Entrepreneurship's Dirty Little Secret

Eric Ries founded CatalystRecruiting as an undergrad, worked as an engineer for a few years, and then co-founded and was CTO of IMVU, which had a string of internal failures followed by perseverance and success. His experience there seems to have formed the core of the Lean Startup book.

Straight from Steven Blank's personal bio: "After 21 years in 8 high technology companies, I retired in 1999. I co-founded my last company, E.piphany, in my living room in 1996. My other startups include two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games. Total score: two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits."

Don't write somebody off as an academic just because they've written a book.

I completely agree with the thrust of this article. My only qualm is that the word "entrepreneur" is too broad.

Let's put it this way. Need money? Go downtown and go door-to-door looking to help people. Maybe you can clean their office, or walk their dog, make a website, or cook a hamburger for somebody. But if you have some reasonable amount of skill and are willing to physically go out and meet people and adapt to what you hear, I can guarantee you that you are going to make money. It probably won't be in the way you imagined, but it'll work.

This is the basis of entrepreneurialism: making something people want. Get out there and find what people want. Match your abilities up to that. It's a wonderful thing.

The problem comes when we try to add any qualifiers at all to this. What this author is talking about is internet or technology startups. That's a whole nother can of worms. It's like going downtown and looking for work as an accountant. Yes, it might work, if you are already an accountant and your town has a lot of accounting firms. But the odds suddenly increase a hell of a lot.

The problem I see with many recent college grads and many startup fans is the belief that they already know what kind of entrepreneur they are going to be. Once you start qualifying things, you are killing your odds. Business is a conversation, not a soliloquy. We've got a lot of people terribly dedicated to some long-shot, 1-in-50 chance venture. That's not a startup. That's gambling.

But I completely agree that for purposes of this article, we have let a lot of people down. We deserve to give them a much more realistic view of how things work instead of spending so much time on Facebook, Google, and Instagram. We're making this into some kind of perverse lottery, and that's not good for anybody. Just don't use such a broad term as startup and then make some sweeping case that "people just aren't cut out for it" Yes, most people aren't cut out for some specific description of a business venture. But I'd argue that just about anybody can sell apples on the street corner. This isn't an intelligence thing, this is an engagement thing. If anything, you can be too smart for startups.

We just get really excited about an idea, and we run with it. We're passionate about something, and it doesn't matter what the end result is yet. We are compelled by everything in us to do this one thing and see what happens. And it doesn't need to be explained, justified, scale, make business sense, or any of these things... especially not at the beginning. Life is an experiment. We live that through our ideas, projects, and love to put it out there and get feedback, and then just keep going. We want to create things, build things, try something new, tackle interesting problems... Making money is never the primary focus. I understand that this is not necessarily practical, rational, and responsible. But it's the kind of thinking that spawned most great enterprises.

We have to be fearless. We have to ask dumb questions. I can't stand "smart" people that make entrepreneurs feel dumb for asking dumb questions. There are no dumb questions. If that person keeps learning, and pursues what they want, then they'll someday get somewhere. We're optimistic and somewhat blind, and thank God because otherwise we'd never get started and never do anything interesting.

Some of the most successful people have little education, and kinda stumble into their fortune because of some of the reasons above. And this makes those who are smart, educated, and experienced upset because they feel entitled, that they've earned it above those who "don't know what they're doing."

I don't know what I'm doing, and I want to keep it that way. It can be an advantage and lead to new ways of seeing the world. A world that maybe one of my half-baked ideas that I throw together without any plan might someday change.