No Entrepreneurship Porn
Entrepreneurship Porn is everywhere and its stupid. What I mean by that is Enterpreneurship is over-glorified by media and to a large extend because of Venture Capital.
Personally, I have never been a fan. I remember how buffled I was when every aspiring entrepreneur around me in undergrad wanted to "raise money" instead of "make money" with software and want to join in the hype instead of building a long-term sustainable business.
Then again, it is not hard to understand why when you look at all the media-worthy news is "(Some random) startup just raised their series F for (ridiculous) million at (even more ridiculous valuation) millions." accompanied by a photo of the founding team posing in suits. Every young and ambitious person would be brainwashed to think that money raised = success and Entrepreneurship is sexy.
I also never get the whole founders taking pride in calling themselves CEO/CTO/COO etc etc. You can call yourself anything that you want but there is no substance in it. The real substance is what you build.
No it is not, and I have been through it. This is one of those 90% of everything is crap things.
Yes there are success stories like Mark Zuckerberg and not all venture capital are evil. I believe there are good angel and VC investors who truly want to build good businesses with good founders. But majority of them are fueling an unrealistic and stupid cycle of Entrepreneurship Porn where they create a lot of hype around s**t startups that the founders are going to spend the next 5-10 years working on. They do not discuss failures, they want to drive up the 'startup ecosystem' so that more smart and young people will spend 5-10 years of their lives working on an idea that these investors can invest in and hopefully 1 out of the many will turn into a highly valued company that can be sold off.
My views on why VC is flawed
It's all just business to them. Most investors don't care about building a longevity business, they want quick returns, because most of the time it's not even their own money! They are just managing other people's money! Great founders on the other hand are sacrificing their time, the most important asset they have, to be one of the many eggs in the investor's basket.
Now I am not saying all VCs are evil. I quite like the philosophy of some accelerators/ incubators and angels who are in it for the long game, who values profitability over growth.
To put it simply: I like investors who want to build sustainable value with the founders, and not those who aim for a quick win. Because those are the investors who see through the bulls**t, who don't care about fluff. But those type of investors are rare.
Why Entrepreneurship Porn is bad
My hypothesis of why most aspiring tech startup founders are non-technical is this: They saw the hype of startups but do not know how difficult software programming is. So they go on to raise money by bulls**ting and end up wasting money and time.
The hands-on technical founders are the ones who go on to build great and lasting companies because they know how hard it is to build the product and they are willing to make that commitment on the idea.
Why do we build startups?
It is no secret that 90% of all startups eventually fail, and personally I believe most of the founders in the 10% that actually make it aren't that happy as well. I mean, isn't the whole point of starting a business so that you can have a bigger say in how things are done? At least that's why I got into startups. However once my startup raised investments, I felt like I was working for someone else again. I appreciate advices, but the only way to find out what works is to do it and learn from it.
I absolutely do not understand why most first time founders like to find mentors like collecting trading cards. As if assembling a set of mentors will make a billion dollar profit business. Nah, you still gotta write that code and sell that software yourself. This video by 37Signals explain it really well.
However, I think investments can still be valuable with the right investors on the right idea and time. But most importantly, the founder needs to be clear of the trade-offs, which is losing control of the business for money to grow (or in most cases, to survive).
That removes the fun from running a business in my opinion. A business is your unique take on the world on how things should be done. So guard your control over it, don't give it away like hotcakes. Because it's your rebellious voice in this world of noise.