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Rethink your entrepreneurial journey

I wanted to think over my entrepreneurial journey and share it with you, fellow entrepreneur. Once a year, I reflect upon the year that has passed. It feels as if in 2017, startup entrepreneurship has become part of the larger rat-race of society. What began as defiance against a society built on neatly parcelled careers and raises, became a successful, popular subculture, and in doing so, re-merged into the rat race.

Just ask yourself if you, like me, have felt anything like the following:

1. You are comfortable with the idea that if your startup does not work out, you will get a job at a tech company thanks to the strength of your startup experience. There is confidence, and then there’s complacency. I won’t lie. It’s been creeping in.
2. You view the outsourced projects that you are working on as more pressing and important than the success of your startup. Airbnb had their Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s. The lessons is that sugar is sweet, but if you have that instead of a whole meal, it will kill you with time.
3. You worry that decisions you make as a startup founder may not look good on your CV. Many factors can motivate a worry that a badly viewed mistake can affect your public image. None of those worries will help you make the right decision, though.
4. You worry about offending potential partners or acquirers more than the customers that you are missing out on. Especially true if you have a personal relationship with someone in the offended organisation. It takes a mental shift to be ok with the idea that you will have professional rivals, and on purpose, so that you can succeed.
5. You unconsciously benchmark your startup’s growth against your peers in the same or adjacent industries. This really can’t be helped when they appear in the news as much as you do. However, paying attention to it is another way of getting into a rat race. Besides, startup growth comes in spurts. Smooth growth charts are a lie.

Also Read: Growth is a dangerous vanity metric; Here’s what your ideal launch plan should be

6. You unconsciously seek out meetings with corporate leaders more than you seek out new customers. High-powered meetings are exciting! Powerful figures also have the means to lend you a hand. If you found that you met more executives than customers in 2016 though, you may need a rethink.
7. You find yourself thinking a lot about the occasional job offer that comes your way through LinkedIn. I’m pretty confident that a lot of startup founders and senior employees get offers through InMail because I received a few. Thinking about them makes me aware that I’m wondering which will get me ahead furthest in the rat race. I learned to view them as an opportunity to reverse-pitch what I’m working on instead. Try it.
8. You see a conference speaking opportunity as a profile-building exercise. By this I mean a personal profile. A good way to know if you are victim is to ask yourself how many slides about your background did you have at your last presentation? It ought to be zero, with incredibly few exceptions.
9. You have to be the highest paid person at the company since you are the founder. Though it’s common to be the highest paid person at the company, sometimes an opportunity to hire someone amazing will present itself, and for a lot of money. I don’t know if I could do it, but a founder who is ok being paid less than some of his team is saintly, and outside of the rat race.
10. You secretly wish that your larger competitor would just buy you already. Everyone wishes for an exit. However if it occupies a lot of your thoughts, perhaps you are in it for the wrong reasons.
11. You opt not to explore a new overseas market because the temporary relocation would really cramp your lifestyle. Moving someplace where the quality of life is lower is a step backwards for those keeping score.
12. You find yourself talking exclusively about growth and revenue in interviews. Aside from being poor presentation, it reflects a focus on score-keeping again. Besides, metrics ought to support an argument, not be the argument.
13. Your friends all work in startups but not one of them is also a founder. Nobody ought to be told how to live their lives or pick their friends. That said, the rest of us draw our lessons from how you live your life and pick your friends.
14. You think that the coming downturn in your space will affect you and the old-school incumbent equally. This is a problem because you see yourself in competition with established, old-school incumbents. You aren’t. Aside from the different scales that both operate at, seeing yourself in competition with them draws you into a destructive race against them.
15. You think that the massive growth in your space represents a great growth opportunity for you and the old-school incumbent equally. Explosive growth also explodes problems. It can entrench bad practices in the name of profit, and turn your company into another corporate treadmill. You can win the rat race, and still lose the spark of defiance that led you to choose entrepreneurship in the first place.

Also Read: 8  startup lessons I learnt from sailing in Yangon’s Inya Lake

16. You don’t understand why other entrepreneurs won’t just chill out more. Being out of the rat race is hard work. A race has an objective and rules. Entrepreneurs reject those rules in favour of creating our own. That’s twice as hard as just playing along.
17. You invest your savings the same way that your peers in corporate jobs do. Do you see your life turning out the same way as your peers in corporate jobs? I didn’t think so. But perhaps subconsciously you do. Why else would you take on the investment risk profile of a corporate employee when you aren’t one?
18. You want to get an MBA to further your career (even though you are the founder). I find this baffling. People don’t use most of what they learned in school at work, regardless of the job or level of education. So an MBA won’t make you a better entrepreneur. I can only guess that subconsciously some entrepreneurs expect to be back in a job where an MBA matters.
19. You tell people about the terrific things that you have achieved, not what your team has achieved. Being self-centred is awful in many ways, and one of them is as a way to grow a personal profile instead of a company profile. It shows a focus on self-aggrandizement, and corporate CEOs that we love to loathe.
20. You believe that if there’s no authoritative blog post written about how to do something, it probably isn’t worth doing. There is an unbelievable amount of material written about every aspect of a startup’s operations. A rat race player has no time to wonder about creative solutions to problems. Do you fall victim to this? By doing so, are you stifling your own creativity in service of efficiency and KPIs?

Also Read: How to be a great boss: Lessons for startup founders

I have a minor confession to make. There are a fair few mistakes on this list that I have made. 2017 seems as good a time as any to try something different, like writing for it’s own sake, and not just content marketing. More sharing and less measuring. Being a startup entrepreneur is something special, and I’m going to remember that.

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Wei Leen is head of marketing at WeAreSpaces. Check out our new coworking MVP SeekSpaces.

The views expressed here are of the author’s, and e27 may not necessarily subscribe to them. e27 invites members from Asia’s tech industry and startup community to share their honest opinions and expert knowledge with our readers. If you are interested in sharing your point of view, submit your post here.

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The post Is your entrepreneurial journey just another rat race? Here are 20 things that say it might just be so appeared first on e27.

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