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Just as a recap, at Startup Village, we give you six ways to successfully graduate:
- Get funded
Your startup gets funded through a venture capital firm or an angel investor. 2. Get into a Startup Accelerator
Your team is selected into a recognized Startup Accelerator1. 3. Get Aqqui-Hired
Your founding team is hired on by another company that values your skills. 4. Become Self Sustainable
Your revenue and cashflows stabilize and then grow, allowing you to scale up. 5. Get a job
You get hired at a great company because of the skills that you acquired while building your startup. 6. Go for Higher Education
You decide to build upon the skills you acquired by getting a formal degree.
The more further you are able to reach in the startup stages, the more choices you have for graduation. A startup which has reached the scaling stage has many more options than a startup which never went past the prototyping stage. This is becasue with each stage, you pick up more skills that are learned by doing the activities in that stage. Your graduation outcome will correspond to efforts you have put in.
Again: as a reminder, all of these are perfectly happy outcomes. You do not have to get a great exit to be good at startups. Use the skills your learnt from building startups to do what you love to do.
Once you graduate, we'll brand you as such separately. New founders who see your timeline and your journey might decide to follow your path. As a Graduate, it's expected that you'll help them out.
And if it makes sense1, do continue to maintain your timeline.
Building startups is a great way to pick up essential skills you'll need. Sometimes it results in unexpected success, but the journey always is rewarding.
There's a wonderful video by Steve Jobs that you should watch. In it, he tells three stories. Perhaps the most poignant is the last one where he talks about death, but here's the first story (emphasis ours):
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
This has been the experience of every startup founder we've interacted with as well. You can never tell which interactions and experiences will lead to your eventual success. The only way out is to trust that things will work out.
As Steve says so wonderfully, Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. All the best!