Ask HN: What if I'm not good enough?

17 points

14 years ago

(This is posted from a throw-away account)

For a long time, I've considered running a business (of ones own creation) to be the best possible occupation. Over the last few years, I have become very interested in the idea of starting a startup. If I had the choice of any path for the next years of my life, I would choose starting a startup with no question.

But, what if I'm not good enough? I would like to apply to YC S2012, but I don't think I have any chance at all of getting in. Firstly, I have the problem of having no idea and no co-founder. But also, personally, I'm just not good enough.

Let me go question-by-question on the YC application form to show what I mean (I'll skip background information questions).

    > Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive 
    > thing that each founder has built or achieved.

I haven't achieved or build anything that impressive yet. Sure, I have played with algorithms and build cool little projects with them. I have even presented at an undergraduate research conference (NCUR - a joke, btw), but I don't have any real, useful accomplishments. None worthy of YC at any rate.

    > Please tell us about the time you, <<real HN account>>, most
    > successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

I really haven't done this either. I have been a play-by-the-rules type my whole life, and I haven't really interfaced with many systems (at least not to the extent to have any reason to "hack" them).

    > Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside 
    > of class or work, that two or more of you created together. 
    > Include urls if possible

Well, without a co-founder, the "two or more of you" part clearly is not going to work. I have a few interesting (for some value of interesting) projects up on github, but they are the sort of things that I imagine that the kind of people who are accepted into YC build in high school (I had no one to teach me how to program in high school).

    > Where do you live now, and where would the company be 
    > based after YC?

Now: A small college town in a less 'forward-thinking' part of the country. Company: Anywhere YC likes.

    > Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you 
    > has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

Anything that I can think to put here ("some professors are much better to learn from than others" or "no programming language has everything you want") were surprising to me when I learned it, but would not be surprising in general. I really haven't been in a position to discover surprising things.

------------

The university from which I am about to graduate is better known for football than for academics. The CS department is tucked in the free space between the chemistry, astronomy, and physics departments in a single building on campus. It is small enough that most all the professors know me on a first-name basis. The curriculum is really not challenging (for instance, no where is a y-combinator even mentioned), and the my fellow students are generally mediocre - not co-founder material. No one there reads HN (afaik).

I haven't had any internships or the like at any of the "cool" places (Fog Creek, Hack NY, etc), and not for lack of trying. I haven't built anything that impressive, and I haven't played with today's most popular alphabet soup yet (Reddis or Node.js or what ever it is right now).

Yes, I have read all the posts about impostor syndrome, but I don't think that that what I'm going through. I know that I am good at CS; my grades and understanding confirm this fact. I feel that, given better opportunities (perhaps having someone to teach me to program as a teen), I might have crossed some proverbial "tipping point" after which I would build more interesting things and get accepted into the cool programs, and I would look substantially more impressive.

Having read HN for a number of years now, I feel like I have a pretty good idea of the scale of things built by the people who go on to start startups. I can look at their history, and see that they came from impressive schools, where no doubt they met other people who helped sharpen their talents. They had internships at all the right places. The build things in college. They knew people. I don't have any of that, but I still want to start a startup.

tl;dr Haven't done anything that impressive, still want to start a startup.

HN: What should I do?

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