What does it mean to be an entrepreneur?

I liked this quote from Mark Suster’s post on Venture Hacks:   “being an entrepreneur is really sexy… for those who have never done it.”

It’s so very true.  I think for most entrepreneurs you don’t do it because it’s sexy, you do it because you’re driven and cannot imagine doing anything else with your life.  It’s intangible, it’s hard to put your finger on, but in your gut it’s what you have to do.  It’s hard.  It’s at times exhiliarating, terrifying, rewarding, heartbreaking.  But it’s not easy.  It’s not a career path to choose lightly.




I came out to Silicon Valley in 1999.  I should probably have come out about six-months-to-a-year earlier.  However, at the end of 1998 when I was pondering the move, I was headhunted away from HBR to an Enterprise Management Consulting gig at a well-respected niche consulting firm in London.  I spent six months getting paid stupid amounts of money for having shiny fancy shoes and a well groomed haircut.  It was great for the bank balance - and very hard to leave in the end.  They offered me a whopping pay rise, a team of my own, and even to let me spend some time trying to build my start-up in London on the side before risking the move to Silicon Valley.  I resisted.  I think it was in leaving London and coming here that I realised by inner entrepreneur.

Background:  In 1992, my best friend Stephen Brown and I started a company, imaginatively called JB Computer Systems.  We sourced computer parts imported from the middle east and built & sold computers for students and local businesses.  It gave us a great standard of living at university.  In the 1993-1994 academic year we decided we tried to start an Internet Service Provider, which would have been one of the first in the UK.  But we needed money.  We were laughed out of every meeting as “two young techies that didn’t know business… what is this internet thing anyway?  it’s an American fad that’s going nowhere… etc.”.

I really didn’t like that.  Some time in late 1995 or early 1996, while in my first post-college job iirc, I bought a copy of Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan and from then on my eye was on Silicon Valley - with a business idea I’d been mulling over with friends for years.

So, mid-1999 I arrived in Silicon Valley naive, armed with a working demo (thanks Steve), a great idea, way way way way too early for the market (think DropBox in 1999!).  It was a tough learning experience.  I think part of the reason for the anti-VC feelings prevalent among many entrepreneurs that Fred Destin talks about, is based in part on people arriving in Silicon Valley, as I did, with little idea of how it works, how funding works, and too short-a-runway to figure it out in time.

Of course, after turning down some early angel money in 1999, in early 2000 everything collapsed and InfoVault was put on the shelf.  I spent the next few years working for other people’s start-ups trying to understand how the process works.  Learning to get product out - I’ll blog about the Xora GPS TimeTrack launch another time, but creating a product and taking it to market leadership from scratch, teaches you far more than any other experience.

The hardest thing was when I had to take a few years out of Silicon Valley, mid-decade - when my son got old enough for his condition to be recognized and eventually diagnosed, and with a second small baby my wife needed to be close to her family.  Though important to do, it was a difficult move.  Houston is not Palo Alto.  But, we got Ethan on a solid path.  A project I was working on with some friends had started to take shape as a potential business.  Unable to stay away, Silicon Valley drew me back again.  This career.  This start-up thing.  ”Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

I was rusty.  I made mistakes getting back up to speed, and I knew I would.  But I just had to come back.  Not because I think it’s sexy.  Not because it’s easy.  It’s neither.  I do it because I have a burning passion to deliver something amazing.  As Steve Jobs would put it, something Insanely Great.  If you have to, not want to, have to change the world.  If you have a vision of the future and you want to help us get there.  If you have something inside that makes you an entrepreneur whether you like it or not.  If all of these things drive you even when you know all the risks, the downsides, the challenges, how hard it will be.  Then maybe you’re an entrepreneur.

If you are one, don’t underestimate what you can do in the long term in favour of overestimating what you can do in the short term.  Learn. Learn. Learn. Listen, and learn some more.  The most important takeaway from the Suster column is that you have to be able to deal with the dark lonely nights, when the cards haven’t fallen in your favour, and break through into the daylight beyond.  I run into a lot of other founders in my day to day life.  Many of whom are true entrepreneurs, but many of whom I feel for.  They don’t seem to have known what they were getting into, and in many cases still don’t get it.  I think you can pick up from people whether they’re resilient enough, and those that aren’t are going to be in for a painfully rough ride.

From his column, I think he’s saying that this is part of the intangible set of impressions a VC will take away from a pitch, when they have to decide if yours is the company they’re going to fall in love with, and you’re the entrepreneur they will spend 3-5 years of their lives helping make it.
Sounds about right to me.