Founder Feedback gives you insights from the startup trenches.
In a post on his blog, Matt Cameron, Co-Founder and CEO of WhoTo.com and Mentor for the Sydney Founder Institute, explains the different mindset entrepreneurs need to sucessfully transition from working at a large organization to running a startup. In short, he urges you to not worry about mistakes or the uncertainty that lies ahead, and to embrace your startup as an experiment with expected failures.
The original article was posted here. Below it is republished.
"A few weeks ago I spoke at the Founder Institute Startup Ideation Bootcamp in Sydney, where I helped break down the process of idea generation for an eager crowd of aspiring entreprenuers. As the precursor to an inaugural FI Sydney intake in March, this event was undoubtedly a spark that will ignite many entreprenuerial fires.
I had the privilege of sharing my journey since completing a fantastic 5 year ride with Salesforce.com as a "suit", only to return to my true passion of building startup businesses. Rather than talking about all the things my co-founder and I did right, I took the time to explain that it took two pivots for us to accumulate enough learning to arrive at the promising results WhoTo.com is now delivering.
During my talk, I made three key points about transforming from the corporate world to the exciting, yet unpredictable, world of startups;
1. If you are in a corporate role you are most likely terrified of making mistakes.
With startups you know, with certainty, that mistakes must happen to afford you the learning you need to ultimately be successful. The key is to learn and adjust quickly enough that you don’t hit the end of your runway.
2. The angst of not building a successful business and having to return to a normal day job will last a matter of months – but the angst of not having attempted anything and wondering, “what if?”, will last a lifetime.
3. If you think about your startup as an experiment to test an hypothesis, then you will have the right mindset.
A disproven hypothesis is not a failure - you successfully learned something.One of the most valuable moments of the evening, for me, was when I was asked how I coped with the fact that I had spent the vast majority of my personal assets on a disproven hypothesis – IE, a business model that didn’t prove to be viable. I responded by saying that it didn’t bother me in the slightest… and I meant it. Money to an entrepreneur is merely fuel in the car – the more you have, the further you can go, and the more interesting things you can do. The point is that most successful entrepreneurs get very little happiness from having a large tank of fuel – it is more important that they are driving the car.
This is the reason that entrepreneurs cannot stay working for large organizations – the money flows in (plenty of fuel), but they are merely passengers in someone else’s car. So, if you are ready to start driving the bus, then I commend the Founder Institute to you as a way of ensuring that you learn fast and can execute using the best practices of Silicon Valley."
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