Paul Graham's advice to student founders, Spotify’s founder on what he optimizes for, and the journey to product-market fit

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Paul Graham’s advice to student founders

“If you start a startup soon after college, you'll be a young founder by present standards, so you should know what the relative advantages of young founders are. They're not what you might think. As a young founder your strengths are: stamina, poverty, rootlessness, colleagues, and ignorance.

The importance of stamina shouldn't be surprising… I can't think of any successful startups whose founders worked 9 to 5. 

Your second advantage, poverty, might not sound like an advantage, but it is a huge one. Poverty implies you can live cheaply, and this is critically important for startups… the guys with kids and mortgages are at a real disadvantage. This is one reason I'd bet on the 25 year old over the 32 year old. The 32 year old probably is a better programmer, but probably also has a much more expensive life. 

The advantages of rootlessness are similar to those of poverty. When you're young you're more mobile—not just because you don't have a house or much stuff, but also because you're less likely to have serious relationships.

The number one question people ask us at Y Combinator is: Where can I find a co-founder… co-founders really should be people you already know. And by far the best place to meet them is school… A lot of startups grow out of schools for this reason. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, among others, were all founded by people who met in school. (In Microsoft's case, it was high school.)

Your final advantage, ignorance, may not sound very useful… My Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston is just about to publish a book of interviews with startup founders, and I noticed a remarkable pattern in them. One after another said that if they'd known how hard it would be, they would have been too intimidated to start.”

Source: A Student’s Guide to Startups

2: Spotify’s founder on what he optimizes for

Daniel Ek is the founder of Spotify, and proposes a philosophy of optimizing for impact over happiness that aligns with founders seeking long-term meaning, growth through discomfort:

“I think happiness is a trailing indicator of impact.

You can feel happiness in small bursts, in small moments, and you can have a lot of variance in your life. You can choose to have that part, which is the ups, the downs of life… but I think truly sustained happiness comes from impact.

And impact is something that's deeply personal to you.”

Daniel gave this advice to Uber’s eventual CEO, who was on the fence about sacrificing contentment for the discomfort of taking on the CEO role:

“I sort of advised him to, "Hey, you should go for this, and that's a far greater thing, and that's going to lead to much more happiness, not just for you, but also for other people.”

I think I self-motivate myself that way. To do the hard things.

You know, like many other people, I'm quite lazy by nature; I try to take the simple road out often enough, but what I've learned that has given me the greatest joys is overcoming the biggest adversities.

And overcoming the biggest adversities usually has been solving a problem of some kind for someone or something that no one else had been able to figure out.

And for me, that's my definition of impact.”

Source: Daniel Ek, Spotify | David Senra

3: The journey to product-market fit

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See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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