Drew Houston argues that hands-on startup experience beats credentials. He points out that Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple were all founded by first-time entrepreneurs without formal preparation. Real-world startup work, not test scores or MBAs, teaches you what you need to start a company.
Chapters
Throughout high school and college, I had worked at a bunch of different startups. And more than anything else, working at a startup was the most kind of informative experience for me, or the thing that prepared me best for this kind of whole journey. And that was a little counterintuitive because especially if you go to a competitive school, you grow up and life is all about checking these boxes, right? First you got to get the right test scores, you got to get the right GPA, you got to do these different things to kind of be prepared and sort of look, you know, be good enough to be admitted into a good school. And so if you kind of carry that logic forward, you imagine that the right path to startups would be something like, well, you know, what got me here was checking off these boxes and I can think of all kinds of other boxes that I should check off before I'm like really ready to start a company. Among them, maybe I should get a bunch of graduate degrees, I'm a really good engineer, maybe I should go get an MBA so I know about business, maybe I should get— work at a big company like a big tech company like Google, then maybe I should work at a medium company and then a small company and then sometime in my 30s, 40s, 50s I'll be prepared to start a company and empirically there is no— I mean, One thing about this whole world is there's a bunch of different paths to success, but empirically it's sort of surprising that so many of the companies kind of you'd think about in the Hall of Fame were started by people who were basically had no idea what the hell they were doing either. And so if you have that feeling, it should be of some comfort that Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, all these things were started by first or second time entrepreneurs who were really figuring it out along the way too. And so don't be too daunted if you don't have all the answers.
