Adults' Job Is Preparing the Exit

My first half-year as an “adjunct university lecturer” came to an end the other day.

It wasn’t the kind of class you might imagine, where you lecture from a thick textbook while students take notes on the board, so I could approach it with a certain amount of ease. I’m grateful to the staff who ran around handling preparation and support.

Direct contact with young people brought a lot of stimulation and discoveries, as you’d expect. Let me list a few lightly.

• I realized I really don’t understand students at all (though I’d imagined as much)
• Even at a university with many earnest students, there are plenty of people with wild ideas
• Students mostly don’t understand the idea of “letting things mature”
• Young people dislike interference from old guys (don’t let it get you down—I was the same way)

That’s the kind of thing I found myself thinking.

To organize this a bit: the course content ultimately involved planning a product or service and building a prototype. Students came up with all sorts of ideas from free-flowing thoughts and unique perspectives. My role was to comment on them, give advice, and where needed, feed in systematic knowledge. Sometimes that meant technical methods of implementation, sometimes guidance on how to generate ideas in the first place, sometimes the basics of how to build a business plan.

And sure enough, some students said things most adults would laugh off (or answer with a wry smile). But I found myself tuning my antennae toward exactly that kind of opinion.

Conversely, when one team presented a “well-made proposal,” I told them flatly, “Well, you could just read that in Nikkei BP or Toyo Keizai. It’s that kind of thing.” (Sorry about that.)

A unique perspective, and the ignorance to fearlessly put wild ideas into action, are extremely valuable things. I don’t want to say something as boring as “these get lost as you age,” but I think it needs to be stated clearly: this is the harm that comes from accumulating too much experience.

History is full of examples of young people, outsiders, or people who strayed from the beaten path shocking a stagnant market and opening the way to a new era.

Wow, this is amazing, I thought—but at the same time, I noticed an overwhelming flaw in the students. Very often, they simply don’t understand “what comes after this.”

That’s not some grand talk about predicting the future. It’s simply that they “don’t know the template.” They build a prototype—it works, it’s cool, I want this—and then? They make an app—it’s fun, they put real care into it—and then?

To be clear, these are extremely capable students with sharp minds (I can vouch for this as a graduate myself, ha). Naturally, they don’t just read textbooks—they dig through reference materials on their own, search online, gather information precisely. They “know” things.

But in terms of felt experience, they know nothing.

When someone like me, covered in challenges and failures, faces students like this, an endless stream of things I want to say comes pouring out: you should do it this way, try this next, challenge yourself with this, tell investors this is what happens in the long term, in the short term don’t move forward until you’ve crushed this problem.

But interference from an old guy 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 stumbling on their own two feet, throwing their whole body down and falling flat on their face. That’s how they become strong and resilient, and eventually they’ll surpass us, the previous generation, with room to spare. That’s what I hope for.

Ah, how powerless adults are.

I won’t say that. Adults have important work to do.

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

Young people tend to see only one step ahead, or at most two steps ahead. And even that projection is often wrong. In some cases, they haven’t even considered the next step at all.

Adults, meanwhile, have a habit of daydreaming about, and trying every day to build, not just two steps ahead but ways of achieving continuity that lasts 100 years. (If anything, that’s the mark of being an old guy.)

So should we accompany them as running partners? In a certain sense, I don’t think so.

Careful accompaniment robs people of the chance to get various small scrapes. It robs them of the chance to worry so much that their eyelids twitch from stress. It robs them of the chance to get into bed at midnight, suddenly realize they’ve made a terrible mistake, jump up, and pull an all-nighter.

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

Protecting a child is a parent’s job, but if a parent gives their child everything, the child remains a chick in the nest, mouth open waiting to be fed. A parent bird sets appropriate hurdles at appropriate times, and the chick clears them, or struggles when it can’t, or gives up and falls apart, or gets back up and tries again. By repeating this cycle, the child eventually becomes able to set their own goals and hurdles and pursue them by their own will. (Or so I hope.)

In business, development, and entrepreneurship, the crucial hurdle to set is the “exit.” This doesn’t necessarily mean just a company’s so-called “Exit”—it also encompasses, in a broader sense, goals or milestones at various phases: “putting out” a product or service, or “entering” some kind of competition.

Suppose a certain business plan proposal is difficult to turn into an actual business right now, and would require several more years of research. Suppose the basic theory is established, but there isn’t enough verification or data, and rather than rushing forward now, it would deliver more value to add another one, two, or three years of research. Suppose the proposers are currently graduate students.

In a situation like that, what options are available?

• Continuing steadily with research in the lab as is

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

They have an idea. They’re sure it will work. So shouldn’t the action be taken now? Shouldn’t the challenge be taken on now?

It’s natural to think that way.

At that point, isn’t it the job of adults to show various other exits? Even if research continues, when you consider matters like patents and other rights, it might be better to think through and act on a way to separate this from the university at the current point. And even if the research itself remains based at the university, it might be worth entering into a contract to jointly fund an external company and transfer research results to it. As for funding, relying on traditional science research grants isn’t the only option. Depending on the subject matter, there are various grant programs from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the Ministry of the Environment, and others. If you can land something through AMED or NEDO, for instance, it’s not unusual to obtain funding an order of magnitude larger than a typical grant. In some cases, it might also be worth challenging major overseas institutions that fund research, like DARPA. (In fact, Schaft, a startup out of the University of Tokyo that was once acquired by Google, obtained funding through a DARPA program.)

You just need to set the appropriate exit according to each person’s goals, motivation, and passion. Few students, I imagine, could rattle off the above smoothly (how many lifetimes have you lived?), but plenty of adults out there could say the same things I just did.

Also, if it’s the kind of idea where you might think “just turn that into a product right away,” the situation becomes even harder for students. Stepping suddenly into the battlefield called the “market,” full of seasoned monsters skilled at releasing products and services, they lack far too much knowledge and experience.

In supporting and guiding students like this, the presence of advisors such as angel investors or advisors within the startup ecosystem is especially important—but students “don’t know that,” and “aren’t connected to the right people in the first place.”

Not every adult can do this, but in many cases, adults know how to connect people through one or two hops. In business, it’s said that references matter. Put in more common terms: connections. You could put it this way: who introduced you is more trustworthy information than your Facebook profile.

Something like “Well, I don’t know if they’ll take you seriously, but why not ask this person?” is probably about the right level of introduction (after all, old guys’ over-interference is disliked, ha).

You quietly place the first exit for them, at the first stage of the small labyrinth they’re facing, on their long journey.

Perhaps that small contribution is a fittingly modest form of payback for the small stimulation and vitality they gave me. (Because old guys have their own stimulation and vitality too! Ha.)

What kind of contribution can I make at the university, what can I hand over to young people, what are the limits of what I myself can do—I hope this challenge, a jumble of excitement and futile effort, continues for a while longer. That’s what I’m thinking right now.

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