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<p>As some people here have already suggested, entrepreneurship may be the way to go for you. Granted, as others have said, while you’ll have clients breathing down your neck, all they will care about is whether you are delivering the product/service they want at a price they are willing to pay, and they won’t really care what you did or how you did it. </p>
<p>As far as when you should try to start a business, I would suggest that you do so as quickly as feasible. Once you have an idea, you should probably run with it. You don’t need an MBA - heck, you don’t even really need a bachelor’s. You can just withdraw from college and try to start your company. Even if the idea fails, so what? You just go back to school. But you will have had a very interesting experience and learned a lot along the way, and your resume will be far better for it. And then of course there is the chance that your business will succeed…</p>
<p>Here’s what Paul Graham had to say about entrepreneurship and Bill Gates:</p>
<p>*…I can’t imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He’d have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he’d been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.</p>
<p>And yes, while it is probably true that you’ll learn some valuable things by going to work for an existing company for a couple years before starting your own, you’d learn a thing or two running your own company during that time too.</p>
<p>The advice about going to work for someone else would get an even colder reception from the 19 year old Bill Gates. So I’m supposed to finish college, then go work for another company for two years, and then I can start my own? I have to wait till I’m 23? That’s four years. That’s more than twenty percent of my life so far. Plus in four years it will be way too late to make money writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair.</p>
<p>And he’d be right. The Apple II was launched just two years later. In fact, if Bill had finished college and gone to work for another company as we’re suggesting, he might well have gone to work for Apple. And while that would probably have been better for all of us, it wouldn’t have been better for him.*</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html[/url]”>Paul Graham;
<p>Now, obviously, there is only one Bill Gates. And in fact, most startups will fail. But like I said, so what? If you’re 20 years old and you found a startup and it fails, then you’re broke. Big deal. Almost all 20-year-olds are broke. If nothing else, you will have learned valuable lessons that will help you to later get a job or to start another company (i.e. Microsoft was not the first company that Gates founded). </p>
<p>*…even if your startup does tank, you won’t harm your prospects with employers. To make sure I asked some friends who work for big companies. I asked managers at Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Cisco and Microsoft how they’d feel about two candidates, both 24, with equal ability, one who’d tried to start a startup that tanked, and another who’d spent the two years since college working as a developer at a big company. Every one responded that they’d prefer the guy who’d tried to start his own company. Zod Nazem, who’s in charge of engineering at Yahoo, said:</p>
<pre><code>I actually put more value on the guy with the failed startup. And you can quote me!
</code></pre>
<p>So there you have it. Want to get hired by Yahoo? Start your own company.*</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html[/url]”>Paul Graham;