[Paul Graham and The Lesson to Unlearn]
I started off this morning reading an essay by Y Combinator Founder Paul Graham about how students in schools are being taught the wrong things -- namely, to win at tests, to prove they are competitive.
The link to entrepreneurship? Graham believes that young founders who are just starting out think that the key to becoming a successful founder is to somehow trick people into believing in you.
He points to a series of discussions he typically has when young entrepreneurs come to office hours to talk about raising money or "being noticed".
He says they come up with hare-brained ideas like "launching on a Tuesday" because Tuesday is when you are most likely to get noticed.
Graham wonders why are these founders making things complicated, instead of just working on a great product that people will love.
"Why did founders tie themselves in knots doing the wrong things when the answer was right in front of them? Because that was what they'd been trained to do. Their education had taught them that the way to win was to hack the test. And without even telling them they were being trained to do this. The younger ones, the recent graduates, had never faced a non-artificial test. They thought this was just how the world worked: that the first thing you did, when facing any kind of challenge, was to figure out what the trick was for hacking the test. That's why the conversation would always start with how to raise money, because that read as the test. It came at the end of YC. It had numbers attached to it, and higher numbers seemed to be better. It must be the test."
This makes me think about things like "Growth hacking," which is not a real thing. It's a mnemonic device that some people in Silicon Valley came up with because they know it attracts young people who believe that marketing is something you do to "hack" the attention of people that leads to growth.
These young founders would soon learn if they were marketing employees of any corporate brand with a digital presence, that these "hacks" were already being done, as long ago as 30 years ago.
But why is the allure of the hack so compelling? Back to Graham's point, everyone who is being taught is also being conditioned. The distance between knowledge building and working on real problems that use that knowledge is huge.
Being a founder, in my opinion, is truly about finding a passion for something and then making a solution built out of rules that resonate in other people's hearts in minds. In other words, it's working with other people, communicating with them, and building a solution for them that not only fixes a problem they have, but inspires them to live a better life.
You do that with three skills, I think:
1. Communicating your own thoughts about the problem to a person experiencing a problem
2. Listening to their response with the intention to understand
3. Working hard until you get the real answer
In doing so, there is no hackable way to solve their problem. You have to continually "quest" for the solution, by building and failing, and building and failing. The failing is the key point.
According to Graham, we are taught that the solution to everything is to be perfect at getting the grade, to prove we are smart.
In fact, out in the real world, we are only really learning when we are applying a solution to a problem, seeing it fail, and then asking deeper questions about how to get it right.
For founders, the spirit of learning is in getting it right. That takes a really long time. Before you try to get noticed by investors, by the media, by anyone you need to get noticed by the customer who has a real problem, and has also failed in solving it.
The true test of entrepreneurship is whether or not can you learn in a way that teaches other people, too.
On December 16, we close applications for AW#20, an accelerator class that is devoted to blockchain and AI founders. You can apply here: http://bit.ly/2rxLzLi
Source material
http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
Doug Crets
Communications Master, AppWorks Accelerator
