Trending

This year you may have attended a graduation party or two or even have recently had one of your own. Earning a degree is something that should be celebrated. But unless you are looking for certain technical skills, college is not always the best place for entrepreneurs.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t attend college. It may even be a great place to start a business. It just that educational institutions aren’t known for teaching essential startup techniques.

In an attempt to fill the gap, here are 10 startup lessons that I never learned in college:

Related: What Helps Entrepreneurs Truck Forward After Massive Loss?

1. Deal with failure.
An inevitable part of the startup experience is tasting failure. Almost all successful entrepreneurs have failed at one point or other. It’s a learning process that can help you make your next venture a success.

But you won’t learn about this in college. After all, colleges want you to succeed. They want you to graduate and become an esteemed alumni who donates money.

Colleges don’t prepare you for failing a class or not landing a job after graduating. They don’t prep you for failure. Truth is, it’s not the end of the world. This is something that you will have to discover and cope with when joining the startup world.

2. Raise money.
Relatively speaking, raising money for college is a cinch compared with funding a new business. While some people rely on parental support, others pursue loans and grants.

But raising money for a startup is infinitely more complex in its paperwork. Investors and banks expect you to present a detailed business plan that describes how a product works and how it will eventually make them a little something extra.

You may have to negotiate with investors and banks if they don’t at first understand your vision (another skill that you may not have acquired in college).

Related: Shoestring Budget? No Problem. Just Be Creative.

3. Budget.
In college you probably did not handle considerable sums of money. You lived off student loans, a part-time job or credit cards -- not taxes, payroll, business expenses or office rent. If you had extra cash, you savored it, even if that meant living off Ramen Noodles for the next two weeks. You really did not have to budget your money.

Just try to do that with a startup.

Being able to understand a profit-and-loss statement or balance sheet is vital. You will have to be able to budget expenses for the next six months, a year or longer -- skills you may not have picked up in a college lecture hall.

4. Pivot if necessary.
College students often change majors and transfer to another school. That's not something widely advertised. But, in fact, 61 percent of students switch their major by the close of sophomore year at the University of Florida, according to The New York Times. And pivoting is something that startups are becoming familiar with.

Related: Do Pivots Matter? Yes, in Almost Every Case.

5. Think outside of the box.
Often in school, there’s a right and wrong answer. But in the startup world, ambiguity rules.

“If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original," author and educator Ken Robinson declared in a TED talk, “Schools Kill Creativity,” which has been viewed almost 27 million times.

6. Build the right network.
Connecting with people in college is not the same as engaging with people in the real world. A drinking buddy or roommate who may have been so crucial to you in college won't matter so much as you try to get a startup off the ground.

No matter how tempting it may be to hire friends, they may not be right for your startup. If you majored in business, though, how often do you cross paths with an awesome programmer? Probably never.

When running a startup, be ready and willing to reach out and engage with the right people, instead of just relying on those who are there. With the right network of people, the possibilities are endless.

Related: Where the Real Deals Are Ignited at Conferences -- the Bar

7. Become a salesperson.
If you want your startup to succeed, then you must sell. You’re going to have to market the company's product to employees, investors and clients. But did you ever take a "Salesperson 101" course in college?

Being a top-notch salesperson isn’t hardly something that can be taught in a classroom. It’s a skill that must be refined over time through experience and that entails being able to read people well enough to get them hooked on your company's mission.

8. Mind your health.
Although your college's cafeteria may have stocked nutritious food and included gyms and wellness seminars, your health may not have been a focal point back then. Instead, staying out all night and then skipping class was fine occasionally.

But at a startup, you and your employees will put a lot of hours and hard work. You just can’t call in sick because you have the sniffles.

Since every day at your startup matters, take note that the Centers for Disease Control has found that overall healthy employees are more productive and call in sick less often.

Related: Managing People Is an Art: 32 Ways to Do it Right.

9. Become a boss.
Some people are natural-born leaders. Others become great leaders in college, like that star quarterback. And still others take business classes that cover all sorts of theories for how to make a better businessperson. But being a boss -- that is, actually managing employees -- is something else entirely.

While great bosses may also be great leaders, not all leaders make great bosses. When that quarterback leaves college, could he look the father of five directly in the eyes and fire him?

Being a great boss means that you should be able to guide, inspire and even make tough decisions. There isn’t a class for that. It’s just another skill you’ll have to learn in the real world.

10. Manage your time.
In college, because of the abundant stretches of free time, you could enjoy leisure time and also make up for any goofing off.

That won’t happen at a startup.

There is no free time. You’re going to be working essentially 24/7, no matter how tired you may be. So while your friends are enjoying happy hour, don’t become upset about finishing up a business plan, doing research or having a late-night meeting with employees. That’s just the nature of the beast.

What startup lessons did you not learn in college?

Related: 9 Lessons You Won't Learn in Business School


Sign in or Post as Guest

Da More Design Studio

VIEW COMMENTS (1)
2K
321
101
Sales Time Management Budgeting Startups Starting A Business

APPS
4 min read
3 Tools Your Startup Needs to Raise More Money

TODAY'S MOST READ

A Device to Help You Sleep Better Raises Almost $500K in Two Days on Kickstarter
15 Signs You're an Entrepreneur
10 Things All Entrepreneurs Must Do Before Quitting Their Day Job
The Beginner's Guide to Getting Better Sleep
How to Stay Productive Working From Home

Tech News for Your Bottom Line
Get the latest news and opportunities in tech each week.

229
583
156
5
John Rampton
JOHN RAMPTON
CONTRIBUTOR
Entrepreneur and Connector

10 Essential Startup Lessons That You May Not Have Learned in College
10 Essential Startup Lessons That You May Not Have Learned in College
JOHN RAMPTON
10 Lessons to Learn From Failing Startups (Including My Own)
10 Lessons to Learn From Failing Startups (Including My Own)
JOHN RAMPTON
How to Create a Healthy Startup Atmosphere
How to Create a Healthy Startup Atmosphere
JOHN RAMPTON
JULY 17, 2014
The old saying, it takes money to make money, is especially true when it comes to technology startups. But I’d follow that up with a saying of my own: Taking money is a pain in the butt. Fundraising is simply tedious. It takes forever and shifts your focus away from the priority of growing your business.

The good news is that we live in an era with an app for every pain. I’ve raised millions in funding over the past couple of years, and through this journey I have discovered a number of apps that have helped me to stay sane and be more efficient.

Here are the three tools I have used to raise more money on better terms:

Related: Clock's Ticking: A Simple Tool to Pitch Your Idea in 15 Seconds

1. Yesware. Whatever channels you use to build investment leads (LinkedIn, AngelList, conferences), you’ll eventually probably send out a pitch via email.

And everyone is inundated with email, investors especially. That’s why it’s so important to know whether your emails are opened and read. So I have used the Yesware gmail add-on to track just that.

With the help of Yesware’s data, I have been able to hone my opening pitch message significantly. My original pitch had three paragraphs of text. My final message hovers around just 200 characters.

Related: When Angel Investors Reject Your Plan

2. Pipedrive. Sure, there are more venture capitalists and angel investors in this world than you could possibly pitch. But that shouldn’t stop you from trying to reach as many as you can.

Pandora's founder was rejected more than 300 times, according to Business Insider. Udemy's co-founder endured tons of meetings with venture capitalists before securing funding.

And you? It may take countless conversations with all kinds of people before you score funding for your startup.

You absolutely need a customer-relationship management software to manage all the stages of those conversations and interactions. The simple user interface and drag-and-drop functionality of Pipedrive's software makes it a good choice for me.

I set up eight stages for tracking the progress of my interactions in Pipedrive: Idea, Intro, Call, Meeting, Interest, Negotiations, Due Diligence and Cash Received.

By the end of the first week, I had nearly 100 seed investors (focusing on my area of software as a service) lined up in the Idea category. After a few weeks of intros and pitches, 30 parties wound up being in the Interest category, meaning they had expressed interest. I eventually secured funds from nine of them.

Related: The Top 100 Venture Capital Firms

3. PandaDoc. When venture capitalists ask to see your presentation (this has been the case 70 percent of the time for me after gaining an in introduction), be sure to have a game plan.

Your presentations must be really good and really short. The first set of slides you send out to a venture capitalist firm should have a maximum of 15 slides.

So how do you decide which slides to cut?

The PandaDoc platform lets people simplify the process of sharing documents online or on mobile devices. The built-in document-analytics tool will show you who looked at which page -- or, in this case, slide -- when and for how long.

The first presentation I started sending to investors had more than 40 slides. I noticed that the venture capitalists were skipping about 25 of them so I decided to cut. The neglected slides were, in fact, detracting from the deck’s impact.

Oh, and let’s not forget about the “who” factor. Because you can see who opens your presentation, you can tell with whom to follow up and gauge how promising a lead is. If you notice, for example, that a deck is forwarded to the managing partner of a fund, work harder on closing the deal!

Here's the best part: the making-it-easier-next-time part. The Yesware, Pipedrive and PandaDoc tools that will help you raise your first round are three perfect ways to stay intentionally in touch with the many contacts you’ve made along the way. Your emails and documents -- and the resulting relationships -- will only become more nuanced from here on out. So track them religiously and learn from them constantly.

So grow like crazy, both you and your startup!

Related: The Art of Business Pitching Has Changed. Are You on Board?