Entrepreneurship

Notes from a Monday morning panel

So yesterday I had the chance to moderate a talk about entrepreneurship for Entrepreneurship@UBC’s Immersion Week, with some seasoned and emerging founders. Coming from the investment side I always look for great people who can meet challenges, are driven, trustworthy and fun to work with. You need to feel a connection and sort of taste the entrepreneurial character which is often not easy to discern in only a few meetings. For instance, I have spoken to lots of great tech founders but they lacked that unique human aspect that is hard to quantify. It’s a rare combination of entrepreneurial zeal and human integrity. It is hard to describe, you need to feel it.

One way to discover it is to just get the life stories from those that have done or are doing it. During the panel Hanna Golata and Emre Akkas (GlobalMe); Kim Kaplan (previously with Plenty of Fish/Match.com); Valerie Song (AVA Technologies) and Harrison Brown (HeadCheck Health) addressed the actual experience of being an entrepreneur. Kim pointed out that from a young age she was driven to do ‘something for herself’ and Emre highlighted a famous quote that entrepreneurship is the ‘relentless pursuit of opportunity’. What all panel members agreed to was that you do not need a business degree or some form of special training, entrepreneurs can have any background, but there are certain character sets that will benefit you on the journey.

Many founders I have seen over the years failed as their pursuit was money. The panel was very clear on this, you will have very little if any cash in the early years and you do not even have the time to think about it. The struggle from raising funding to managing teams is a journey of ‘scarcity’ and the lack of things actually fuels the quest for opportunity. The ‘ups and downs’ are continuous. In a way entrepreneurs will need to disconnect from standard social parameters of safety and security and put themselves in a zone were none of that is present. The pursuit of the opportunity is what gives meaning, so you will have to solve a technical, social or business problem that provides meaning to that journey. The companies of Valerie and Harrison are great examples of creating something larger, something that goes beyond the founder and creates value for society at large.

Given that this is so hard entrepreneurs often need help and the panel emphasized the importance of reaching out. Asking for help, recruiting advisors, mentors, or anyone that can support the often lonesome journey. This is something I see almost everyday where simple and short interactions between total strangers create a stage for asking questions, solving problems big and small and which in turn can create lifetime relationships. There was pointed advice from the panel about team building, the ‘hire fast, fire fast’ slogan has been around for years but both Hanna and Valerie underlined their key importance. The scarcity of resources and the speed at which start-ups operate necessitate strong and highly functional teams and you cannot afford to carry team members that are not bringing the right skill set to the mission.

As the audience chimed in it became clear that there were concerns from aspiring founders about being taking over by large corporations or being unable to protect their intellectual property. The edge start-ups have is to innovate and that is something that is hard to do in larger organizations, and the panel made it clear that the best way to protect that effort is to run fast. What also came out - and this is something I have been talking about for a long time - is age. Would you risk your life savings at age sixty to start a new venture? Maybe not, but the trend of ‘older’ entrepreneurs is here and the pandemic crisis is actually creating a whole new batch of start-ups run by people from all backgrounds and of all ages. Just measure your risk and do something meaningful that you can do well into your eighties or nineties. As long as you sense the scarcity, you can create and pursue the opportunity.