Start a company only if you cannot stop yourself and the world needs you to
Dustin Moskovitz says passion is the minimum a founder needs, and building a task manager at night showed him when an idea is strong enough.
YC Root Access · Lecture 1 - How to Start a Startup (Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz)In a Stanford classroom full of students eager to start companies, Dustin Moskovitz, the co-founder of Facebook and Asana, stood up to tell them not to do it.
Sam Altman, the president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, had just warned them that they should never start a startup for the sake of it. "There are much easier ways to get rich," Altman said, and every founder says the work proved far harder and more painful than expected. Moskovitz then gave them his filter for when to ignore that warning.
Moskovitz said the best reason is that you cannot help yourself. He meant it in two ways, and both have to be true. You are so passionate about the problem that you work on it anyway, and the world needs you in particular to solve it.
That passion is the minimum you need to get through the hard parts, Moskovitz argued. Job applicants quickly sense when that drive is missing, he said, and they will go work for a founder who has it instead. He added that your own subconscious notices too, and that is a huge problem.
The other test is need and fit. If the idea will not make the world better, he said, work on something else. And if you are not especially well suited to solve it, you may lose to a team that is, or win with a worse result for everyone.
He learned it at Facebook. He and his co-founder, Justin Rosenstein, described themselves as reluctant entrepreneurs. They spent their days working on Facebook, then spent their nights working on an internal task manager used inside the company. It was so clearly valuable, he said, that they could not do anything else.
At some point they saw the impact inside Facebook, became convinced it could be valuable for the world, and came to believe no other team would build the right version. If they did not act, he said, a lot of value would be left on the table. He said the idea was "beating itself out of our chest," "forcing itself into the world," and that is the feeling to look for before starting a company.
Questions people ask
What is Asana, the company that came out of that night work?
Asana grew out of an internal task manager that Moskovitz and Rosenstein built for coordinating work inside Facebook. They started Asana after becoming convinced the tool could be valuable for the wider world. It later went public in 2020 through a direct listing.
Why would joining a startup sometimes pay better than founding one?
Moskovitz compared founding with joining a fast-growing company. He said joining Dropbox as employee 100 locked in about $10 million, joining Facebook a couple years in made $200 million, and even Facebook employee 1,000 made $20 million. By contrast, a founder of a $100 million company might keep about 10 percent after dilution, and founders stay about 10 years if things go well and about five if they do not.