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Comment by 1gor | Hacker News Reader

Would you skip engineering and cs books? Is whom you know more important in life that what you know?

Essentially, the article calls you to try to be Steve Jobs, not Steve Wozniak. If you are an MBA type rather than a hacker, then go ahead, skip the books, get to know right people, take care of you network and create 500+ connections in your linkedin.

Oh, by the way, don't be fooled: becoming Steve Jobs would still require hard work on yourself (on your taste, philosophy and general personality, if not on your technical knowledge).

For some reason I think spending life making things is more fun than spending it bullshitting, networking and kissing ass of your 'mentors'. And there is less competition in the former field, as they say.

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There's a difference between building a product and building a company. Mentors are huge in building a company, and like it or not, building a company is a people-process.

Just to give an example -- right now we're preparing our investor deck and exec summary. You can read books all day long on that, but the comparative worth of having an experienced entrepreneur that can read over what you've got and critique it -- and then put you in touch with the people who you want to read it -- is much higher.

The traditional vc-based path to building a company is sub-optimal, this has been the topic much covered on HN. Product-based way of building a company seems to be the future.

The companies that went directly to customers first on merits of their product and then attracted attention of rolodex-waving vcs include google, 37signals and probably pg's viaweb (sorry for non-original examples).

Remember, internet IS a network already. Even mentor knowledge is available through Google. Leverage this network and you're in business. You do need some hard technical knowledge (and books) to achieve this, though.

On the other hand, stuffing startups with executive 'mentors' who bring 'experience' but also grab tons of call options is a venerable vc industry tradition.

As somebody who went once through a vc-funded startup that was later killed by the same vcs, I remain ever sceptical about their motives and see this article as a piece of vc propaganda.

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