Team Startasprout

Few pieces of advice are repeated as confidently or as uncritically as the suggestion to follow your passion when starting a company, and although the phrase is meant kindly and is sometimes useful, it tends to lead student founders into companies that do not survive their first eighteen months for reasons that the advice itself helped create. The problem is not that passion is bad for a startup, since passion does meaningful work over the long arc of building a company, but that passion...

Founders pick problems for many reasons in the early days, including whatever feels novel, whatever they can pitch easily, whatever a recent article made them think about, or whatever a friend mentioned over coffee, and the result is often a company that runs out of energy somewhere between month nine and month eighteen because the founder has lost interest in the problem long before the market has decided what to do with it. The longer truth is that almost any startup worth building will...

Most articles about student founders skip the part that no one talks about at the demo days, because the articles describe the wins, the funding rounds, the early customers, and the moment a professor told the founder they should drop out, while quietly leaving out what gets traded away to make those moments possible. This piece is about the trades, and it is for the student who is building something while taking classes and is starting to wonder why everyone around them looks more rested,...