Ryan Haraki
Note: This blog post is adapted from the original Medium post.
I’m Ryan Haraki, a 19-year-old student studying Business & Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in British Columbia Canada. I was previously the co-founder and CEO of Collective, a hiring and work platform for web3 powered by on-chain data.
I started Collective during the summer of 2022 because I had been itching to build a company and previously failed twice. I wanted to build something huge, and finally found a problem that I thought may be worth solving.
The next 5 months included working every waking hour, experiencing insane highs and lows, learning and growing more than ever before, and meeting lots of interesting people. To continue the company, I decided we need to raise VC money. We weren’t able to get enough term sheets in time, and we sunsetted the company to focus on school and other commitments.
I don’t plan to tell the story of Collective during this piece, but what I learned from it. Being a startup founder at such a young age has enabled me to compound my knowledge exponentially faster than I would have otherwise, and I believe I came out with knowledge that very few have, stories that very few can tell, and a unique insight into how I can optimize my time (the most important asset).
My hope is for this essay to help a lot of students in a similar position to the one I was: hyper-ambitious, trying to build the future, willing to spend all of my time doing it but confused about how to do it. If you fit this description, I hope this essay enables you to benefit from my learnings and mistakes to answer the questions that are probably constantly going through your head regarding this topic.
The Problem
You should be completely obsessed with solving the problem that you’re working on, or extremely excited about a future where your product exists. Without this, you won’t be able to stay motivated when things inevitably get hard.
Don’t build a company while in school
You just don’t have time as a student. If you choose to build a company, you should set aside at least 1 year to iterate and see if things will work out, and working on your company should be the only way you spend your time. If this is not the case, you will not be able to move fast enough to beat your competitors and your users will stop using your product.
Being in school makes the iteration process extremely difficult. I’ve talked to student founders that could only work on their company once a week, spent their summers on the company, and only upon graduating could raise a small amount of money. Yes, they managed to raise, but the opportunity cost of building a company that you cannot grow is extremely high — is that the optimal way to spend your summers?
I took a summer course for school during the latter half of my summer, which means I had to pivot from full-time on Collective to mixing it with schoolwork as well as my social life since I was now back on campus with my friends. I thought taking a single course wouldn’t mean much, but school is hard. My time working on the company started getting diluted, and I couldn’t focus as much since I had assignments due, lectures to attend, and tests to take. This took a huge hit on the rate at which we were able to move and was the beginning of our downfall.
Work at a startup before starting one
One advantage I had coming in was knowledge. I was previously an early hire at a startup that ended up getting acquired, I advised and worked with founders in the past, and spend a huge amount of my time-consuming information and learning about startups. I was able to follow best practices which helped me the company off the ground, but you soon realize every company is unique and you will have to learn to solve your own problems.
The key benefit of working at a startup is learning how to build systems to ship product and iterate faster. You learn how to organize an engineering team, how to craft an optimal employee experience, what not to do, and how to get product out the door to customers as fast as possible before you start your own company, which makes it slightly easier.
Raising VC is extremely difficult, especially as a student
To continue working on the company we needed the runway necessary to support ourselves. I decided to start raising our pre-seed in September 2022 to raise 6M by the end of the month (course drop date). I started reaching out to a bunch of angel investors and VCs in my network without realizing that the process often takes longer than a month (unless you’re a hypergrowth, A tier startup with VCs drooling to give you term sheets). I wasn’t able to get enough traction in time (or any signal of receiving a term sheet) and ended up failing to raise our round. We also applied to a few student programs (Soma cap for example) but didn’t get a decision in time. The difficulty was compounded as a student because fundraising is a full-time job, and I was already in school full-time trying to make this work.
Because I knew I was going to be raising money from the start, I should have started my raise from the beginning. A much better strategy to raise money starting from day 1 would have been the following:
This likely would still not work in the current market with the traction we had, but it would significantly raise our chances. Currently, I believe a pre-seed round is a product in market for 3 months and considerable traction.
A few notes on Dropping out
You probably don’t have the guts to drop out. I told myself I would drop out of school if I raised a round, but when the time came to potentially leave and take the bet on myself (to raise the round) I wasn’t able to do it.
Personally, this greatly confused me and I started seeking advice from both sides. One huge factor for me was my parents, who were pro-school and pro-system. While I knew I didn’t agree, I cannot ignore my parents and their opinions. Almost everybody that I talked to told me to take a gap semester, yet I still didn’t do it because I could not justify it based on the traction of the company at the time (which I do not regret in hindsight).
If you can drop out, however, here are a few things to check off before doing so:
Growing fast (product in market)
MRR increasing every month (also requires product in market)
18 months runway in bank (or term sheets)
Crazy conviction You should also ask yourself the following questions:
Do I really want to drop out or is everyone just telling me to?
What would I be doing if I was still in school?
What is the opportunity cost of continuing school vs startup?
In my opinion, take a gap semester (only if you check off 1/4 of the items on the list, not including conviction — you NEED product in market) first and see what happens.
The only thing you should be doing is shipping product and talking to customers. There is going to be a lot of noise as a founder which you must drown out.
One example is conferences. I attended Consensus 2022 with the goal of launching, gaining customers, and finding potential investors. Looking back on it, conferences are noisy and have low-return — most people will not bother to circle back with you afterward. Conferences attended/people spoken to is a vanity metric 99% of the time for early-stage founders unless you’re recruiting or are extremely well-networked beforehand.
You also need to be wary of how much time you spend doing things “for fun”. You should be removing distractions from your immediate living and workspace, and optimize the amount of time you spend doing things like partying, and hanging out with your friends to be lower than it was before.
Be very wary of accelerators that are not widely-known (YC, 500 Startups etc) as they may actually not be worth your time. Do not do a bunch of accelerator programs to fake progress as this does not help with accelerating you to product-market-fit.
Team Building
Pick the highest-performing/smartest people you know to be your co-founders, do not settle here. You need a CTO even if you’re technical because as the CEO you will not be able to code as much as you might want to (if you’re an engineer). This is fine, leave the bulk of it to the CTO but help out as much as you can. Naturally, your first hires should be technical.
Early on, do not hire anybody that is non-technical. The most important thing early on is shipping product as fast as possible and hiring a COO/CRO/CPO is a waste of time. As the CEO, you should be doing most (if not, all) of the selling early on. Don’t hire anyone to sell because you’re too lazy to figure out how to sell your own product.
If you’re thinking of firing someone, you should have done it yesterday. Fire them and stop wasting time.
Picking Industries
It’s important to build sticky products — this means your product can/must be used by your target customer in order to make their lives significantly easier (ex Google, Notion, YouTube).
A huge part of building sticky products is picking the correct industry to build in. I once got an amazing piece of advice from the CEO of a public company that has stuck with me:
“Think about what’s not going to change, not what’s going to change”
People will always need food, shelter and water => problems regarding essentials will always be sticky.
Developer tools will always be needed, the cloud will always be needed, etc. Be careful when picking an industry, it should either be one that you’re certain will last for a very long time, or one that you have strong conviction will become the norm.
Build systems within your company as early as possible. They don’t have to be complicated at first, just enough to enforce accountability among co-founders and keep everyone in the loop. Make sure these systems don’t become redundant.
At Collective, we had standup 3 times a week and took meeting notes. My CTO and I used to pair-program all the time and ideate together in Discord calls. We also had a Notion hub with all the company details including our customers, user interview notes, tech stack, roadmap, etc.
Make sure not to go overboard with software or your tech stack, just pick whatever you’re good at and works. We only used Airtable, Notion, and Linear and our stack was Next.js, Tailwindcss, PostgreSQL and Flask.
As CEO, you define your company and everything within it. It’s on you to create and communicate the company values, actions, strategies, systems, product, etc which is extremely taxing.
Everything is your responsibility
As CEO, it is your responsibility to take ALL of the blame. If the product is bad, it’s your fault. If you’re not growing fast enough, it’s your fault.
You should always take the blame and try to reassess how to improve on your mistakes. NEVER blame any of your employees. If they make a mistake or do a bad job, let them know with constructive criticism and work closely with them to improve and prevent future mistakes, or just fire them if they can’t perform in their role. Never just harshly point the blame at an employee.
You should also be willing to pay any upfront costs for your startup that you can afford. This is quite obvious and simple for things like hosting, database, etc. Try to take advantage of any student resources you can like the GitHub Student Developer Pack, free Figma, free Notion, etc. As a student, this can be difficult especially when expenses come that you cannot afford. When I started raising money, I planned to take money out of my education fund to incorporate the company (we went through a lawyer who was going to charge us $X,000k, a big mistake). I ended up not doing it so looking back I feel fine, but if I had lost money incorporating a company I would be down thousands right now.
CEOs that are not product-focused will almost always fail
If you’re an “ideas guy” or a “marketing CEO” and want someone else to focus on the product then your company is probably going to fail. This is not to say “build it and they will come”, but more so “build it and understand it so that when you go to them they will understand the value prop the way you do”. If you aren’t product-focused, you won’t be able to build a culture around shipping an amazing product (the only thing your users care about) and may waste time coming up with paid marketing strategies (totally viable if it fits your business, but many startups can achieve organic growth) instead of figuring out how to solve your user’s problems.
You should be doing 100% of the selling early on
Nobody wants your company to succeed more than you, nobody understands why your company can/should succeed more than you, and nobody understands the product and its value props more than you. Hence, you’re the best person to sell the product. You are responsible for getting the first MRR, and you should be the point of contact for all of your initial customers, and you are going to be selling the vision to future potential hires and investors. Don’t hire a salesperson or “salesy founder” because you’re too lazy to figure out how to sell your own product.
You will spend a huge amount of time in meetings
Based on the previous point, you will likely spend a considerable amount of your time every day in meetings.
This may be sales calls, customer interviews, standups, team syncs, chatting with VCs, trying to resolve a production issue with your CTO, or about a million other things that may come up during the life of your company.
Because of this, it’s important to optimize the meetings you take to only be the most efficient ones. A few key guidelines:
You should be extremely honest with yourself about why you’re a founder. Do you actually want to dedicate every waking hour for the next few years of your life solving this problem, are you interested in getting rich, are you in it for the clout, or some other reason?
There is no wrong answer, but there is only one answer that will maximize your chances of success. Whenever you tell someone you’re the CEO of a company, you know at the back of your head how that company is really doing — so be honest with yourself and adjust accordingly.
The highs and lows of building a company are extreme, but anxiety and stress are constant throughout your day. You should be willing to deal with constant anxiety.
Sell, then build. Don’t waste time building something nobody wants, priority #1 should be figuring out what they want and will pay for. Your first MVP should be stupidly simple, which was something I got right at Collective. Our first MVP took me 3 hours to make, and I shipped it the next day. The only reason we built software was because the day zero MVP had traction. I do regret not charging for the MVP, though.
Make sure you’re obsessive about solving your customer’s problems. Always follow up with them and bring something tangible every time you do. Track the outcome of each call, book follow-up meetings at the end of each call, and make sure you have something amazing to deliver so you impress the customer every time you talk to them.
Shipping product is one of the most important parts of your company. Having systems in place to ship updates as fast as possible is extremely important. Our process looked something like this:
For backend, my CTO and I would draft our backend architecture in FigJam before implementing.
It’s extremely important to move as fast as possible. You should be able to ship updates multiple times a week. It’s better to ship small updates a lot than to ship large updates a little. We made the mistake of choosing the latter and our users had to wait too long.
One of the biggest gains I’ve gotten from Collective is that I now know what my next steps are and what I need to optimize my time on — most people will never know this at my age. You can only get this from taking large bets that force you to grow exponentially at an inflated rate, which a startup does very well.
I would appreciate if you shared this article with other people. I believe this is the most important piece I’ve written to date, and think that many aspiring student founders will find it useful to learn from someone who has done it. If you’re interested in chatting or are still considering being a student founder, feel free to DM me on Twitter @ryanharaki_. To save you time, if you read this and are still dead-set on solving a problem, I’d recommend you go for it. I leave with one final message:
Taking a bet on yourself is worth it regardless of whether you succeed or fail.