It’s the 4th time in a few days that I show the video below to people. It is rather old (dated 2004) and it is just great. A sentence I remember from the first day I watched it is the following: “I think there’s stuff you can’t possibly learn in school and I’m not even sure you can learn that on the job. There’s an entrepreneurial character. Some people have it and some people don’t. Some people may not think they have it, and they may have it. A lot of people they think they have it, and many don’t.” Here is the video and then the full transcript…
I think what can be taught, by and large, is a set of very basic skills about the various domains required for startup to succeed: finance, organizations, transactions, strategy, business models. You can get an exposure to that which can raise your entrepreneur IQ a hundred points. Because starting without that context, it could be awfully hard to understand what’s happening around you as you work in these environments let alone try to do it. I also think you can get exposure to the personality and character of entrepreneurship through the case study method in particular. You can begin to see the tortured lives that many entrepreneurs have to live in order to pursue their dreams. And you can get a sense of how that relates to your abilities to cope and to make tradeoffs in your life.
I think there’s stuff you can’t possibly learn in school and I’m not even sure you can learn that on the job. There’s an entrepreneurial character. Some people have it and some people don’t. Some people may not think they have it, and they may have it. A lot of people they think they have it, and many don’t. The entrepreneurial character is very, very comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. That entrepreneur character is very capable of understanding and targeting opportunities that others don’t see and is tenacious about their pursuit. At the same time, they remain permeable to know ideas and to course corrections from feedback from the market and from people who might have more experience or more insights than they’ve got. There’s a personality that works in this environment. And there’s a personality that I think is uncomfortable. And I try to explain this in particular in the classes that I teach. There is a badge of courage in being an entrepreneur. I mean, we sort of, you know, if you read the press and you read the local technology rags you know there is a real sense that entrepreneurs are a special super breed. They’re different. They create a lot of value. I love working with them.
But if you’re not an entrepreneur that’s OK too. There’s lots of other value to be created. There’s lots of other things to be “attacked” in the market place that maybe more appropriate. So I think you can learn a lot. And I think you can accelerate your ability to learn more by building a context. But I think ultimately you got to ask yourself a hard question. Am I suited for the uncertainties and ambiguities, the ups and downs, and the risks of being an entrepreneur, or am I not?