The sad state of affairs is that working for yourself is really just a worse version of working for somebody else We really, deeply, unabashedly, lust after entrepreneurship. It's the dream job. Do whatever you want! No rules! Your own office, your own schedule, everything exactly the way you like it. At Harvard's Biz school where I am a student, they have a required course in entrepreneurship in the spring semester. But I'm going to take the contrarian position here. I think that entrepreneurship sucks.
And as someone who started his own company as an undergrad and sold it for 17 times its paltry earnings, I am somewhat qualified to give some commentary and to clarify some of the many misconceptions about the field.
I have written about this before on my Forbes column, but want to raise the question again: Are Business Schools Setting Up Entrepreneurs To Fail? The question has, over time, resulted in huge discussions, some defensive, some self-aware and some even solution oriented.
Nonetheless, in the last couple of years, the flow of first-time entrepreneurs who come out with the misconception that Entrepreneurship = Financing has not abated.
We had written code for 8 months in our home town of Missoula, Montana before it occurred to us we might need to raise money to launch our startup. There were a number of reasons for this: 1) We had no idea what we'd do with the money. 2) We assumed our apps' success would be huge and immediate.
Obviously, this was naive.This naivete was complicated by the fact of our geographical remoteness from the centers of funding.
I know that many, many entrepreneurs are feeling dejected because of investor rejections.
Today, I want to share with you a story of an amazing entrepreneurial team led by Alex Bouzari, CEO of Data Direct. In How To Defend Your Dream Against All Odds, Alex and I explore the company's journey to $200 Million in revenue, while their VCs wrote them off. From what I have seen, this is one of the few companies that can cross the elusive billion dollar mark in due course.
During today's roundtable, we had some excellent discussions of product marketing for a couple of different concepts.
The 1M/1M Channel on Stanzr
The first of these discussions was about a new social media marketing platform called Stanzr, from San Francisco-based Voluble, that we are using at 1M/1M. Taariq Lewis, the founder of Voluble, is a 1M/1M premium entrepreneur. We did a cobranded social chat event on Tuesday that gave us an opportunity to actually test ride the Stanzr product. We thought it was very cool!
In the late 90s, Tom Peters famously declared that we were all CEOs of our personal brands. In Fast Company he wrote:
"Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You. It's that simple - and that hard. And that inescapable."
This is even more true for professionals today and no group more so than entrepreneurs. When you talk to investors, partners, customers and most potential new team members one of the first thing all of them are going to do is get a sense for who you are and what you've done. When you first start a company, the corporate brand hasn't yet developed a reputation or any customer momentum, so most early-stage companies leverage the brands of the individuals involved for credibility. If you don't believe me, think how many times have you described a startup to someone by first describing the background or people involved? Therefore, for those of you planning to be serial entrepreneurs your personal brand is an invaluable asset.
During today's roundtable, we had a lot of discussion around nonprofits and for-profits.
Foundups: Michael Trout, from Fukui, Japan, pitched Foundups, which he claims will be a platform for open corporations. He talked about everything from raising funding for pre-seed entrepreneurs to get them to the seed stage, crowd funding, social media marketing and open source. It's the kind of pitch that makes your mind spin. You can't tell what the company does. And Michael said himself that he has a hard time explaining what he does in three minutes.
A new program that began earlier this year is looking for five IT-centric entrepreneurs to receive seed funds along with a series of services. Located in an underused mixed-use office building in downtown St. Louis, the program is run by two venture capitalists - Judy Sindecuse and Hal Gentry - who have formed a new entity called Capital Innovators. And yes, each of the five selected will receive $50k, along with free Internet hosting services, accounting and legal services, and intensive hands-on mentoring for 12 weeks.
I am not a lawyer, and I don't wish to ever become one (on TV or in real life), much to the disappointment of my mother who once wished that would become my chosen profession. I was reminded of this recently when I reviewed an article that Scott Fulton wrote last month for ReadWriteEnterprise here about the recent changes in our patent law system. It seems we are headed down the wrong path, making it harder for entrepreneurs to obtain and contest patents.
At today's roundtable, we had a chance to discuss a topic that continues to bother me endlessly - the Internet's obsession with FREE.