Building Before University
On starting companies before you know what you’re doing, and why the not-knowing is the point.
I started building before I had permission to. There was no curriculum, no mentor, no funding. Just a laptop and a suspicion that the world was more moveable than adults let on.
Universities are extraordinary places, but they are optimised for a particular kind of learner: patient, credentialed, willing to defer the world for four years. I was not patient. The internet had already taught me that the fastest way to learn is to make something real and let it break in public.
What building early gives you is a compressed sense of time. You realise, viscerally, that months are cheap and years are not. You realise that the people you admire were once as unqualified as you are. You realise that the biggest gap in the world is between people who ship and people who talk about shipping.
If you’re considering it — build. Read too. Study when it earns its place. But start.