This strategy increases odds of starting successful business
According to Jeff Bezos, you do not need to start a company at the age of 20 to be a successful entrepreneur. In fact, the billionaire Amazon founder recommends working at a successful, established company for a few years before striking out on his own.
Rather than delaying your success, gaining this valuable hands-on experience increases your chances of starting your own successful business when you’re ready, Bezos says. in question at Italian Technology Week in Turin, Italy, on Friday.
“I always advise young people: Go work in a company that applies best practices, where you can learn a lot of the basics. [like] “How to get hired really well, how to interview, etc.,” said Bezos, adding: “There’s a lot of things you’ll learn at a great company that will help you, and once you’ve absorbed that, you still have a lot of time to build a company.”
Numerous entrepreneurs have founded multibillion-dollar startups after dropping out of college, never gaining significant business experience before doing so. But Bezos calls these success stories “exceptions”; This is understandable, given that the majority of venture-backed startups fail, and those that succeed are often led by older, experienced founders. research shows.
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TechCrunch in 2021 analyzed Startups from more than 150 founders from the Y Combinator accelerator program have achieved valuations of at least $1 billion. According to the publication, their average age when founding these ventures was just over 28 years old.
More broadly, the average age of founders of “high-growth startups,” defined as the top 0.1% of the fastest-growing new businesses in the U.S., is 45. 2019 study From researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Y Combinator partner and Twitch co-founder Michael Seibel wrote that it can take years to build a “large, impactful company,” but potential founders need not feel pressure to start young. 2017 blog post.
“My best advice is to move to a tech hub (preferably the Bay Area) and work at a tech company until you save money, make friends with the right potential teammates, or discover the problem you’re passionate about,” Seibel wrote, adding, “It’s okay to push back your start date to give yourself the best chance of success.”
Bezos was 30 years old when he founded Amazon. After graduating from Princeton University in 1986 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, Bezos took a job debugging lines of code at Fitel, a telecommunications startup, before working as a product manager at Banker’s Trust, now part of Deutsche Bank. From there, he became a vice president at DE Shaw, a start-up hedge fund focused on using advanced mathematical modeling to spot market trends.
He said Friday that Bezos “learned a tremendous amount” from Shaw. This experience played a key role in his decision to start Amazon because at the hedge fund he was tasked with identifying untapped opportunities in the early days of the internet space. He found a statistic showing that web usage was growing at a rate of 2,300% per year, which sparked his interest in starting an online retail business.
He said the experience and knowledge he gained by climbing the ranks at three different companies gave him a much better chance of success at Amazon than if he had dropped out of college to start a company a decade ago.
“I think the extra 10 years of experience actually increases Amazon’s chances of being successful,” Bezos said, adding that he has no regrets about getting his college degree. “I enjoyed college and I think it helped me.”
Even the famous school dropout-turned-entrepreneur Bill Gates expressed regret for leaving Harvard University early, telling CNBC Make It in February; this was mainly because he was “having a great time” making friends and taking a wide variety of classes, from computer science to history and psychology.
The billionaire Microsoft co-founder is “not someone who encourages college dropouts,” he said. “I’m a big fan of a broad body of knowledge, and I think this is an exceptional case where there’s an urgency to cut short college years to do something else.”
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