ToInfinityandBeyond!

A 10-point checklist of milestones on the Silicon Valley road map to riches

BRUCE FEIRSTEIN

1. Do something incredibly precocious by the time you’re in high school.

Napster's Sean Parker got a visit from the F.B.I. when he was 16; Elon Musk—of PayPal and Tesla fame—sold his first video game when he was 12. If you're coming up on high-school graduation and haven't created something marketable or hacked someone major, you're way behind.

2. Drop out of college.

Or don't bother to go at all: if Harvard or Stanford wasn't good enough for Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Yahoo founders, surely it's not good enough for you. Right? Bonus points if you become a Thiel fellow.

3. Park yourself in a garage.

Move to the San Francisco Bay Area, crash with friends, and sleep

on a futon while you search for a garage where you can launch your start-up, just like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard with H.P., Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with Apple, or Larry Page and Sergey Brin with Google.

4. Have your eureka moment.

Fueled by nothing but ramen noodles and Red Bull (while never seeing the sun or eating breakfast), hit on the concept that will "utterly change human interaction." In your mission statement, invoke the buzzwords "creative destruction," "paradigm shift," or "mobile" anything.

5. Meet with an angel investor.

Get access to Ron Conway's legendary spreadsheet and through it his 1,300 contacts, then get accepted to Paul Graham's ultra-competitive Y Combinator incubator. Then try to run into Ashton Kutcher.

6. Take a trip out to Sand Hill Road.

Go fishing for Big Money and persuade Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, or Greylock Partners to fund your next round of financing. Cram the night before by reading blogs of V.C.'s Fred Wilson and Ben Horowitz.

7. Embrace failure, and pivot!

Just because your idea doesn't work doesn't mean you've failed. Retrench, reiterate, reconvene, pivot to something promising— like Instagram's Kevin Systrom did— and start all over again.

8. Make the Grand Conference Tour.

Hire the OutCast Agency's Alex Constantinople to do your P.R. and book you on tech panels at the D Conference, TED, and the TechCrunch Disrupt conference— as well as South by Southwest (SXSW), where Jack Dorsey made a splash with Twitter. Book your ticket to Sun Valley to make your presentation to bigwigs at the Allen & Co conference.

9. Show up on the cover ofWiredand Bloomberg Businessweek.

Congratulations! You're the Next Big Thing! (And it won't be long before Tom Friedman weighs in at The New York Times, as he recently did with Brian Chesky of Airbnb, declaring that you've created an entirely new business model and user-based eco-system, because "average is over" and "the world is flat.")

10. Now, decide how to cash in. Choose one:

A) Does your start-up actually make money? Time to set up a meeting about an I.P.O. with Goldman Sachs and put down some money on a Tesla Roadster.

B) Does your start-up lose money? Boatloads of it? Sell out to Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or AOL, and start looking for your next job.