{"id":154453,"date":"2025-09-13T18:27:20","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T18:27:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/154453\/"},"modified":"2025-09-13T18:27:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T18:27:20","slug":"paul-graham-why-you-should-not-launch-a-startup-in-high-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/154453\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Graham: Why You Should Not Launch a Startup in High School"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Graham<\/a>, the cofounder of startup incubator Y Combinator<\/a>, said on Saturday that students should think twice before launching their startups in high school.<\/p>\n

“The thing to do now is to learn new things and increase your skill at the things you already know,” Graham wrote in a post on X.<\/p>\n

“Startups are rarely the optimal way to do this. The point of a startup is to make something people want, not to learn,” he added.<\/p>\n

Representatives for Graham at Y Combinator did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n

Graham said it probably isn’t the best idea for a high schooler to start their entrepreneurship journey right away, even though they could learn from the experience.<\/p>\n

“You will learn things in a startup, of course. But the way to learn the fastest is to work on whatever you’re most curious about, and you don’t have that luxury in a startup. In a startup, you have to work on whatever users want most,” he wrote in a follow-up post on X.<\/p>\n

Most prominent startup founders began their ventures after graduating from high school. Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard<\/a> during their junior and sophomore years, respectively.<\/p>\n

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Some, like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, earned their bachelor’s degrees before starting their first companies.<\/p>\n

Graham has posted career advice on X. In August, Graham said in a series of X posts that the best way to secure one’s job<\/a> in the age of AI is to focus on honing one’s passions.<\/p>\n

“What AI (in its current form) is good at is not so much certain jobs, but a certain way of working. It’s good at scutwork. So that’s the thing to avoid,” Graham wrote.<\/p>\n

In his post, Graham said low-level programming jobs “are already disappearing.”<\/p>\n

Top programmers, meanwhile, are still “being paid exceptional amounts,” he added.<\/p>\n

“So if I had to boil down my advice to one sentence, it would be: Find a kind of work that you’re so interested in that you’ll learn to do it better than AI can,” Graham wrote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paul Graham, the cofounder of startup incubator Y Combinator, said on Saturday that students should think twice before…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[182,2254,38783,28,270,524,158,26584,6292,94709,13096,14729,94710,16153,14512,20433,18692],"class_list":{"0":"post-154453","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-august","10":"tag-bachelor","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-business-insider","13":"tag-career-advice","14":"tag-entrepreneurship","15":"tag-high-school","16":"tag-job","17":"tag-paul-graham","18":"tag-post","19":"tag-startup","20":"tag-startup-incubator-y-combinator","21":"tag-thing","22":"tag-way","23":"tag-x","24":"tag-x-post"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}