In Boston, a School to Learn How to Work at a Startup

Have you thought about joining a startup, but have no idea what you could possibly offer? Perhaps you are looking forward to graduation and want to pick some skills that will help you work for a startup when you leave school. Maybe you want to change your career and get into the exciting world of tech startups, but do not know what it takes to succeed in that type of high-pressure environment. Perhaps it is time to look into Startup School.

The Boston Startup School, founded at TechStars Boston (see For TechStars Boston, Life Beyond the Pitch), is creating a program that will give aspiring entrepreneurs and others all the tools they will need to work at a startup.

Startups are not easy. They often consist of bare-bones teams working crazy hours, sleeping in the office and doing a little bit of everything. A lot of people correlate startups with bleary-eyed programmers who have been staring at a screen for so long that they are stuck to their chairs. But there is more to it than that.

Startups are businesses. They have all the needs of any business – including sales, marketing, product development and design – to go along with all of those software engineers. Coding is just one part of the equation. It can be even harder to develop the skills needed to not just survive in a startup, but to thrive.

A startup “is a pretty unique place that takes a special person to break in [if] they don’t know how to do this,” said Aaron O’Hearn, part of the operating team at TechStars Boston.