I did a fair bit of speaking at Universities in the last few months of 2013. In Nov and Dec, I think I gave guest lectures or spoken at events at HBS, MIT, BC, Harvard College and attended a capstone event for an entrepreneurial program for Duke undergrads. These frequent interactions with students has gotten me thinking about the topic of starting companies in college.

Startups and entrepreneurship are in vogue in universities these days. More and more schools are introducing new courses and programs geared towards supporting entrepreneurial endeavors.  While business plan competitions and accelerator programs used to target business school or grad school teams, more and more colleges are creating their own programs to enable undergrads to build businesses during their time at school.  Venture capital firms are supporting this in various ways as well, through funds and programs specifically targeting campus founders (Rough Draft VC and the Dorm Room Fund are a couple examples, but there are others).

Some of these programs have given rise to some promising companies, and here at NextView, we’ve funded a handful of companies founded in college (Plastiq, Whoop, and Bridj). But overall, I have mixed feelings about all of this activity around entrepreneurship at the college level.  On one hand, any endeavors to promote more risk taking and entrepreneurial aptitude are great for the startup ecosystem broadly.  But in some ways, I think these efforts actually do some harm.  “Starting a company” or “working on a startup” is becoming something to do for its own sake.  One can adopt all the lingo and mannerisms and “play house” without really having the great raw ingredients for building something that solves important problems.  Even worse, I often find that companies founded in college are the result of an academic investigation of ideas rather than an authentic one.  I happened to be listening to Paul Graham’s lecture at Stanford a few weeks back, and I noticed that he touched on this topic as well.  In his subsequent essay, he wrote:

“Given this dichotomy, which of the two paths should you take? Be a real student and not start a startup, or start a real startup and not be a student? I can answer that one for you. Do not start a startup in college. How to start a startup is just a subset of a bigger problem you’re trying to solve: how to have a good life. And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lot of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it. Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search. Most people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.”

So, my advice to 99% of students is not to start a startup in college. I have two reasons for this.

1. The best startups are born out of authentic experiences. And when you are 20, it’s hard to have enough authentic experiences to form unique and exciting companies. This isn’t true for everyone, but I think that starting great companies require both unique insight into a problem and unique dedication to solving that problem.  These insights don’t necessarily come out of insanely unusual experiences, just ones that are different enough and meaningful enough to set a founder on the right path. I think the vast majority of people have neither when they are in college.  But, these same people may have a decent shot of developing both over the next 10 years of their lives (and certainly much later in their life as well). If you are passionate about a problem but don’t have a unique insight into it, find a way to work on that problem during and after school in the context of a business, non-profit, or someone else’s startup.  If you lack both a unique insight and unique dedication to a problem, searching for a problem to solve wont’ really help. You need to live life – search “breadth first” as Paul Graham suggests.  It’s hard to lay out the steps to develop this, but like Steve Jobs talked about during his Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005 ,“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”  And so my companion advice to this is: draw bold, interesting dots.

2. Great founders must be able to assemble significant resources much earlier than their company deserves.  This includes, people, capital, partnerships, customers, etc. But probably most important is people. Attracting extraordinary people to a company and having them working like crazy at low wages requires A) that you know these extraordinary people and B) that they would want to work for/with you.  Out of college, one’s network of extraordinary people may be pretty strong, but it is likely to expand exponentially after college when you are able to naturally interact with a broader set of talented people in a different context. Not that there isn’t amazing raw intellectual horsepower among one’s classmates in college, but sometimes, industry or functional specialists can really move the needle for a company and are very important to get on board sooner vs.later.  Some people may be in a position to bring on board their first three A+ engineers while in college, but many others will find themselves better positioned to do this at a different point in their journey.

So, if you are going to start a company in college, I’d suggest thinking about where you fall relative to these two factors.  Remember that most startups fail, most are more difficult and more painful than you can imagine, and many of these failed companies are led by pretty remarkable individuals.  I think it’s wonderful that an individual in college has the gumption to go down this path, but I’d urge him or her to do so for the right reasons and with the right appreciation for what it will take to be successful.  Do not start a company for the sake of starting a company.  Your friends may be impressed, and it might make great fodder for interviews or grad school applications one day. And you probably will learn a lot in the process.  But there may be other and better ways of making progress towards this goal, and there may be different better experiences in store for you if you if you challenge yourself to seek them out.