Should You Start a Startup? with Harj Taggar | Startup School

**Harj Taggar** (0:09)
Hey everyone, I'm Harj Taggar, one of the group partners at Y Combinator. Today, I'm gonna talk about whether you should start a startup. Because YC invests in startups so early, I've spent a lot of time with people who aren't yet sure if they should start a company or not. I've helped many people, including my own friends and family, think about this decision. And my intended audience for this talk is anyone who doesn't feel ready to start a startup today, but thinks they may want to one day in the future. I'm gonna break down the topic of whether you should start a startup into two parts. First, we'll talk about which types of people seem best suited to being startup founders and help you figure out if you might be one of them. Second, we'll talk about how you might best prepare yourself for becoming a startup founder in the future. Let's start by helping you figure out if you're the kind of person who should become a startup founder or not. I really wish there were a simple test you could take that would give you a clear and correct answer to that question. I've now worked with almost a thousand startup founders as a group partner at YC, and I still get surprised by which people take to startup life like a Dr. Walter and which ones struggle to adapt. Now, you might find this surprising if your image of startups is based on the way famous founders are often depicted in books or movies. These depictions can make it seem that if you're not a ruthless, brilliant programmer like Mark Zuckerberg in the social network movie, or a charismatic product genius like Steve Jobs in one of the many books or movies about him, you probably aren't cut out to be a startup founder. Now, I can't deny that being a brilliant programmer or a charismatic product genius will certainly make it easier to be a successful startup founder. But I can say that after working with many successful founders, there are many more different types of people who succeed at startups with different strengths than just those stereotypes. As an investor, my job is to pick which people will make great startup founders. And yet, even after 15 years of starting and investing in startups, I still get surprised by who turns out to be a great startup founder. That means it's gonna be hard for you to know for sure if you're suited to being one. You might think you could just look at how well someone has done in school or at work and assume success there will lead to success at startups. That's definitely what I thought when I first started working at YC in 2010 and began reading YC funding applications for the first time. After I started working with more startups though, I realized that these signals mattered much less than I'd expected they would. When you're working on a startup, you have to put in blood, sweat and tears to convince even a single user to care about trying your product. Let alone convincing the first 10 or 100, you have to push through a lot of rejection to get there. And because this is your startup, all of that rejection feels very personal, in a way it doesn't when you're working at a fan company, building a product for someone else. It takes a lot of resilience to make it through this initial struggle to get your early users. And that's the quality I think is most important for startup founders to have. Resilient people are suited to startups and should definitely become founders. But how do you know if you have enough resilience to be a startup founder? When I first started working at YC, I thought I could use confidence as a proxy for resilience. I'd assume that if someone projected confidence, like speaking with conviction, being high energy, during our funding interviews, they were likely to be a resilient founder.
The more founders I worked with though, the more I realized this was also wrong.
It turned out that someone could appear very confident initially, but not be resilient when their startup hit roadblocks. Conversely, some of the quietest and least confident seeming founders at first, turned out to be the most resilient founders I'd go on to work with, many eventually taking their companies public. This is Saji, the founder of BenchLink. I met him when we funded BenchLink in 2012 BenchLink is now worth over $6 billion, and Saji has grown into a formidable founder and CEO. But I remember when we first interviewed him and his co-founder, Corey. They were both softly spoken engineers, and we were all concerned they wouldn't be suited to working on BenchLink, because BenchLink's idea was to sell software to biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies to make money.