damir iskakov

i hope not all of you become founders

Spending a summer as a founder at 15-23 years of age is one of the best things a person can do, yet almost always the product is meaningless.

part 1 - early stage startup programs

During most of the incubation/accelerator programs you get a week, sometimes two, to pick one problem, so you take something that is the right size for the deadline and then spend the rest of the program shaping yourself around it instead of going after anything that would take longer to understand than the program allows.

For instance, an app that helps students prepare for exams, built because students cannot concentrate anymore. Attention is cooked, everyone knows it, and the app adapts to it. A product solving the consequence, not the root problem. The app has a streak counter, a focus timer and push notifications, which is three separate ways of interrupting a person who came there to concentrate.

Part of that comes from the order in which people decide things. You call yourself a founder first, and a founder is somebody who builds a product, so from that moment every problem you look at has to come out the other side as a product. Some of the problems worth solving are not products at all. Attention is one of them, and the honest answer there might be somebody writing about why reading matters and why being bored matters, which nobody would call a startup and which would do more than another exam trainer. People restrict themselves inside the frame of a founder and lose the role of a problem solver.

I cannot blame a seventeen-year-old for that, they simply do not yet know how to solve a problem of that size, and there is nothing shameful in not knowing, the honest thing is just to say that society gets very little out of these projects while everyone involved keeps talking as though it gets a great deal.

What happens after the idea is chosen is that you zoom into it so far that you lose the ability to see anything standing behind it. Week by week you iterate, you talk to potential customers, you rewrite the landing page, you abuse Claude Code, and every one of those actions is an action inside the frame you picked in your first week, which nobody has looked at since.

The programs also optimize the approach for every startup at once, one template for iteration, one template for talking to customers, one template for the launch, because a program running a hundred teams cannot do anything else.

So the LinkedIn posts are all the same, a hook in a couple of words, short sentences, a sobbing story about rejection, a hero solution of not giving up. The landing pages are all the same too, short sentences at the top, an unreadable middle, and a menu at the bottom that has never worked on a single one of them.

On demo day the team with the biggest inflated numbers wins, showing nothing more than noise. The judges are adults who are moved by the fact that a sixteen-year-old is building anything at all, and at that age they were throwing rocks in the street, so the building itself impresses them and they never get to the question of what is being built. The only follow-up question is how old are you, and the answer is always the best part of the pitch. But everybody in that room is building something, that is the entry condition, and you still have to choose one team out of all of them. That is why at least some of the judges should be people who were building at a very young age themselves, because they are the only ones who can look past the fact of it and judge the thing. The momentum from winning carries a team for another couple of weeks after the program ends. A month later you can count the survivors out of a hundred on the fingers of one hand.

The program gets its statistics and they are satisfied with it, because it is optimized for volume on the assumption that one team out of a thousand will be successful enough to pay for the other 999.

part 2 - participants in those programs

It might seem like getting enrolled in those programs is a terrible decision, but with the right approach, I think a summer spent building something is one of the best things available to a person.

Most of the participants aim to win with those inflated numbers, everybody understands that, and that is why that line in a cv or a college application impresses no one. The real value is in the process of building and selling a product.

What a startup really is, is being a full-stack dev, a designer, an seo expert, a seller, and much more at the same time. In the process people find out why customers and businesses spend money and why they do not, which of their problems are real and which ones they only mention in surveys. Nobody has ever discovered a real problem in a form where question one was how likely are you to use this on a scale of one to five.

If you have decided to build a tech product and you want to call yourself a tech founder, then that decision comes with what it comes with. If in the middle of the summer you

then the summer can turn into the best experience for the youth. Those qualities and that work ethic are very rare, shipping end-to-end, iterating fast, and most importantly finding and solving real problems. That is the reason why top companies always strive to hire ex-founders.

Last year I was building a product, and reflecting back I cannot say that it was meaningful to society, even though the company was valued at $8m, because a valuation and being meaningful to society are two entirely different things and the first one is much easier to get; however, the amount of new people, opportunities and work ethic helps me everywhere. Today I am researching, building a company and mentoring people, all at the pace of startup building.

Life is far more than revenue and ltv/cac, and there are many more problems to solve than businesses losing revenue.

Overall, a startup is an application of your knowledge, so when there is nothing to apply, the product shows it immediately and everybody can see it, which is why I think most people my age would get more out of studying and doing research mainly, and spending only the summer break building. And only in case of success continue building it in parallel. I believe there is no point in dropping out to build a startup, in case of dropping out the startup has to be already built and working.

So when I judge or mentor at these events, I tell them the same thing every time, which is that I hope not all of you become real founders when you grow up. The pace, the stride and the manner of a founder work in any profession there is, and you can carry them into research, into medicine, into building things, into art, and be better at those than most of the people already there.