Originally published on Forbes

I know dozens of entrepreneurship professors at campuses around the country and they’re almost universally great guys (they are typically male). I love what motivates them. They’re truly dedicated to developing young people.
But I’ve also spoken to hundreds of students groping for next steps. And I have to say that, at this point, it’s clear that entrepreneurship education, as it’s currently practiced, does not work.
The numbers are stark. Entrepreneurship classes and programs in colleges around the U.S. have quadrupled in the past 25 years. Meanwhile rates of private business ownership for households under 30 have declined over 60% during the same period. So, the more we teach entrepreneurship, the fewer young people actually start businesses. This has profound implications.
There are a number of schools that are producing real businesses. Northeastern, MIT, and Stanford come to mind, as well as a number of graduate business schools. But for most students at universities around the country, studying entrepreneurship is a pleasant intellectual diversion, not a professional choice, path, or commitment.
This is not the professors’ fault. It’s largely due to the structural difficulties in teaching entrepreneurship.

1. Action-oriented, not knowledge-based

Let’s say I were to teach you and 100 other people how to raise $1 million. I break it down step-by-step. You take excellent notes and are able to recount my lesson in full detail.
Can you then go out and raise $1 million?
Probably not. Or if you can, you probably could have before I did anything.
Starting a business is similar to an athletic endeavor, like serving a tennis ball. Telling you how to do it is useless. You actually get better through a combination of practice, coaching and repetitions with money on the line.
Do you really want to know how to raise $1 million? Go out and raise $100k from friends, family and fools. Then make everyone’s investment pay off. And then raise $500k. And then make that pay off too. After that you should be able to raise $1 million with no problem.

2. Failure

What if a professor were to stand in the front of class and say, “Half of you will fail this class, as partially determined by my rolling dice at the end of the semester.”
Most of the students would leave and the professor would be reprimanded and probably fired.
Yet, this is a reasonable depiction of what would happen in starting a business. Most businesses fail. And most every entrepreneur has a major failure or two in their early days. Bill Gates started a failed company called Traf-o-data before Microsoft MSFT +0.15%. Sam Walton started a failed retail store before Wal-Mart. Selling is a bit like being a Major League baseball player – even if you’re good you don’t get on base a majority of the time. The trick is to get enough failure under your belt early so that you can get up and try again.
Schools don’t tolerate failure. Our students can’t accept it.
The best entrepreneurship course would give everyone who enrolls an F. Whoever takes it probably has the makings of a decent entrepreneur.

3. Conviction

One student said to me after taking an entrepreneurship class – “It made me hesitate to start a business because it seemed so daunting, like there were so many things to do and know.”
If someone could start a million-dollar business, what would he or she do?
They’d drop everything and go do it. They would probably be nowhere near a classroom.
What you need most of all to start a business is courage. Conviction. Confidence. Belief. Heart. Spirit. Will. Perseverance.
Entrepreneurship classes tell stories about people who have these qualities. But they don’t convey them. Tacitly, the act of being in the classroom pushes one further away from actually taking on the challenge.

So how do you teach entrepreneurship?

In a word, apprenticeship. At Venture for America, we match top performers with early-stage companies for 2 years. Our Fellows have a front row seat to what it takes to raise money, sell something new to customers, and make tough decisions. More than 25% of our alums go on to co-found a company within a year of completion. Real companies, real responsibilities, real success and failure, real money = real entrepreneurs.
The more real you make it the better. The best programs push students out of the classroom, get businesspeople with real problems, and give strong teams an actual chance to launch and operate with access to real angel investors. Go out and get some customers.
The fundamental question is one of resources. Ideally, we’d give every entrepreneurship student $100k and a few years and let them have at it. The Dorm Room Fund invests $2 million a year in student-run ventures, as an example of something that works. Instead, we give $100k loans to law students, and then wonder why there will be 176,000 unemployed and underemployed law school graduates by 2020.
Let’s get serious about teaching and training entrepreneurship both in and outside the classroom. Our young people desperately want it – and it would be a tremendous boon to an economy that needs more new companies to take shape and create jobs in communities around the country.

In this week’s digest: how to become your most resilient self; what it takes to give the right kind of feedback (and why it matters); and Brad Hargreaves, co-founder of General Assembly, on the trial-and-error method behind the largest tech and design school in the US.

Resilience is crucial for success—here’s how to get there. You probably know someone who’s unusually tough in the face of hardship—someone who bounces back from every setback with a positive attitude and the will to overcome. Psychologists call that kind of mental fortitude “resilience,” and it’s linked to both professional success and personal fulfillment. The great news? Turns out, you don’t have to be born that way—resilience is all about perception, and it’s something you can learn. And if you want to build something, we can’t think of a better skill set to master. READ IT HERE: “How People Learn to Become Resilient” by Maria Konnikova

Why feedback is critical—and how to deliver it with “radical candor.” Delivering feedback can be awkward—and it can feel even more challenging on a small, tight-knit startup team. But according to Kim Scott, failing to give feedback isn’t a kindness; it’s a mistake that can stunt professional development and bring the whole team down. Kim makes the case that real kindness—and real growth—requires fostering an environment of radical candor, where giving guidance that’s direct, challenging, and caring is the norm. It’s a critical tool for a healthy startup—and not a bad concept to keep in mind whether you’re giving feedback, or receiving it. READ IT HERE: “Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss” by First Round Review

The strategies that keep this founder grounded. When Brad Hargreaves and his three co-founders launched General Assembly, they weren’t trying to start a business. Initially dreamed up as a coworking space—what Brad thought would be a fun, six-month project—GA is now the largest technology and design school in the country. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Through the tumultuous ups and downs of building GA, Brad developed some crucial strategies for keeping his feet on solid ground. His personal motto? Things are never as bad, or as good, as you think—and you can’t measure your worth as a person by the success of your company. (Sounds like a pretty resilient mindset to us.) LISTEN HERE: Interview with Brad Hargreaves, Founder & CEO of Common; Co-founder of General Assembly

Originally published by Dan Klemmer ’14 on Elite Daily

As an undergrad, I was enamored by the fast pace and seemingly unbound world of startups.
The potential to wear what I wanted, be my own boss and have full autonomy over how I budgeted my time appeared to be the promised land of post-graduate opportunities.
Although this should come as no surprise, my conception of a startup was more of a fallacy than a truth.
I’m on the marketing team at Cincinnati-based Rhinegeist Brewery. It’s a startup brewery, and one of the fastest-growing in the country.
We work our fannies off at Rhinegeist, and we certainly smile while we sweat.
When I started the job, I felt my two biggest assets were my excitement about the beer world and my track record of hard work.
I planned to put my head down and keep my nose as close to the grindstone as possible.
The words of hustle and grit swirled around my mind like the siren song of startup success, but I quickly hit a wall.
There weren’t tangible goals or grades in the beer world. My normal school-taught pattern of “study, absorb and test” became less relevant than I could’ve expected.
Through Rhinegeist’s transformation from 15 employees when I interviewed to the current 120 and growing, the brewery’s needs have changed greatly.
Given that change, these are four components that have been crucial to embody throughout the process.

1. Flexibility

If your startup is growing — or even more apparently if it’s not — its needs will continually vary.
Much of the time, that variance is unforeseeable.
For you to be as strong of an asset as possible, you’ve got to be ready to adapt to the inherent curveballs that’ll be thrown your way.

2. A Yearning To Build

You must have the hunger to create systems to solve the problems your startup is presented with.
These systems can be anything from customer support and fielding product requests to setting up communication protocol.
The second iteration of this building is the creation of systems that can scale, or (even better) abate problems that haven’t even come your way yet.
If you’re a builder, you’ll be unbelievably valuable.

3. The Ability To Fix

Unless you were one of the first five employees, there are probably a huge amount of processes already in place that you’re abiding by or working around.
Given the growth or the change in business direction, it’s improbable that the processes that worked for the first five will work when 25 people are onboard.
If you want to be a kick ass member of your startup, you’ll recognize the processes that have broken or will break.
Then you’ll try to fix them.
While pointing out problems is helpful, fixing them is pivotal.

4. Ego Suspension

It’s crucial to remind yourself that you’re not the center of the universe.
You are but a piece in the greater framework of your startup.
When a task is offloaded your way with little explanation, it’s doubtful your coworker did it with the intention of screwing up your day.
Putting your ego to the side and embracing the hectic nature of a startup will only make your days more delightful, not to mention limit stress considerably.
Try placing a sticky note on your computer, reminding you to breathe deep and slow down. It works wonders.
However, all these tips do not mean you should forgo your sense of autonomy and self-worth.
Instead, they should encourage you to better understand that what you want from your startup and what’s in your startup’s best interest may not always be aligned.
Embodying the builder’s mindset to create and fix — coupled with a flexible disposition — will make finding the balance between your startup’s needs easier, and will ultimately make you a valued member of the team.

• Name: Dan Klemmer ’14
• Alma mater: Boston College ’14
• Job: Sales, Marketing, Distribution and Expansion
• Company: Rhinegeist Brewery, one of the fastest growing breweries in the country

This week, Jeremy interviews Chris Webb, Co-Founder & CEO of ChowNow, an online ordering system and marketing platform for restaurants. At just 19 years old Chris’s interest in markets and trading led him to start his career at Bear Stearns and then Lehman Brothers. While working in the financial sector, Chris’s family made a founding investment in the now popular Tender Greens restaurant chain in California. Chris’s experience with Tender Greens brought to light the gap in the market for online ordering solutions for local groups and independent restaurants. To prove the market need, Chris and his co-founder created a fictional product that mimicked the service that ChowNow would offer and traveled to Santa Barbara to see if they could sell their fake service to restaurateurs. Within a few days they had more than sixty restaurants interested and knew ChowNow would be a hit. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear more about ChowNow and why Chris and his co-founder were courted by three LA based accelerators without even applying.

Click here to listen

In the startup world, failure happens. And who knows that better than a company founder? This week we are excited to broadcast a panel from San Antonio Startup Week (planned and executed by a VFA Fellow!). From losing major clients to handling customer service nightmares, these panelists have seen it all. Tune in for a lively conversation with Magaly Chocano, CEO of Sweb Development, Lorenzo Gomez, CEO of Geekdom, Jason Straughan, CEO/Software Engineer of Grok Interactive, and Melissa Unsell, Vice President and Found Member of elumicor. The conversation is expertly moderated by Paul Flahive, Journalist and Producer at Texas Public Radio.

Click here to listen.

In this week’s digest: One founder’s quest to bring renewable energy to the world (through soccer!), why we need more women launching companies, why finding success at a startup might require a whole new mindset, and a case against playing the blame game.

This founder harnesses the energy of soccer balls. As an undergrad, Jessica O. Matthews took a trip to Nigeria, a country where soccer is widespread but access to reliable electricity is not. So she invented the SOCCKET, a soccer ball that harnesses energy with every kick—and can provide hours of light. Listen to the #VFApodcast to find out how Jessica took her company, Uncharted Play, from an idea to a rocky Kickstarter campaign to a full-time job, bringing SOCCKETs and more to the communities that need them. LISTEN HERE: Interview with Jessica O. Matthews, Founder & CEO of Uncharted Play

Why success at a startup job is all about attitude. Does it take the same skill set to excel in school and kill it at a startup? According to Dan Klemmer—who spent the last year and a half hustling and grinding on the marketing team at Rhinegeist, a brewery startup in Cincinnati—the answer is: not quite. Find out what it took for Dan to adapt and add value at every turn as Rhinegeist grew from 15 employees to 120+. READ IT HERE: “The New Office: 4 Traits You Need To Make It In The Startup World” by Dan Klemmer

The best way to learn from mistakes? Move past blame. When something goes wrong, it can be convenient to place the blame on a single person or team—and a relief to feel like only one party is responsible. But the truth is usually more complicated, and discovering what really happened is the best way to improve things for next time. Where to begin? Create an environment where honesty is rewarded, and blame is passé. READ IT HERE: “This is How Effective Leaders Move Beyond Blame” by First Round Review

Why we need more women founders. Any attempt to build the strongest team possible involves a certain amount of luck and guesswork. But according to Andrew Yang, we know at least one thing for sure: gender balance matters. When women are involved at the executive level, companies perform better over time—and that’s just the beginning. READ IT HERE: “Why Women Are the Best Opportunity for Businesses” by Andrew Yang

Originally published on Entrepreneur.com

The Honest Company, which makes natural eco-friendly household products, is set to go public. It was recently valued at $1.7 billion with more than $150 million in revenue.
Jessica Alba first got the idea for the Honest Company in 2009, when she had an allergic reaction to an infant detergent recommended by her mother. She became obsessed with the idea of providing safe, beautiful and convenient products that parents could use worry-free. But she had a tough time convincing investors.
“I was getting rejected by so many people. They were like, ‘Right you want to create a business? Good luck… why don’t you just do perfume…”
Even Brian Lee, who eventually co-founded the company and became CEO, passed on the idea initially. He came around almost two years later when he had a child of his own, and his wife started transforming the household. The Honest Company launched in 2012, sold $10 million in products its first year and took off from there.
The Honest Company is now a runaway hit. But the difficulties it had getting off the ground reflect some of the impediments facing women entrepreneurs — only 20 percent of angel investors and 6 percent of venture capital partners are women. Between 2011 and 2013, only 3 percent of venture capital went to companies with female CEOs. Even Jessica Alba struggled to get financial backing, and she’s a CELEBRITY. In a way, she’s the exception that proves the rule.
I run a national non-profit that recruits and trains aspiring entrepreneurs around the country. Over the past five years, I’ve seen just how tough it is for female entrepreneurs. And I am more convinced than ever that there are incredible opportunities — and unmet needs — in building women-oriented and women-led companies.
On the market side, women are now a record-high 57 percent of U.S. college graduates and will comprise more and more of the employee and customer base in the years to come. There will be many more households in which women are the primary economic drivers — one estimate is that as much as 85 percent of consumer purchasing power will be held by women.
Yet many corporations remain male-dominated in their approaches and leadership — only 5 percent of Fortune 1000 CEOs are women. Quite often, the default offerings don’t fully account for the female perspective.
This creates market opportunities. Sallie Krawcheck, the former head of Merrill Lynch, recently co-founded Ellevest, an investing platform designed for women. “It’s time to give women an investing experience designed specifically for them,” Krawcheck says, noting that women control $5 trillion in investing power and demonstrate better investment returns than men over time.
A friend of mine, Cariann Chan, went through the experience of freezing her eggs and found the process costly, uncomfortable and difficult to navigate. She now is working on a new product, Level, that measures fertility potential with a home test so that women can be better informed about their individual reproductive data before undergoing a procedure.
Investors are coming around too. One Silicon Valley venture capitalist said, “I’m on the lookout for companies that solve issues for women in innovative ways. There’s a ton of potential.” Indeed, a study indicated that women-led private technology companies achieve 35 percent higher return on investment than male-led tech companies.
This underscores the problem. Investors are cold-blooded capitalists (for the most part). If companies that include women statistically outperform others, then we’re systemically under-investing in women entrepreneurs.
Some of our partners are investing to change this. Rent the Runway and UBS are teaming up to mentor 200 female entrepreneurs via Project Entrepreneur. Anu Duggal started the Female Founders Fund expressly to tackle the imbalance and take advantage of the opportunity.
At Venture for America, I work with dozens of brilliant young women who clearly have the potential to start successful companies. I also have many accomplished women friends at different stages of their careers (I’m 41). The stories that my women friends tell me about the sexism they’ve experienced are astounding. Everything ranging from subtle patronizing to blatant harassment on a somewhat regular basis.
It remains very difficult for women to achieve and maintain positions of leadership. There are massive barriers at every turn. And not all of these are external — my women friends talk about how easy it is to be worn down after years of pushing against resistance.
The tempting thing to do is say, “Sexism is terrible, but it will recede as we become more enlightened. Women will start more companies, investors will wise up and things will get better!” Which I really hope is true — and I believe on good days. We all have to help make it happen.
In the meantime, I’d like to recommend an approach that’s inspired by Stanford professor Tom Kosnik.
Tom is an incredibly highly-regarded entrepreneurship and engineering professor. He often gets approached by students looking to start companies. If he is approached by a male founder or team, which is typically the case, he tells them, “Come back to me when you have a female co-founder.”
When I started Venture for America back in 2011, I wasn’t the first employee. That was Eileen Lee, our chief operating officer, who got us up and running. Our first class was only 25 percent women (it’s about 50% now). The female Fellows wanted more women, which isn’t surprising. But here’s the thing — so did the men.
Studies have shown that companies with women in leadership positions perform better. First Round Capital published a report that portfolio companies with at least one female co-founder performed 63 percent better than all-male teams in increasing valuation over time.
High-performing companies with male-female leadership teams are becoming more common. Mark Zuckerberg has Sheryl Sandberg. Jessica Alba has Brian Lee. Sallie Krawcheck has my friend from Brown, Charlie Kroll. I’m in the camp that companies run better when both men and women are involved at the highest levels. This represents a fantastic trend that we should encourage.
Women are of course perfectly capable of founding and leading world-class companies on their own — Sara Blakely, Arianna Huffington, Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna, Barbara Corcoran, Jennifer Fleiss and Jen Hyman and many others have shown that women don’t have any limits when it comes to building companies.
But in my view, many entrepreneurs, both men and women, would benefit from building a balanced team as fast and early as possible, including at the founder level. Men enlisting women early on would often help the company. And in some cases, the reverse is true as well.
So if you’re a set of guys looking to start a company, think about women you could team up with — they will see things differently and solve problems you didn’t even realize you had. And ladies, you don’t necessarily have to go it alone — there are guys out there who will appreciate the opportunity and want to work with you.

This week Jeremy is joined by Sam Rosen, Founder of Makespace (and previous podcast guest!), to interview Otto Cedeno, owner of Otto’s Tacos, a Southern California inspried Taqueria in New York City. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear about the trials and tribulations of opening up a restaurant in New York and why Otto was ahead of the curve in the single serve restaurant craze.

Click here to listen

Originally posted on Forbes

I recently became a parent for the second time.  And I’ve now started several companies – one that failed, one that did all right, and one that is currently ongoing.
It’s struck me that there are tons of similarities between being an entrepreneur and being a parent.  For people who have kids and think about entrepreneurship, I thought it might be useful to point out the parallels.  Also, if you don’t have a child yet, this may give you a glimpse of what’s coming.

Here, in no particular order, is one man’s list on how starting a company and raising a child are similar:

Everyone’s got an opinion.  But no one knows what they’re doing.
The first two years are brutal.
No one cares as much as you do.
On its best days it fills you with meaning and purpose.
People lie about it all the time.
Choose your partner wisely.
It’s very very hard to outsource.
You find out who your friends are.  And you make some new ones.
Occasionally the responsibility blows your mind.
Heart is more important than money.  But money helps.
If you knew what it entailed you might not get started.  But you’re glad you did.
There will be a thousand small tasks you never imagined.
How you spend your time is more important than what you say.
Everything costs more than you thought it would.
Most of the work is dirty, thankless, and gritty.
Sometimes you don’t even know why you’re doing it.  Then, something happens that strikes a bolt of inspiration into you where you know you’re doing the right thing, and you feel re-energized.
You learn a lot about yourself.  You get tested in ways that you can’t imagine.
When you find someone who can really help you’re incredibly grateful.
You have to try to make time for yourself or it won’t happen.
Whatever your weaknesses are, they will come out.
You think it’s fragile.  But it will surprise you.
You sometimes do things you weren’t sure you were capable of.
When it does something great, there’s nothing like it.
You start out all-important.  Yet the goal is to make yourself irrelevant.
People sometimes give you too much credit.
There is a lot of noise out there, but at the end of the day it’s your call.
It gives your life a different dimension.  You grow new parts of yourself.
It’s harder than anyone expects.  It’s the best thing ever.
Most people think of entrepreneurship as starting a business.  But the actual definition of entrepreneurship is “pursuit of an opportunity without regard for resources currently under control.”  Every parent pursues the best possible opportunities for their child while climbing over obstacles and limitations each day.  So in a way, all parents are entrepreneurs.

In his sophomore year at Yale, Brad Hargreaves noticed that the university was selling a lot of antique furniture and spotted an opportunity. With a rented U-Haul and a newly caught entrepreneurial bug, Brad and his friend Matt Brimer bought antique furniture at very low prices and resold it for a profit. They called the company Aloysius. Since their days at Yale, Brad and Matt have worked on several businesses together including General Assembly, a global educational institution, which they co-founded in 2011. General Assembly has grown tremendously over the last 5 years, raising over $100M in investment. Now Brad is working on Common, a company that offers flexible, community-driven housing by providing fully furnished, month-to-month memberships, beginning in New York City. Listen to this week’s podcast to hear about how General Assembly aims to democratize technology education and how Common is changing the way we look at housing.

Click here to listen

Originally published by Mike Wilner ’13 on Medium.com

Mark Zuckerberg had a programming tutor at age 11.

Bill Gates was excused from Math class at age 13 so he could write code.

I learned what HTML stood for after I graduated college.

As an aspiring entrepreneur, I felt insecure about my lack of technical skills — it felt like a handicap. So when my friend Taylor and I came up with an idea 15 months ago and neither of us knew how to code, I was nervous.

Now, we have six figure sales and a working platform, and we even found a technical cofounder. Instead of letting our lack of technical abilities slow us down, we used it to our advantage.

Here’s how.

There’s Nothing to Do but Sell

We stumbled into a problem first-hand by seeing our family members struggle with it. Small businesses lack the time and expertise to work on their online presence. The original idea for Compass was vague — to build a marketplace that connects freelance digital marketing professionals to business owners who need their help.

We didn’t have the technical skills to build a marketplace like Upwork or Visual.ly. There was only one thing we could do with our time: sell.

Five weeks and a few dozen phone calls later, we had our first 3 customers all for one service — web design. With our first three paying guinea pigs and two designers, we had the beginnings of our web design “marketplace.”

Interviewing prospective customers is a useful, common way to get early feedback. But we took it further by selling from day 1, allowing us to find the specific problem that people were willing to pay us hundreds of dollars to solve. We had a business, and it gave us a clear path forward: keep selling.

Prototyping to Stay Afloat

Over the next 6 months, we sold 40 more websites, nearly falling apart in the process.

While I was selling, Taylor was running project management 12 hours a day, every day, and it was barely keeping us afloat. The stress was starting to overwhelm us; our nerves were shot and our tempers short. The manual work that went into servicing more and more customers was actually becoming physically exhausting.

Paul Graham, who’s written the bible on startups, encourages “doing things that don’t scale,” and that’s exactly what we did. But the problem was our entire product was made of things that didn’t scale, and we were selling like we could scale.

Even though we couldn’t build the platform to automate the process, we had to do something. With our limited technical skills, we used an array of existing tools that we duct-taped together to mimic the experience of a platform so that we could keep selling and growing.

We combined Google Sheets, Streak, Typeform, and Zapier to make it easier for customers to provide content, to match customers with designers, and to facilitate a feedback process. It wasn’t pretty, but it was a prototype of the platform we hoped to build, and it allowed one person, Taylor, to run a web design marketplace with 40 simultaneous projects.

Our duct-taped process was keeping us afloat. But as we continued to grow, the cracks got bigger. We were reaching the limits of what we could do without our own technology, and if we were going to continue growing, we needed software.

Using Traction to Attract a Technical Co-Founder

Our good friend Matt was the best developer we knew. A few months before starting Compass, Taylor and I pitched Matt on another startup idea. It was a social app idea for which we had no users or revenue. He politely declined.

We were dejected, but we shouldn’t have been surprised.

In fact, according to Ryan Waggoner’s blog post, good freelance developers get pitched to join a salary-less startup about once a week.

But this time was different. We had dozens of happy customers and designers, tens of thousands in sales, and a working product. We had proof of concept.

Matt saw how he could turn us from a lean service business into a tech company. We had a bike and were pedaling as fast as we could; Matt could make a motor. For us, convincing a developer to come on board as a founder was less about the vision and the polish of the pitch, and more about having an actual business.

Putting the Cart Before the Horse

With a technical co-founder on board, our founding team was complete.

Excited by the fact that we could finally build our own tech, we started building the alpha version of our platform.

Four weeks later, it was finished. We were pumped — we finally had our own product! We immediately invited our next two customers to it, expecting the process to be seamless.

But it wasn’t. Worse, customers were more disoriented than before, resisting using our new, shiny platform.

“What am I supposed to do here?”

“Can’t I just send you an email?”

“I was confused so I just created a separate word doc. Is that ok?”

This was a customer development failure. This was a product process failure. This was a “holy shit we can build tech let’s get started” failure. As a result, we wasted 4 weeks of development time.

But it could be way worse.

Our current platform would have cost $144k and taken 4 months to build if we had decided to outsource it. Even after spending that much time and money, we still would have to make constant changes to the expensive platform as we continue to test our assumptions.

Technology can be an amplifier — we built the wrong tech and our problems got louder. We had some great assumptions, but we needed to further test before we were ready to turn our ideas into a platform.

Building — and testing — without tech allows us to focus our engineering resources on problems we deeply understand, saving us time and money.

Doing it the Hard Way to Find the Right Way

Now, even though we can build, we never start that way.

This is our process:

1. I bring as many customers in the door as I can.
2. Colleen (our rockstar project manager) manages all of the projects, and manually tries new experiments to make the process more efficient.
3. Taylor hacks together solutions using existing tools to streamline Colleen’s work.
4. We evaluate how Taylor’s solution affects the process, get feedback from customers and designers, and iterate.
5. Once we get a working, duct-taped solution, Matt builds it into our platform.

We make better decisions because we’re not building our product based on what we think will work. We build our product based on what our customers, designers, and business operations need.

As first-time founders with limited resources, less guesswork means fewer mistakes, giving us a better chance to succeed.

Final thoughts

We thought our technical inability was our Achilles heel when we started this journey. Now it has proven to be one of our biggest strengths.

Taylor and I are thankful we never learned to code. That handicap forced us to learn how to sell, learn from our customers, and build a business — not just a product.

Even now that we have a technical co-founder, building without tech is still a part of our company’s DNA.

So if you’re thinking about getting a business off the ground and looking for a technical founder, or you think you can’t get started because you need a website, software, or an app…

…Ask yourself: is technology really what’s holding you back?

Compass is the online presence general contractor, starting with a focus on websites. We make it easy and affordable to work one-on-one with a Compass-vetted designer to get a beautiful website. Compass onboards customers, plans the project, then matches them with the perfect designer who builds modern websites using Squarespace and WordPress. By managing the entire process, Compass makes it easier than ever for businesses and freelance designers to work together. Find out more here.

Originally posted on Entrepreneur.com

I spoke to a group of University of Virginia students last week who were interested in entrepreneurship. One of them asked me, “Isn’t it a good idea to go to a big-name brand firm straight out of college? You can always go to a small company or start your own business later.”
It’s a very good question. There are indeed many benefits to working at a big company and getting that experience under your belt. You learn how large firms work and organize processes. You typically go through a very well-put-together training program. You gain skills and detail-orientation. You make some friends and contacts. You get socialized as a professional —  it takes a bit of time to get used to dressing well, being punctual waking up early every morning, etc. The money’s typically better than what you’d get at small firms too. Last, if you’re not sure what to do later, it’ll be a compelling couple lines on your resume.
What a list. When a college student asked me how to spend his summers, I advised him to try and get an internship at a large firm for some of the reasons above.
Okay, so slam dunk right? Big company it is!
Well, it actually depends on what your goals are. Let’s say your goal is, “I want to be a middle manager at a big company.” Then, it really is a slam dunk – you should head that direction right now.
But let’s say your dream job includes things like,
“I want to have real responsibility from day one.”
“I want to feel like my work is having a positive impact.”
“I want to be able to touch a lot of things.”
And the big umbrella goal: “I want to be in position to start, run or manage my own business or organization within 10 years of graduation.” That is, you want to be a founder or CEO of either a company or non-profit while you’re still young.
A lot of people share that goal. But not a lot of people actually get there. In their senior survey, 10 percent of Harvard’s 2015 class said they hoped to be in entrepreneurship in 10 years — but less than 3 percent are involved in entrepreneurship now. And if they’re not involved in entrepreneurship now, they almost certainly won’t be in 10 years. In 2013, only 3.6 percent of households headed by adults younger than 30 owned stakes in private companies — a 24-year low.
So if you happen to have such lofty goals, the thought process gets more complicated. What do founders and CEOs do?  How the heck do you learn how to become one?
There’s no easy answer. Here’s a partial list of things that CEOs do:
They evangelize products.
They raise money from investors and sell to customers.
They open an office, buy furniture and arrange for cleaning.
They hire and manage people without much in the way of a brand name or resources.
They establish a culture.
They convey conviction and determination.
How does one learn to do any of these things?
The absolute best way to learn how to do these things day in and day out is to work with someone who’s doing them. Imagine if you could team up with or shadow a CEO or founder for a couple of years. That would give you a running start.
Okay, so how can you work directly for a CEO or founder? That sounds like a dream job.
This is where it gets a little tricky. If you work for a small company or startup, you may have a direct line-of-sight to the CEO and the executive team. You could be given real responsibility. If the company does well and grows, you could develop into a manager and leader in a few short years and have an amazing experience.
But there are risks.
I’ve found that many young people would actually prefer to work for a smaller company in a bigger role — their main concerns are around the risks. What if the company goes south?  Then what?
It’s one reason I founded Venture for America. We connect enterprising young people with small teams to learn how to start or manage their own business. I’m sure of the value of this experience because it’s how I learned — I worked for a small startup for four years before becoming the CEO of Manhattan Prep when I was 30. There is no way I would have been ready for that if I hadn’t seen my own CEO in action each day.
There’s a saying that “You can’t be what you can’t see.” The biggest piece of advice I would give a young person is to try to spend time with someone who has had a career like the one that you want, and then do your best to figure out how they do what they do.
You want to be a chef?  Find a kitchen. Want to be a filmmaker? Find a director. Want to be a CEO? Go find a role where you’ll see the CEO do his or her thing and pick up a thing or two. Think about the person’s whole life — not just their job — because they’re often tied together. What you see as a couple lines on your resume is actually thousands of hours spent with a group of people with values, stories and institutional memories.
If you want to run a big company, there are two ways. Join one and climb the ranks. Or start your own and make it great. The truth is that there is no one path to your goals. Your goals will shift and evolve over time. It’s a little bit like when you started college — you probably imagined things a certain way, and it completely changed over the years as you gained experience. The same thing will happen with your career.
The main thing is to see yourself as a work-in-progress and know that every environment and organization will give you different attributes and tools to develop. There is no one right career path or way to start your career. You can learn what you need wherever you go as long as you stick with it, push and take it seriously.
I’m now 40 and have seen hundreds of people’s careers and lives take shape. The risks aren’t what you think they are when you’re young — the real risk is never giving yourself the chance to become the person you wanted to be.