YC co-founder who backed Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit says high school isn’t the time to launch a startup

How to test if you’re old enough to start a startup

Jessica Coacci is a reporting fellow at Fortune where she covers success. Prior to joining Fortune, she worked as a producer at CNN and CNBC.

Sorry, high schoolers, your dreams of pitching that dream start-up on Shark Tank will have to wait. Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator—the start-up accelerator behind Silicon Valley giants like Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox and Reddit advises not to rush into entrepreneurship before graduation. 

“If you’re in high school and you want to start a startup one day, you might think the best thing to do now is to start startups. But it probably isn’t,” Graham wrote on X.

Instead, Graham highlighted the importance that Gen Zers should focus on learning and skill-building while they’re young. “Startups are rarely the optimal way to do this,” he continued, adding that startups can get in the way of learning because of the pressure to succeed.

“The point of a startup is to make something people want, not to learn,” he added. “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.”

But don’t worry, you don’t have to wait too long after high school to start the founder path: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI was funded

It’s not the first time the “Founder Mode” startup guru has warned against prematurely becoming a self-starter. In a separate essay in 2007, he even outlined how he looks for maturity in founders.

In it, Graham writes that the lower age limit for being founder-ready may be as young as 16, though Y Combinator typically does not look at anyone younger than 18 who can’t legally enter into contracts. And although Altman, was the youngest and most succesful founder Graham backed, he wrote “there are other 19 year olds who are 12 inside.” 

So if you’re an ambitious student who thinks they’ve cracked the code for a new product or idea, he shared exactly how to test if you’ve passed his maturity threshold. 

One example is making excuses of being “just a kid” and relying on your youth to escape complex situations. Adults typically could allow you off the hook, but Graham emphasizes the importance not to rely on this “kid flake reflex” when things get too hard if you want to be taken seriously as a founder.

Another way to measure if you’re ready is

“What you don’t often find are kids who react to challenges like adults. When you do, you’ve found an adult, whatever their age,” he wrote.