about two hours, so I'm not sure how much stock to put in their experiences.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Odds are you'll ignore the advice of a graybeard with multiple degrees. But I'll have a go just in case.

Being accepted to MIT is a great accomplishment. Don't blow it. The primary reason to go to university is to learn and graduate. Part of the learning experience is an ever increasing awareness of little you actually do know. After completing SICP, you'll realize how little your programming chops as a kid matters.

Education is an expensive investment. However, the credentials and the network you build will pay dividends for decades after you graduate. The odds of a part-time startup matching those returns are very slim. The few people who have created truly successful startups at university have dropped out. But the majority have ended up with a failed startup, a failure to graduate and a student debt for the wasted years.

By all means enjoy your sport. Build a network of like-minded folks. Undertake ambitious projects, but with the primary goal of learning. But most importantly of all, study seriously. Lapses during the early years tend to bite hard in the later years. In my case to the point of needing to repeat mandatory subjects.

You realistically only have time for one of the following:

1. be a serious student

2. be a serious athlete

3. be a serious maker

4. be a serious business-person

My advice would be not to take any of them too seriously -- enjoy college, enjoy your sport, enjoy tinkering, make connections. Don't worry about starting a company until after college. Take advantage of your college years to learn, work on other people's projects, try out new things, and invite others to collaborate with you.

If you're brimming with ideas now, you'll have just as many in four (or six or eight) years, and you'll have gained invaluable connections and the know-how to execute on them. (But if before then a great opportunity falls into your lap to start a business with some of your fellow students or professors, don't be afraid to take a sabbatical from being a student and athlete and having a life, and dive into it for six months or a year.)

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