An Adult's Job Is to Prepare the Exit

The other day my first half-year as a “university adjunct lecturer” came to an end.

It wasn’t the kind of class you might imagine, some thick textbook, a lecturer droning on while students dutifully copy notes off the blackboard, so I was able to approach it with a fair amount of ease. My thanks go to the staff who ran around handling preparation and support.

Coming into direct contact with young people brought, unsurprisingly, plenty of stimulation and discovery. Let me list a few, lightly:

• I realized I understand nothing at all about students (though I had suspected as much)
• Even at a university full of serious students, plenty of people have wild ideas
• Students mostly don’t understand what it means to “let something mature”
• Young people dislike interference from old men (don’t be discouraged — I was the same way)

Things like that came to mind.

Let me organize this a bit. The course ultimately had students plan a product or service and build a prototype. Students came up with all kinds of ideas from free thinking and unique perspectives. My role was to comment on those ideas, offer advice, and where needed feed them systematic knowledge: sometimes technical methods of assembly, sometimes guidance on how to generate ideas in the first place, sometimes the basics of drawing up a business plan.

And sure enough, some students said things most adults would just laugh off (or smile awkwardly at). But I found myself perking up my antennae at exactly those kinds of opinions.

Conversely, faced with one team’s “well-made proposal,” I said flatly: “Well, you could read that in Nikkei BP or Toyo Keizai. It’s nothing new.” (Sorry about that.)

A unique perspective, and the ignorance to act fearlessly on a wild idea, are extremely precious things. I don’t want to say something as trite as “you lose that as you age,” but I do need to say clearly: too much accumulated experience brings its own harm.

Indeed, history is full of cases where young people, outsiders, or those who strayed from the orthodox path shocked a stagnant market and carved open a path to a new era.

Wow, this is amazing, I thought. But at the same time, I noticed an overwhelming flaw the students share. Very often, they have no idea what comes after this.

That’s not some grand talk about forecasting the future. It’s simply that they don’t know the template. I built a prototype, it works, it’s cool, I want one… so what? I made an app, it’s fun, I put real care into it… so what?

To avoid any misunderstanding: these are extremely capable students with sharp natural instincts (I can vouch for that as a graduate myself, ha). Naturally they don’t just read textbooks — they hunt down reference material on their own, search online, gather information precisely. They know things.

But as a matter of felt experience, they know nothing.

Someone like me, steeped in challenge and failure, faces students like this and the things I want to say pile up endlessly: you should do it this way, try this next, take on this challenge, tell investors this is where it goes in the long term, in the short term you can’t move forward until you’ve knocked this obstacle down.

But interference from an old man is, unfortunately, not something young people tend to welcome.

And that’s fine. Because I was the same way.

What matters for them is standing on their own two feet, running on their own two feet, and then tripping on their own two feet, throwing their whole body into it, and falling flat. That’s how they become strong and resilient, and eventually surpass us, the previous generation, with room to spare. That’s what I want to hope for.

Ah, how powerless adults are.

I’m not going to say that. Adults have important work to do.

That work is what I wrote in the title: preparing the exit.

Young people, as a rule, can only see one step ahead, two steps ahead at most. And even that assumption is often wrong. In some cases they haven’t even considered the next step at all.

Adults, on the other hand, have a daily habit of dreaming up and trying out ways to build not just two steps ahead but permanence lasting 100 years. (If anything, that’s the mark of an old man.)

So should we run alongside them as an accompanying runner? In some respects, I don’t think so.

Careful hand-holding robs them of countless small opportunities to get scraped up. It robs them of the chance to agonize until their eyelids twitch from stress. It robs them of the chance to realize, after they’ve gotten into bed at midnight, that they’ve made some terrible mistake, jump back up, and pull an all-nighter over it.

I have four children, and when I deal with them, I actually think about the same thing. I suspect many parents of young children feel the same way.

Protecting children is a parent’s job, but if a parent gives their child absolutely everything, the child stays a chick in the nest, mouth open, waiting to be fed. The parent bird has to set up the right hurdle at the right time: the child clears it, or struggles when it can’t, or gives up and falls apart, or gets back up and tries again. Through repeating that, the child eventually learns to set their own goals and hurdles and work toward them on their own initiative. (That’s my hope, anyway.)

In business, development, and entrepreneurship, the crucial hurdle to set up is the exit. This doesn’t necessarily mean an “Exit” in the corporate sense alone; it also encompasses goals or milestones at various phases, such as putting out a product or service, or entering some competition.

Suppose, for example, a business plan proposal is one that’s currently difficult to turn into a business, requiring several more years of research. The underlying theory is established, but there isn’t enough verification or data, and rather than rushing forward now, adding one, two, or perhaps three years’ worth of research results would yield much greater value. Suppose the proposers are currently graduate students.

In a situation like that, what options are on the table?

• Keep steadily continuing the research in the lab as is

That’s probably the option that comes to mind first. The supervising professor would likely approve, and it seems like it would go well. But depending on the person, this might look like giving up. It’s not about how it looks to others; it’s about how the proposer themselves feels about it. At the very least, nothing changes on the surface, and if the story is “step on the accelerator again in a few years,” when exactly is that timing? Will that timing really come?

I have an idea. It’s absolutely going to work. In that case, shouldn’t the action be taken now? Shouldn’t the challenge be taken on now?

It’s only natural to think that.

That’s when, I think, it becomes the adult’s job to point out various other exits. Even if the research continues, considering matters like patents and rights, it might be better to think now about separating it from the university and act accordingly. Or, even if the university remains the primary research body, it might be worth arranging a contract to set up a jointly funded external company and transfer the research results there. As for funding, relying on the traditional Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research isn’t the only option. Depending on the subject matter, various grant programs exist through the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry or the Ministry of the Environment. If something happens to catch on with AMED or NEDO (Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization), it’s not unusual to receive funding an order of magnitude larger than a typical grant. Depending on the case, it might even be worth challenging a well-funded overseas institution focused on research investment, like DARPA. (In fact, SCHAFT, the University of Tokyo’s first startup, later acquired by Google for a time, received funding through a DARPA program.)

You just have to set the right exit according to each person’s goals, motivation, and passion. I doubt many students could rattle off what I just said (how many lives have you lived?), but adults who can say the same thing are probably all over the place.

And if the idea in question is one where you might think “just turn that into a product right away,” the situation gets even tougher for students. Taking on, all at once, the battlefield called the market, full of monsters skilled at releasing products and services, requires all sorts of knowledge and experience that students simply lack.

In supporting and guiding students like that, within a startup ecosystem, the presence of advisors — angel investors, mentors, and the like — matters enormously. But students don’t know that, and, more fundamentally, aren’t connected to the right people in the first place.

I can’t say every adult is like this, but in many cases, adults know how to connect people one hop, two hops away. In business, references are said to matter. To put it in more worldly terms, connections: who introduced you carries more credibility than your Facebook profile.

Something like: “Well, I don’t know if they’ll take you seriously, but why don’t you try asking this person?” That level of introduction is about right (because, you know, an old man’s over-interference gets disliked, ha).

You quietly set down one exit for them, the first exit at the first stage of the long journey through the small maze they’re facing.

Perhaps that modest contribution is a fair, modest bit of payback for the modest stimulation and vitality they’ve given me. (Because, you know, the old man himself gets stimulation and vitality out of it too! Ha.)

What kind of contribution can I make at the university, what can I hand off to young people, where are the limits of what I myself can do: I’m hoping this challenge, a jumble of excitement and futility, keeps going for a while longer.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/02/394/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.