Money hungry entrepreneurs
This post was inspired by a discussion in my psychology class about how money doesn’t buy happiness
Few of us are born entrepreneurial. We’re geeks! We’re engineers. We love computers, we love programming, and we’ve known this from an incredibly early age. Many people ask me when did I get into this geeky entrepreneur stuff. Well, easy! I remember tinkering with my Windows 3.1 desktop since kindergarten days. Daddy would teach me how to use the control panel, how to install/uninstall my kindergarten computer games, and I got hooked. I went to computer camp starting in 5th grade and started coding in C and C++. I didn’t know that I’d one day call myself an entrepreneur. Ask the Google guys or Bill Gates what they were doing in elementary school and they’d probably reply with something quite similar. All of them stumbled on doing their entrepreneurial ventures not so much for the purpose of getting rich, but rather because they truly wanted to pursue their own projects and interests. The money is great, but the means are even greater.
This precisely answers why multi-level-marketers are NOT entrepreneurs: they don’t care about what they’re doing or what they’re selling. They’re obsessed with the idea of getting rich, and the means of getting there doesn’t matter. They aren’t invested in the process of creating a business and few of them are capable of it anyway. To start a company based on the idea of getting rich is probably not in your best interest for two reasons:
1) High expectations = high likelihood of being disappointed. Chances are, your business is going to fail. I know plenty of successful entrepreneurs who start new companies that fail, but with low expectations, they’re able to get on their feet and start anew. If my expectations for starting a company are to have a good learning experience, there’s no way that I can fail.
2) Money seeking entrepreneurs often fail because they over-plan, over-expect, over-demand, etc.. For small web/tech startups, it makes most sense to get a startup off the ground without much planning. If it fails, great. If it doesn’t, even better! Plans are good for thinking things out, but they’re often irrelevant because your company is likely to go in different directions from originally planned.
Entrepreneurs in business solely for money will hate their jobs. They’ll get bored and impatient until they cash out their millions. Because of their disinterest in the means, these money seeking “entrepreneurs” prioritize short term gain over long term benefits. The term “money doesn’t buy happiness” has some truth to it — sure, money is what all entrepreneurs inevitably want, but it comes down to whether or not they’re interested in the process of creating a project and turning it into a business in order to better pursue their interests.
Real life example: For the project that I just announced I was starting, one of my partners was thinking about planning things out and revenue models and all of that jazz – but personally, neither me nor my cousin are interested in that. We just want to make something new and awesome. I’ll take care of the business development and revenue, but only because that’s something I have A LOT of fun doing.
The point is, we didn’t start or end as “entrepreneurs.” True entrepreneurs always had a love for doing what they do, and they decided to be entrepreneurial because it gave them more opportunities to explore their interests and to create cool things. They care about money, but wealth isn’t a requirement for entrepreneurs to want to start companies. Keep this in mind before you start your next company.
Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early college, Bard College at Simon’s Rock.
She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don’t hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.
April 15th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Well said!
University you end up attending bennefits from your insights.
April 16th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Jessica, I’m totally in agreement with your point. Starting off with the intentions of tackling a problem or just building something cool is certainly good advice.
April 16th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
This is a great post. Its so true of many of the projects that I’ve started with friends or associates. People tend to be so profit-centric about how much they are going to make in sales, they lose focus of the real reason. You said it perfectly: “to build something awesome!”
Innovation should be the driver, but its always the backburner. And on a few projects, people have quit because they said gaining any return would take too long. Basically, the question I’ve always been asked was: well, can we have a product out in 4 months to make the Christmas season. It takes the fun out of what you are trying to accomplish. And burnout results.
The one important thing you touched on as well when you said your company may go in different directions than your original intention- is that the act of creating your cool new app gives you so many other ideas. You might start out with a very small app designed for a very specialized use, but the research involved opens up ideas to different uses. You begin to see how you can develop your app for uses you didn’t even intend or imagine. And this is lost when people are too profit-minded.
I took a creative writing class once where the professor was all about world-building instead of plot-outlining. She was of the opinion that if you can conceive of one object in the world where your story takes place, no matter how insignificant hat object may be, many stories would develop for you. For example, if you took a flower that grew in a small meadow, and described as much about that flower as you could, you would suddenly realize many stories that stem (pardon the pun) from that flower. Its origin, its color, the way it bends in the wind, the way it mesmerizes a passer-by. The creation process can be drawn out by this simple exercise which I feel applies to any product idea that someone has. Forget the business plan. Focus on the details of your product, and why it should exist, and the benefit it wil bring. Describe the awesomeness of it
And then you’ll be on the road to innovating something spectacular. To me, that thought process is what the entrepreneurial spirit is all about. Thanks again for the awesome post!
April 18th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
[...] 1) Money Hungry Entrepreneurs = FAIL [...]
May 1st, 2008 at 9:26 am
[...] In a nutshell, I view startups with mediocre employees as being subpar, average, and bound to have unforeseen problems that your mediocre employees will be incapable of solving. Let’s say that you don’t agree with me — you think your coder is awesome, he loves your startup idea, but he’s just a mediocre coder. In that case, you’ll likely be forced to deal with his/her issues and inadequacy in ways that I can’t possibly predict for you. In other words, you’re sent back to my first thesis: that without a top notch team, you’re wasting precious time and energy. No startup founder should suffer through entrepreneurship in the hopes of getting rich. Doing so goes against what being an entrepreneur is all about, which leads to abysmal failure for some very thought out reasons. [...]