Don’t Start Your Company as a College Freshman

Student entrepreneurs should explore, not accelerate, in college

Indra Sofian
Student Voices
Published in
6 min readSep 6, 2017

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For many people, the concept of a student entrepreneur seems glorious.

From everyone else’s perspective, they’ve got their life together. They’re starting and growing their company, getting customers and getting press. They’re raising money, they’re committing all of their time to their companies, they’re dropping out of school.

By my tone, you can tell that all of that’s wrong.

From my time as a student at Georgia Tech, I’ve witnessed this trend of the “hype” student entrepreneur. Remarkably, a considerable amount of the people I’ve seen follow this trend are college freshmen. Although there are notable exceptions (and everyone thinks they can be the exception), most of these freshmen entrepreneurs end up crashing and burning within several months, if not weeks. I’ve seen it firsthand myself, and it’s not pretty. It’s ugly not just because the company, with all its promise, fails, but because of the emotional and psychological toll it takes on the person. It happens a lot.

But it’s not (just) due to bad luck.

There are a couple of big reasons.

From Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates, there are almost too many points of reference for people to use as reasoning that they should start early, drop out of school, and build their startups. While there are many reasons why those people had some specific qualities in their environment and situation that allowed them to succeed, I’ll not go into them. Instead, I’ll focus on the qualities of the people I’ve seen fail.

Lack of Experience. A lot of people will definitely disagree with me here. “Young people can figure things out”, “Everyone starts somewhere”, “You don’t need experience to start”, etc. I know the arguments, because I’ve used a couple of them myself when I started my own company. Here’s the thing: experience is important not because it’s an imagined prerequisite, but because it allows you to either better understand the problem you’re solving or understand what you need to grow and scale your company. Without one of the two, you’re either screwed or at a disadvantage. Domain knowledge and organizational experience can help a ton when building your company.

Imagine this: you want to start a platform that connects online micro-influencers with brands. You think that you’ve identified a gap in the market and you can build a business from it.

Right off the bat, there are a couple of questions you need to answer. Can you build the platform? Do you know what the current solutions in the market look like? Do you know how influencer marketing contracts and payment terms are structured? Do you know where the inefficiencies in the process are? Do you know the pain points of the influencers? Do you know the pain points of the marketers?

That’s just customer-related questions. What about your company? If you need to raise money, do you know how to do that? Do you know how to analyze a term sheet? Do you know how to hire people? Do you know how to manage people? Do you know how to fire people? Do you know how to handle a bad client? Do you know how to build a financial plan? Do you know how to delegate to a team? Do you know how to delegate to a team of managers?

There are ways to mitigate this. To be honest, even most entrepreneurs don’t know the answers to all of these questions. I definitely don’t.

But it would make it a lot easier if you knew at least a couple. And the fact is that most young student entrepreneurs don’t know any at all.

Lack of Maturity. Some people grow up early, certainly. They had to manage their households because their parents were incapable, they had to take up jobs to support themselves early on and became independent, they started business even while in high school, they’re super geniuses, etc.

Thing is: how many people do you know have done any of that? I can tell you straight up that a lot of student entrepreneurs haven’t.

Picture it in your head. When the chips are down, will the entrepreneur power through it? If something goes wrong and the client is beyond furious, will the entrepreneur be able to react accordingly and handle it? If everyone on the team is depending on each other to pull through, can they depend on the entrepreneur to get things done? Does the entrepreneur communicate to the team and customer well? Do they get mad easily? Can they keep track of multiple different subjects and situations at once without cracking? Do they seem to lose motivation often?

It’s definitely not easy stuff.

Lack of Commitment. This one’s huge. As someone just entering college, there are so many other things that vie for your time. There are clubs, classes, sports, festivals, city attractions, concerts. You have friends, you have hobbies, you have family. All of these things take up time, and suddenly this new entrepreneur has everything to juggle. Some handle it well. Many don’t. It’s an exercise in time management, a skill many people, let alone young students, have yet to develop early on.

But it’s not just the time balancing. An entrepreneur has to be willing to forgo other commitments for the sake of their company. If there’s an important meeting you need to attend and absolutely can’t get out of, forget that club meeting, friend’s birthday party, cool racecar building event, or anything else of that variety. If you need to drop some classes (or school) or drop a favorite hobby of yours that’s taking up too much time, then you need to drop it. Managing and growing a company isn’t something you can half-heartedly do.

You’re either in it to win it, or it’s a hobby.

A lot of people will disagree.

You certainly can. After all, there are exceptions to the rule. Some people will argue that a lack of experience can be construed as bringing a new perspective to a field or subject matter. For lack of maturity, most people tend to figure themselves out as they go along in running a business, so it shouldn’t be a big concern. As for lack of commitment, there are plenty of examples of people who have been able to balance everything in their lives while running their business.

Some people have it figured out. But the fact remains: most people haven’t. Running a business is hard, even for people who have all the time, resources, and energy in the world.

Instead of devoting all of their time towards a burgeoning startup, student entrepreneurs should spent time on exploring their environments.

For most people, college lasts a handful of years. Barring extenuating circumstances, it’s a time for young people to figure themselves out. They should give themselves the chance to check out that cool club, study abroad in a different country, intern at a couple companies in different positions, explore the cities around them, and allow themselves to grow up. For many people, it’s these types of experiences that enable them to get past the factors that usually stunt student entrepreneurs: lack of experience, lack of maturity, and lack of committment. With these experiences, they’re able to become better future entrepreneurs.

But beyond gaining experience, these young college students should just let themselves live a little. Life’s not just about putting items on your resume, making money, and gaining prestige. For most of us, life after college is an ever increasing amount of commitments, whether it be work, family, or personal. College is the time to try different things and experiment, and people shouldn’t commit too early to something and close off all other opportunities. To be honest, if you’re starting and growing a company, that’s what it tends to do. And you can’t just be half-in and half-out. You have to be dedicated to your goal, whether that’s starting a business or exploring the world around you.

So, if you’re a young, aspiring student entrepreneur, my advice would be to hold off on that startup for a bit.

It’ll be there when you get back.

-Indra

-Atlanta, 2017

Check out more of my writing in my blog, where I write about college, business, entrepreneurship, and culture.

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Co-Founder of @soraschools. @GeorgiaTech '18. Talk to me about education reform, startups, diversity. Prev @startupexchange @contrarycapital @trueventures