Why Students Make Great Entrepreneurs

Dharmesh Shah at OnStartUps.com:

Having been involved, either in an informal or formal capacity over the years, I have found that many startup founders that I know began their companies while they were still students (undergraduate or graduate) or shortly after they graduated.

Why Students Make Great Entrepreneurs:

1. Starry-Eyed Optimism: Let’s face it, starting a company takes a fair amount of optimism. You have minimal resources, and the odds are severely stacked against you. To overcome this potentially troubling reality, founders must to some degree exercise suspension of disbelief and demonstrate a degree of optimism to take that initial step.

2. Trusted Peer Network: One of the great things about being a student is that you have the opportunity to meet and work with a lot of different people. If you do it right, you can get to know some of these people pretty well by working on projects with them and hanging out with them outside of class.

3. Higher Risk Tolerance: Let’s face it, when you’re a student your opportunity cost is likely lower than most other points in your career (even if you’ve been in the workforce for a little while and decided to go back and get that MBA). When you’re sitting there in class and an idea comes to you, it doesn’t really cost all that much to give things a try.

4. Abstract Thinking: In many academic programs (and especially the better ones), students spend a fair amount of time thinking about abstract concepts. This is particularly true in an engineering, computer science or even a business program.

5. Applied Learning: As a student, you’re quite often “drinking from a fire hose�? and bringing all sorts of new information into your brain. Some of which “sticks�? and some of which doesn’t.

If you’re a student or recent graduate, this is a great time to think about starting a company. Keep your mind open. See if you can find patterns in the problems that you’re seeing and try and find unique and compelling ways to solve problems people care about. It often is really that simple.

Photo by drs2biz.

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