Like many others, we’ve been watching How to Start a Startup in a small study group, following the videos every week as they come out.
But we aren’t in Silicon Valley. We’re in Singapore, halfway across the world. Does Y Combinator’s weekly dose of concentrated startup advice, originally designed for a Stanford audience, make sense in Southeast Asia?
Episode 3: Paul Graham: Counterintuitive Parts of Startups, and How to Have Ideas.
Paul says: To succeed in startups, you don’t need expertise in startups; you need expertise in your own users. There’s a hump in the curve: beyond a certain point, you know too much about startups, and you start wanting to game the system. “Playing House” is what they call it.
The Asian Angle: Paul is absolutely right. Indeed, this is even more true in Asia – where every mom is a Tiger Mom, and every student, embittered by an incomprehensible, nerve-wrackingly competitive educational system, looks for tips and tricks and ways to cheat the test. Sadly, the pressure of school often translates to “I don’t want a corporate job – what’s the alternative? A startup!”
So they go into startups for the wrong reasons – they’re running away, not running toward. But still they bring the old mindset!
Paul says: But you can’t game the system in startups: you have to make something people want.
There are exceptions: Sometimes there’s a bubble. Sometimes, too big to fail. But the everyday world of business is more like physics than an engineer might suspect: if your startup fails to make something people want, sooner or later it will die, as surely as a rat in a sealed chamber.
The Asian Angle: If you happen to live in a country which is hell-bent on encouraging entrepreneurship, and if your civil servants haven’t read Josh Lerner on the subject, then your government might be busily creating perverse incentives for founders to launch weak companies and run them well past expiration date. In Singapore, we call founders of zombie companies “grantrepreneurs.” The good news is, with more enlightened leadership, things are getting better and the first generation of such startups are beginning to get flushed out of the system.
Paul says: How do you pick a good startup idea? Work on things that interest you – particularly if you’re the kind of person who finds boring work intolerable.
The Asian Angle: The current generation of emerging-middle-class students are at a disadvantage here. Schools in Asia are famous for being very good, which is to say they are very good at stamping out natural curiosity. Post-colonial emerging economies like Singapore are especially obedient: for generations, the highest ambition anyone’s parents could imagine was a job as a government doctor, or in-house counsel to a foreign bank. Even the scientists see themselves as employees first and researchers second.
The good news: that’s beginning to change, too – after a few generations of financial security, the youth are finally expressing themselves through software.