# Dalton & Michael: The student's guide to becoming a successful startup founder

**Author:** Dalton Caldwell, Michael Seibel
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/IZ-dalton-michael-the-student-s-guide-to-becoming-a-successful-startup-founder
**YouTube ID:** O5KCB2p6SB8

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If you're a high school or college student with big dreams of starting your own company, this video is for you. Dalton
Caldwell and Michael Seibel, two startup founders who started in their early 20s and are now top investors, sit down to
share the hard-won advice they wish they had known back in high school.

Whether you're already running your own startup or just have an idea you can't stop thinking about, Caldwell and Seibel
will discuss the skills you need to learn now and how to set yourself up for success after graduating school. Their
stories will give you a glimpse of what's truly possible at the intersection of ambition and opportunity in in today's
world. This is a masterclass in entrepreneurship for the next generation.

## Transcript

your job is to be an optimist your job is to believe amazing things about what can you do with your life and what you do in the world when you're young that's the point that's the point that's why the world needs young people [Music] this is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell and today we're going to talk about our advice for our high schoolers uh oh it's been a little while it's been a little while so maybe the place to start because I think that oftentimes young people are in a rush maybe we can just start by

saying the startup game isn't going away that's true you've got time and look I think to set this up we know a lot of young people watch these videos yes we know they like startup content we know they um may even anonymously be involved in startups on discords and stuff like it's crazy for the folks that apply to YC a lot of them are literally in high school and so we we understand who you are if you're watching this or if you know someone like this you can forward them the video yes but we want to speak directly to you

high school students who are yes who are trying to figure out who are ambitious and want to be a part of what's happening in the tech world in the you know startup worlds and aren't really sure where to begin yes maybe the first analogy I give you and this will immediately age me so I apologize I was a big Final Fantasy 7 player do you play fun with ff7 a little bit worse all right the basic thing I learned in Final Fantasy VII was that you can fight the boss at a certain level and get your ass kicked or you can grind for like you know 10

more hours and fight the boss and actually like kick their ass and I think that this analogy applies to a lot of things in the real world and specifically in the startup world where like investing and leveling yourself up can produce a lot of benefits later on like deferring a little bit of that satisfaction of getting started right now so you can upskill makes you 10 times more powerful later but let's be clear you have to be upskilling dude the grind has to happen exactly if I

just stood there and didn't grind my character got no better and it was cool in a video game you see grinding it's a lot you can see the character leveling up exactly learning new spells really exactly but um in the real world let's talk a little bit about grinding what's the kind of grinding what's the kind of upskilling that you would advise high schoolers to do well the most obvious and straightforward one is learn how to code obvious like it's pretty tricky even if you think hey I'm not going to be a lot of people say to me the younger folks oh I don't want to be a coder my

whole life I want to be a Founder I want to be a product person well you should still learn how to code like there's it's really hard to make an argument yes if you're a young person why you shouldn't have that skill in your skill tree can you make a case why do you make no case I was the business guy you didn't know how to code and literally I would say there are many moments in the early stage of a company where I felt borderline useless and certainly I didn't have the power to impact the product anywhere near as much as my other three co-founders who were who were software Engineers so like this is

such an obvious one yeah and you've got time yes this is a great thing AP Computer Science yes you can take replet like there's all these YC companies that help you learn how to code code academy there's so many so even if you have some complicated relationship with maybe I don't want to be a programmer that's fine learn the skill yes this is like it's like learning how to cast spells or something well I'll push even harder like get this complicated view of I don't want to be a coder out of your head like the coders are the most powerful people inside of software companies like that's the hint the

people who code are the most powerful they're the most highly compensated they're the hardest to replace they often have the best ideas they often have the best the easiest the easiest path to implementing their ideas by far they're the power center the talkers not as much sometimes people on this coding thing they're like well I didn't grow up coding or I wasn't like a 13 year old whiz kid like people I know in high school it doesn't matter I'm just trying to argue you don't need to be that no if you have the right ambition and grind mentality to to be willing to learn of course you can do it

yes even if you're 19 or 20 yes it's never too late to learn this stuff never to it number two um we talked about this a little bit design learning how to use basic design software yeah this is one that kind of blows my mind because when I think back to my startups I had to power up you know Photoshop we use this thing called ramp back in the day like basically if a button needs to be made and we didn't have a designer yes make the button you know like you didn't even have to look that good

um and so this is a skill that anyone can grasp for and like there's examples of good design and bad design yeah all over the internet right so you can easily copy I think the third one is launching products like man if you could get a product out it doesn't have to be used Banning people it doesn't have to just like actually going through the full emotion of coming up with an idea for a little side project and releasing it and handing it to someone because you're doing reps like one of the things I noticed at YC is a lot of the folks that later on become great Founders they

worked on projects in high school that may not be commercially like venture-funded companies but they were like pretty cool yeah and so one of the examples I always think of was um back in the 90s there was a computer program called Winamp and that's how you would listen to the mp3s you downloaded from Napster and some high school kids Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Daniel I believe built a music recommendation plug-in for Winamp it was quite popular I think it's called like the brain or something like something like that yeah and so it was just like a free plug-in and it was quite popular and they made

it when they were in high school and I don't think it had anything to do with what they did later on in life but they knew how to write code they knew how to make something they themselves wanted which was music recommendation for Winamp and they released it and I think it got like million of downloads it was pretty popular they went through all the Motions the startup founder has to but in this kind of like no Stakes yeah they were trying to it wasn't a business at least to my understanding maybe maybe they thought it was but it was more of making something cool yes and this sort of story comes up a lot in our some of the founders that we fund is that they

do stuff like this yeah and you ask them well why why were you doing that and they almost don't understand the question it's their nature to build things and release them so again the advice part is find low stakes things you can work on give them to the world and again I think there's a lot of the advice if you want to be in the music industry if you want to be a writer a lot of the advice if you listen to the greats to young people is do it do the Reps and even if you write the poem and don't show it to anyone yeah or even if you are in a bunch of bands that don't make it and break up you got the Reps in

you're learning when you were young the next one that comes up a lot if you're going to be a startup founder one day you gotta learn how to talk to people gotta learn how to make friends yep and needless to say I think that this is a skill that people kind of assume you can't learn like assume like oh some people are just really social and other people are just shy and like I can't change that but I know you and I have seen this with YC Founders like massively changed you know absolutely this is 100 a learnable skill and anyone

who says otherwise is really doing you a disservice I think what's so interesting about this one is just like the previous examples the way you get better at it is you suck at it first yeah and you have to be willing to be uncomfortable again I think my high school mentality I don't know if you feel the same way is you believe too much that your identity then like that's a nerd that's a jock that's a like it was like you would put people and sort people into buckets like they were like permanent yes and that's fake yes that is not permanent everyone could be

anything yes yes if they choose to yes and so you can make a choice if you're like well I'm not really you know a people person or like I'm not the kind of person that would go and talk to everyone at a party or whatever like yeah you could do that totally do that and it's so weird to me because looking back to high school it was such a like it was such a Sandbox like it was such an environment where my interactions with people didn't matter really right like I'm not how many high school people

are you still really close with right not a ton right so like one that reputation's not going to follow you in the real world and two you can experiment like you you can play like it could be whoever you want to be yeah yeah if you make a fool yourself you go to college you're going to see those people ever again I think it's totally fine totally fine and I think that um the other thing that I learned about this is that everyone else feels shy too even the people who you think don't feel shy even the people who you think oh they

make a bunch of friends everyone has that thing instead of them being a little bit like and I think when you're older you get that yes you get it but man you don't get that you don't get that the popular kids are like have their own thing they're working on exactly that they're struggling with exactly the person that you're afraid to go talk to is the same person who would probably like someone to come talk to them I think another one here is like how to help people I think that um what's tricky about being a startup founder is you have to be empathetic like you

actually have to care about your customers you have to care about your users and I think this is something you can start practicing early and you know I I remember doing this and it was this really weird story I remember tutoring some kid in high school and I'll tell you I'll be honest right I was doing at the check the box on the like National Merit Scholarship whatever the the contest of the thing and I remember you know I was maybe 11th grade and I was treating this ninth grader and I remember the parents

on the second or third time I came just looking at me and smiling and being like and I realized oh my God like they really really want their kid to learn and they are so happy that I'm taking time and they're paying it and they're still so happy that I'm taking time out of my schedule to help this kid and I was like oh my God like that's when like it kind of clicked a little bit where I was like if you help

someone they'll really appreciate like if you actually help them right if you care and I actually took it more seriously um and it was funny because I remember there was one time where I screwed up and I couldn't make it and I was like oh my God they're gonna they're gonna fire me like I was supposed to be there and they were like totally fine just come back next week it's totally fine and I think you might find that with your customers even if you screw up like if you really care and you're really helping them they're gonna fire you you're not gonna

fire you it's it is so rare to find products or people who actually care yeah that's a rare thing especially from young people again like people are really impressed when young people care give a you like like teachers notice like people notice yeah I don't know it's it's a way to stand out yeah it's a very easy way um now here's another one that's a little controversial right like how to play the credential game this one's tricky because I'd like to say we live in a world where credentials don't

matter yeah but we don't live in that world right so how would you tell a high school to think about this game there's the people that like love the system and embrace the system like the teachers pets yes and then there's the people that see the system for what it is and they want to Rage Against the Machine and destroy the system yes and you know I was a little bit more or less God yes the Stanford kid yeah exactly but the key thing is I'm telling you I'm talking a high school priest I'm just trying to say like when you see

yes you're like man this is like not ideal yeah I think it's one way to say it yes um a little up and to the extent you can learn to work to understand the rules of the game and play the game with credentials and realize that leveling up on the credential game will help you with your long-term goals yeah I think that's much better than like rejecting the system out of hand it's basically like either extreme is bad rejecting that like fundamentally you understand the system is somewhat arbitrary right if you're

smart enough you understand that right yes and with that understanding you can reject the system and then like because you don't have the right credentials it'll hold you back you can somehow not understand the initial Point think the system is the filter for merit completely and then get very disappointed later in life when you realize that all these credentials don't mean you as far as personal room or you can try to get the system to work for you yeah that's a great way to put it it's a Centrist philosophy which is you acknowledge some of the

the yeah but also if if you opt out of it completely you're kind of just hosing yourself and I think that like this mentality is really important because I think that a lot of people feel like the system's operating on them but I think what they should feel is the system is a tool they can use if you understand it you can use it and you can use it to accomplish whatever goal you want to and so this idea that it's operating on you I think we're trying to break like you can use this like you can use the

system all right let's talk about fads yeah there have been a lot of fads yeah well I think it's easy especially when you're young to just got get caught up and stuff whatever the thing is and some of the things are pretty cool again I was really into the internet yep yep when that was a new thing I was really really really into it and obviously that stuck around certainly there's a lot of young people that got super into crypto there's young people that got really into stock trading recently with Wall Street bets and Reddit like you'll see people get really into stuff yeah and so

it's actually great fun in the Zuckerberg case building a Winamp plugins that was part of the Napster thing yeah so it really into that yeah but how you know where could it go too far Michael yeah I think that like the tricky bit about fads is it's kind of like what we said before about understanding the credential system the fads are just like another system right and I think you kind of have to understand that some things stick because they create a lot of value and other things are just kind of passing with the time and I

think what's really important for young people to start to understand is like how to distinguish between the two right like fad stick when they really add value and fads pass when they don't and if you can have a nose for when something is adding value when it's actually helping people if you can train yourself on that then that's a really important skill that's a great Point um on the flip side we see the opposite of this in the startup world all the time we're like covet happens everyone wants to have a zoom startup and it's like yes the zoom

guys thought people need a video golf would say way before coven right and you know you mentioned Robin Hood oh now you know Wall Street bets bam I need to make a robin to be better that's like even the robin guys were before Wall Street bets it's like The Fad is often hiding what's really going on and like if you can kind of Pierce through that you can figure out real value fake value temporary value long-term value and I think that um that helps a lot and you can probably as a young person look at what's going on in

your life right now and try to figure out what's a fat and what's going to stick you know next one how to be excited about technology we came up in this weird era I guess I didn't think it was weird but looking back I guess it was weird where um everyone thought technology was cool and making the world a better place yeah a lot of the way we understand the world is framed via journalism yes and one thing again for young people they don't have context on this but it used to be journalists

were all emphatically excited with no downsides No Reservations No Reservations the internet is great yes and they would debate how great it was the debate was like yeah yeah we know it's great but just how great yeah and who's making it the best who's making it the better the fastest you know and so it was this it was hard to like see any problems with it yes and um in this current Universe we live in it's the opposite yeah it's

this is bad a lot of these people are bad every new technology how is it going to try to screw us exploit us yeah you know yada yada and let's be clear both extremes are incorrect that's correct points yeah it's it's a hundred percent there are fair points but I I sometimes when I talk to to Young Folks they internalize too much of the current thing yes and I think I don't see how that helps you when you're young like your job is to be an optimist your job is to believe amazing things about what can you do with your life and what you

do in the world when you're young that's a point that's the point that's why the world needs young people they need that optimism yeah so I think on this one the real trick is like even when you're absorbing this bad news like remember like look around see how technology is making the world a better place like look at your phone and see the things you could do that you couldn't do before go online see the things see the things you can learn that you couldn't learn before see the ways you can work that you couldn't work before like

he put the core message in your head the technology is progress even if the news isn't covering it that way let's talk about honesty Yep this is a big one this is a big one that I think people um in fact you know we talk about a lot of people who maybe didn't learn this lesson that honesty is important and for a while they do okay with it but inevitably um they get caught so how do you think about learning to be honest if you're a high schooler the

best skill is to learn to be honest to yourself like if you if your own relationship with yourself yes is you can't be honest about things what do you really feel what do you really think who are you really yeah it's going to be rough yeah and then at your core if you're not honest with yourself your your relationship with your parents your relationship with your friends with institutions yes it's going to be tricky anyway we we run across folks that seem like they've deferred a lot of this honesty yeah I think that um

the thing you should understand about the startup world is that a lot of it works because of honesty a lot of the reasons why early adopting customers will use you is because like they think you're going to be honest a lot of reasons why investors might give you money while your co-founders might work with you employee might work with you um a lot of reasons why people make things happen in startup world is because we're in a high trust environment yeah and this is one of those like negative things that people say about nerds is oh this person has new manners they just say whatever they think like again in polite Society yeah

you're supposed to lie all the time something a nerd would do is be like hey um my our that product sucks like why are we shipping this product that no one wants yeah like it's like hey shut up man like that's like what a that's what a nerd would do yes you know you're bad for telling the truth about something because it's impolite and you're hurting people's feelings yeah and so there is part of the nerd culture in this that I think is good which is essential the person who would stand up and raise their hand and point out

you know that the emperor is wearing no clothes yeah our thing is broken yeah no I totally agree and so I love that because that's both the be honest to the stakeholders around you but it's also that Honesty to yourself right like if you know your product sucks if you know you don't care about your user you gotta acknowledge that and then I think the last one is um learn to love long games and this is kind of the theme that I brought in the beginning these games are long and I remember when I started my startup I was

23 years old and I had never done anything that took very long when you really think about it like what do you do in school what's the longest project you have in school like maybe a senior thesis in college Maybe and so I remember talking to our lawyer at the time and he said oh and he was 30 which in my mind was like impossibly old I was like well obviously nothing you know is relevant to Modern Times And he said you know the average startup takes seven to ten years to exit or IPO or

sell and I just thought that couldn't be the case like and what's funny is like he worked at a law firm like he worked at a law firm that represented like maybe a quarter of all tech companies he had the data like this wasn't like a off the top of his head thing and I just remember thinking this guy doesn't know what he's talking about and I remember when our company sold took him out to dinner it was seven years later I was his age when he told me that I was 30 he was 37

impossibly old I remember thinking the guy was right this is a long game and I think having ambition in your life involves playing the long game because to actually do something great it doesn't happen overnight yes and I don't know what your experience is but we we know a lot of people when they were very young yes and it's okay to have ambition it's good to have ambition yes and true ambition means being patient over many many many

years yes and so to give you a completely non-startup example my high school girlfriend her thing was poetry and she really liked poetry again this is like high school yeah yeah yeah and so she like would write all this poetry she you know that was like her thing and you know I kind of fell out of touch with her but she's the um New York Times poetry critic now holy and that my high school girlfriend who loved poetry so she played the long game and this is my point is that like you know probably not everyone that likes poetry

when they're like a six-year-old is probably not gonna go there but if you actually put in your whole life towards something and you have a dream yeah and you're not ashamed of the dream and you keep the dream going into your third like a lot of people have dreams when they're young and they lose their dreams and their jobs they let the dreams go yes but if you keep your dream and put in the years of work those are the people sitting at the top of the system yes like the people that make it are people just like you and me yes that had a dream and they put in 17 years 20

years of real hard work yeah well and then they get to reap the rewards and and I think that it's funny because as this goes as you're describing this like two things went through my head one I remember being in my 20s and being this like poor startup founder and seeing my friend in San Francisco which isn't the most fun city but it's another topic um and seeing my friends in New York who were in banking and finance and stuff going out and having fun and I remember thinking like why do they get to live this fun life and I have to live this

hard working life and then I realized like this grind is going to benefit me and like the fun that a 25 year old has in New York to be honest it's pretty shitty a wealthy 30 year old way more fun so to wrap up if you're a high schooler and you're thinking about this startup game one that's awesome right like we love that you're thinking about hey don't let it never let anyone put you down yeah

have a dream we're telling cool be cool be yourself like if that's your dream we love it yes Live Your Dream Live Your Dream the game will be here when you're ready to play and you know we'll be here now all right man enjoy chat thanks [Music] thank you
