The 10 Things About Entrepreneurship They Don't Teach You in College

College is a unique environment that plays a key part in the transition from childhood to adulthood. Education occurs in major ways both inside and out of the classroom. I learned a great deal in my time at Northeastern University, but even with the great pair of degrees I recieved (Electrical Engineering & Technical Entrepreneurship), I found there were a number of important skills an entrepreneur must develop that I did not learn. If you have the opportunity to learn any of these skills while in school, take full advantage! Your future startup will thank you.

The 10 Things About Entrepreneurship They Don't Teach You in College

1) How to email

This may seem like an easy one, but it's so important.  If you reach out to someone asking for help in the Boston startup community, there's a great chance you'll get a response. However, if you email them a 25 paragraph book, they are significantly less likely to be helpful.

The key is to realize two things:

A) The more specific your ask for help is, the more likely they can help you or point you to the help you need. A long email is unlikely to have a succinct, clear request.

B) A busy entrepreneur will appreciate the opportunity to help when he can respond quickly. 

When I learned the http://three.sentenc.es/ method, the response rate for email requests increased significantly.

2) How to ask for help & engage mentors

I alluded to it above, but this is so important. If you reach out to someone for help, know why you're asking them specifically. Are they an expert on marketing and you're looking for some marketing tips? Are they a great developer and you have questions about a new Ruby gem you're thinking about using for your project? Are they a super connector and you wanted to see if they knew someone that could help with a specific problem?

Mentors are here to help; I've rarely met anyone that didn't want to give of their time to help others. However, they have their greatest impact when you ask them for help in an area they have expertise. 

Next time you're looking for help, think about specifically what would be the most important thing you could learn from them. Asking to meet for coffee to get feedback on your idea is probably too vague and decreases your odds of getting a desired response. 

3) How to sell

Want your startup to make money? Then you need to be able to sell. No one is born a great sales person. It's a skill you hone over time. The sooner you can start sharpening your sales skills the better off you'll be.

Especially if you're a non-technical person interested in entrepreneurship, being able to sell is the best asset you can develop. With solid sales skills, you'll be able to sell your product *before* you build it and nothing attracts an engineer to a product quite like paying customers.

4) How to live lean

Most people I've met in the startup scene are lucky enough to have gone through college with enough money from student loans and/or parental support to live relatively comfortable. This is helpful as you transition to adult responsibilities, but it also distorts your reality on what it means to live lean.

Your personal burn rate is your startup's life. When you're out of money, your startup is dead. Learning how to stretch a dollar in both your personal life and in business is an invaluable skill.  Do you really need $50 business cards or would the $10 free ones be almost as good? Can you handle packing a lunch instead of spending $5-$10 every day? 

5) How to lead a team

I wrote about this last week, and it bears repeating: the success and failure of your company will rise and fall based on the ability of you and your cofounders to lead. Good team dynamics do not come naturally. The soft skills often get overlooked as people focus on making pitch decks, writing marketing plans and building prototypes, but should not be overlooked. 

Unfortunately, school projects don't count as leadership training. The graded incentive, shortened timeline of working together and the fact that usually you can't fire a weak link means it's a totally different experience than a group of people working on a project while balancing other jobs and responsibilities. The good news is, leading a club or running an intramural sports team are great opportunities to get real leadership experience.

6) How to work with people of other disciplines

Engineers and business people think differently. They organize ideas differently, communicate differently and view the world through a different lense. Unfortunately, few programs have you cross over and work with your colleagues on the other side of the table.

Working together helps you understand how they view the world, how to recognize a good vs. bad engineer/biz person, and what resonates with them.  Finding a project to work on across disciplines will only enhance your startup skills.

7) How to build a network

With the right network, you can get anything done. But building a network takes patience and the right approach. There is nothing I can say that is better than Keith Ferrazzi and his book, Never Eat Alone. Go pick it up, read it, and live it.

8) The who, what, when, where, why and how of fundraising

So many students think the key to getting their business off the ground means raising money. I thought it on my first startup too.  The real secret is that the best companies build an early product people love first. Then the investors come to them.

I recall hearing the story from Jason Jacobs that at first everyone doubted RunKeeper, but then once they had some great early sales all that changed. He had already engaged a bunch of mentors, who coincidentally were investors. So, when they were ready to raise money, it was easy.

Also important to remember is that as local VC Lee Hower says, "Startup Fundraising: There is No Try." You either are definitely raising money, know how much you want to raise and exactly what you'll do with it, or you're not raising.

9) Pattern Matching

So much of what I do now as an entrepreneur is pattern matching. From customer development interviews to matching what I hear and learn around me, it's all pattern matching.  Often too much of college is just reading and reciting back what you were shown by a professor or read in a book. It doesn't hone skills in pattern matching.

You can hone these skills by reading up on subjects you're interested in. Stay current on tech blogs and try to use multiple people's views to understand the real picture; everyone has a slant. 

10) Handling Failure

In startups you have to be very comfortable with failure. In academia, unless you're a researcher, you don't see much failure. Instead, you're constantly driven by your test grades, where failing would be a terrible thing.

Don't be confused: Your goal is not to fail at anything. However, no startup succeeds at everything they try. You should set out to succeed at everything you do, but then look to learn from every attempt in marketing, sales, engineering and any other experiment you make. Even if your startup as a whole fails, there's a tremendous amount to learn from it. The key is to not fail the same way twice. 

What do you wish you had learned in college about startups?