Some of the things I've learned at university are pretty interesting and fun to play with. Now, notice the "fun to play" with part. Some thing require a lot of investment (both money and time) in order to be learned. So, I believe it's not unfeasible to want to start a company so that you can fund your curiosity and learn the new things. The company itself might fail, or might not, but I believe as long as the purpose was to learn something new, failing is not as bad. If you start a company thinking this is the future, and you put value in making money as opposed to learning, then failing is losing.
In an ideal world, that would be possible, yes. But a company does need to make some money, even if only to pay its founders for their time. That money can come from investments, but if you start a company just to learn new stuff you'll have a hard time finding those.
> He goes and learns a bunch of stuff to the cutting edge.
Some of my best work and graduate school assignments had started off by being handed an RFC (or a language, or a third party library, or a paper, etc...), asked to become an expert on it, and then implement it (or in the case of a library to re-factor old NIH-y code to use that library, etc...). Learning isn't useful as preparation for something else, but it's extremely rewarding in it of itself.
Re:Before the Startup
by DodgyEggplant on Thursday October 02, 2014 @02:00AM
(#8399585)
The most important point in the lecture: Startups are the one area where the traditional gaming of the system will not work. May bring you seed or even series A, but not users. Learning in a college is, after all, gaming a traditional system.
I found this ironic given that he was saying this as a guest lecturer for Sam Altman's "startup" class at Stanford.
The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. The way to become Larry Page was to become an expert on search. And the way to become an expert on search was to be driven by genuine curiosity, not some ulterior motive.
At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity. And you'll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive toward the end of the process.
So here is the ultimate advice for young would-be startup founders, boiled down to two words: just learn."
This is my favorite part. Elon Musk does it this way even after his first few companies. He goes and learns a bunch of stuff to the cutting edge.