Naturally 17 year olds don't think long-term like this which is why PG's advice is so useful. It gives them a pathway to follow that they likely wouldn't have reasoned otherwise.

I told my much younger brother when he was 12 what programming was and it'd be a great career. He looked into it and within months was writing CLI games. Eventually releasing his own unity 3d game on steam as a teen.

Eventually he got into CS and did really well because none of it was scary and new. He parlayed that into role at Meta out of university.

My point being, 17 year olds have time to learn new skills and guidance can go a long way.

Yes. And they almost certainly have a better understanding of their own situation that him. This is not a dig at Paul Graham, the closer anyone is in age, the better they understand what they have to deal with. I'm roughly in the middle between Paul G and the 17 year old, and even though I'm really quite fascinated with zoomer culture and probably come more in touch with it than most (due to relatives in the age range etc.) I realize I have very little idea what it's like to grow up in the world they grow up in.

Most. But, that isn't the point.

Either way, this isn't really advice for 17 year olds. Pg is thinking out loud about the pathways for founders.

What about a 19 year old?

>Whoa. I’m 19 and I trained a 100M language model from scratch. Did a v2 now with a new SFT experiment to see if I can get better results on same size.