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Writer's pictureChang Liu

The top reason startup is hard for top students

Updated: Aug 21, 2021

Many people do really well at school - they excel at high school, undergraduate institution, graduate school, even as professors and engineering faculty. However, being good at school does not make startup any easy. Why?

The most valuable knowledge are the ones no one will teach you.

At schools and universities there is a structure for teaching and research. However, most the knowledge is "low cost" and "too advanced". Let me example:

  • Low cost knowledge means knowledge printed freely on the internet and contained in books. One can acquire those information by just spending time.

  • Advanced knowledge related to many research schools - the work they do is curiosity driven and not product driven - as result, most knowledge generated are not knowhow and can not be bought and sold.


No matter how much you "know", you still have to learn through experience, and by building knwo-how with a product. Most of the time you build a product with little knowledge about the "market knowledge". So really, no matter how much studies you have done and how clever you are, you still have a long way to go.


What is hard for startup is the following:

  • for founder to quit job is hard.

  • for making quality product is hard.

  • finding buyer is hard, no matter how much "interest" people show

  • making profit is difficult - most businesses are money losing because the market is saturated with up and down competitions.

Knowledge is but foundations of knowhow.

Knowledge is broad. Deep knowledge is only experienced. It is too valuable, and too many. No one will teach you.


Real knowledge is "what you did not know you did not know".


Knowledge is what it takes to build knowhow, and only knowhow is secret. The secrecy is what you find when making a product, not imaging the product.


An idea based on general knowledge you obtain from book or internet or thinking is not worthy anything.


Patents really is a paper fence. It means nothing. Compete.



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