Why you should start a company young

When you're in your twenties, fresh out of school (or not even out yet), and you start thinking about building your own thing, you'll get a lot of advice, solicited and unsolicited, about why you should NOT start now. "Go get experience first." "Build some savings." "You're too young." I want to make the case for the opposite. Start now.

The Instability Dilemma

Most young grads dive straight into the job search, even when what they actually want is to start a company. I think the reason is fear of instability. Not a small fear either, a deep one. It's the fear of launching something with no guarantee it pays next month, or ever.

That fear is valid. So a lot of people take a job "for now" and tell themselves they'll build their SaaS on the side, nights and weekends, until it's ready to take over. Someday they'll quit and go live the dream. I call this the Moroccan dream.

Here's what actually happens instead, at least in what I've seen with myself and people around me: you get too exhausted after work to build anything real. You go from student to employee. The salary shows up, and with it, lifestyle inflation. A better apartment. Nicer habits. Maybe a relationship that depends on that income. And suddenly jumping into instability is harder than it would have been as a broke student with nothing to lose.

You end up trying to hold two safety nets at once, the job and the startup on the side. But in reality, you're not balancing two things. You're building golden handcuffs, and they lock quietly, one paycheck at a time.

The "Get Experience First" Myth

I've heard this advice constantly. And every time, one question runs through my head, and I'd encourage you to ask it back to whoever gives you this advice:

What exactly will I learn in an office job that makes it easier to launch my startup?

I'm a software engineer by training. I genuinely don't know what part of sitting in an office, headphones on, coding for 7-8 hours a day, prepares you for a job where most of your time will be spent convincing clients to buy, convincing investors you're worth the risk, convincing accelerators to take you in, and iterating fast on a product that doesn't exist yet.

Steelmanning the advice. The strongest version of "get a job first" isn't about learning management styles or "industry knowledge." It's about runway. You need enough savings to survive 12-18 months of little to no income. That's a real, practical concern, not a vague appeal to "experience." And it deserves a real answer, not a dismissal.

So here's mine: if runway is the actual concern, the job isn't the only way to get it. Freelance and contract work can get you there too, often faster, without the golden handcuffs a salary builds.

Rough numbers, not gospel: if you have no dependents and you're willing to live cheap (shared housing, minimal fixed costs), a realistic minimum runway to attempt this in your early twenties can be far lower than most people assume. I don't have precise, sourced figures to give you here, this is a rough personal estimate, not verified data. If you want real numbers for your own plan, sit down and calculate your actual fixed costs for 12 months. That number will tell you more than anything I or anyone else can say in a blog post.

If your life truly depends on a day job right now, my one piece of advice: try to get it at a young startup, not a big company. My two years working part-time at a local startup while still in school were genuinely useful. Watching the CEO's day to day up close gave me a real preview of what running something looks like. After I launched my own company, that same CEO gave me advice, opened doors, and connected me to my first B2B client. If you need the job, make it one that's close to the fire.

The Third Path (Where I Actually Am Right Now)

There's a version of this that isn't "job vs startup." It's contract or freelance work while you build, and it's the part I'm actively figuring out myself, not something I've solved.

Two open questions I'm sitting with:

• Hours. How do you split real client hours against real building hours without either one suffering? Client work pays the bills today. Building is the bet on tomorrow. Both compete for the same 24 hours.
• Formal or informal. Do you run that freelance work through your company structure (in my case, invoicing through my SASU) or keep it separate and informal while you're still small? Each choice has tax, credibility, and time-cost tradeoffs I haven't fully mapped out yet.

I don't have a clean answer for either. If you've solved this, I want to hear it in the comments.

Who Should Ignore This Advice

To be direct: this isn't universal advice. Skip this whole post if you have dependents relying on your income, real debt to service, a visa that requires salaried employment, or zero financial support network to fall back on. In those cases, the calculation changes completely, and "just start now" is bad advice, not brave advice.

I'm also aware this entire post could be survivorship bias talking. I haven't failed yet. Weigh that before you take advice from someone still mid-story.

Where I Actually Stand

I started Entervio at this age, with none of the "experience" people said I needed first. What I know now about clients, product, and sales, I learned by doing it badly first, not by having a job that taught it to me in advance.

So, to the third path question above: how are you splitting client work and building time, and are you running it formally or informally? Genuinely asking, drop it in the comments.