Do You Want to Be An Entrepreneur? (A Helpful Flowchart)

In the October 2014 Harvard Business Review, Walter Frick asks an interesting question:  Why do we lionize the tech industry's past and mock its present?  For example, Frick notes Walter Isaacson's new book, The Innovators, which looks at the computing giants who "set the world afire."  He also mentions Michael Malone's new work, The Intel Trinity, which extols the work done by men like Robert Noyce.  He then compares these examples with HBO's Silicon Valley where "characters care more about ideas they can code in a weekend than they do about truly world-changing innovation."

Perhaps that's the answer. Modern tech, at least the most visible kind based on apps like MonkeyParking and Yo, and the ease with which clueless individuals can get bankrolled and suddenly become "entrepreneurs," really might be mockable.  "A few decades from now we may look back on this era," Frick writes, "as one in which the tech world, notably Silicon Valley, mostly just spun its wheels, producing many more trivial or even laughable ventures than truly disruptive technologies."

The analogy I like to use for SV's current iteration is that if the semiconductor phase was like John Adams, and the software phase like John Quincy Adams, then what's going on now is like Gomez Addams.


I've taken swings at the subject here, here and here.  (Bear in mind, too, that if you peel back this onion there really is a lot of mind-boggling, substantive innovation going on.  It's just not getting lots of press.)  Another way of articulating this phenomenon, I think, is to say that the entrepreneurship narrative was once an "outside-in" proposition; work, learn, observe, experience; identify a product or process that truly solves a problem; build a product/business with a long-term commitment to growth and value-add.  Failure was a terrible option ("fail often"--not) and more than likely a career-buster.

Now the process is entirely "inside-out" beginning with the desire to "be an entrepreneur." (Be a cowboy. Be an astronaut.  Be an entrepreneur.)  Once you say the magic words, it's just a matter of coming up with an idea--yo, almost any idea--and getting it coded.  No need to ponder markets, marketing, sales, distribution or, quite often, a business model.  It's a code-and-hope world.

Here then, as a guide to getting you situated in the whole weird Gomez Addams thing going on out there, is a chart that helps you become an entrepreneur, circa 2014.  In fact, it insists you become an entrepreneur.  Enjoy.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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