Entrepreneurial Super Powers
Entrepreneurs need some skills to have a chance at any form of success in their ‘pursuit of happiness’. In order to understand the context of these super powers, we need to explore the categories of entrepreneurs.
There is an inside joke within my close circle of friends. We say “a person is either an ideas person or an implementation person. It is rare to be both. People who are both a unicorns”.
Some people are very good visualisers. They imagine things into existence. They can easily pick an idea, turn it in and out, run a pilot, see the problems and issues, fix them, raise funds, scale, expand and exit all in their heads. I call them the Enigmas, because they can easily understand things that are seemly difficult for other people to wrap their heads around, run with it till it becomes obvious. Enigmas are able to pick the flaws in an idea as soon as they hear it, based on the context and available information they have. Experience in the vertical that the presenting idea operates also gives them an edge. They are able to give deep revealing insights that may be elusive to others. In some way, there may be an aura of mystery surrounding them because colleagues begin to wonder, how do they know these things. Enigmas make it a point of duty to know things, so they read a tad bit more than the average person, watch more educational videos, adore podcasts and are very much in-touch with introspection. They can be said to live in their heads.
The second group of people are implementers. They just do. They are the biblical doers and not hearers only. Give them a spark and watch them create magic. I call them Builders. Builders are very much activity people. They get bored with just sitting down and thinking about possibilities. Unlike Enigmas, builders want to jump in once they understand what needs to be done. They will figure out the rest on the way. They make decisions lightening fast and may or may not give things more than superficial thought. They believe in fixing. So when they eventually run into issues down the road, they just try to fix it. You will see them in the trenches of the market negotiating, selling, buying, organising, and just pushing products out.
Understanding these group of people opens up a world of human interaction in business and entrepreneurship to me. In one conversation, we debated; which group are better for business? Obviously, they both have different approaches to everything. One will take longer to make a decision while the other will speed date with possible future catastrophe in a heartbeat. One can generate ideas on the fly and understand deeply how it will ‘become’, while the other needs a first push, an initial illumination to begin the self driving race to either oblivion or purgatory. After 3 hours of red wine, the verdict was, they are both essential but at different stages of the product or business lifecycle. Look at Ben Horowitz book “The hard thing about hard things” to see the same verdict for Peace-time and War time CEOs. Each have their importance, but the ultimate determinant is the stage of the product or business.
Zooming in and out as a super power: Enigmas have a mysterious ability to see and organise on a grand scale. This called Zooming out. They go up and have a birds eye view of solutions, products and business. An enigma sees a big gap with financial services in Africa and wants to bank the unbanked. She is already in her introspective mode. She time travels to eight years in the future where everyone now has a bank account because of the ubiquity of mobile phones. She begins to retro-visualise how we got to this point. Technology of today obviously needs to be leveraged. What technologies exists today? Internet and smart phones, USSD and feature phones and then smart feature phones (thank God for KaiOS). This is great. She is at the drawing board. What do I build? How do I build this? How do I get it to consumers? Who will I start from? What financial institutions will be most receptive to starting this unsure journey with me? What resources would I need? What skillset do I need? etc.
Builders are different. They possess a power to zoom in. They expand an idea and go straight into how it works, because of their skillset. The word builders alludes to the fact that they are vertical oriented. They have building skills for a particular domain, in essence, are domain masters. So, when an idea in their domain comes to them as the initial illumination, they zoom in to see its feasibility from the development side. In our above case study, a technical person zooms in to evaluate the closed system in the banking sector, explore the possibilities of getting around it and pushing for API integrations.
Building as a super power ONLY IF: Unfortunately, builders have an edge over enigmas in this regard (case in point — Microsoft’s Bill Gates). Building is so important because people are interested in products not just an idea. They want to feel it, touch it, see it, use it. Only builders can make this happen. Fortunately for enigmas, funds can even the playing field here. Enigmas can higher talented builders to build their vision. However, this may not be the ideal. An ideal scenario would be to have a builder in a long term business relationship with an enigma (Case in point — Apple’s Jobs and Wozniac). This duo is the most powerful force for creation and the ultimate super power.
Being able to do both is a super power that makes an entrepreneur and/or an intrapreneur a unicorn.
Cross Breeds: I mentioned Bill Gates earlier. He is one of those people called Unicorns. Bill had his initial illumination while developing the skills. The match was just gold. What this means is that it is possible to be both. Yes. I call it ‘Cross Breeding’. Using myself as an example. Early after school, I started a series of tech startups with the aim of changing the pharmaceutical space in Africa. I had the vision. I am a born enigma, however, I lacked the skills. 5 years after hoping from failure to failure and then taking a step back to introspect and study what made others successful, I realised that learning to build was ‘VERY’ important. I started with picking up design skills because that came more natural. I quickly realised that UIUX and product management skills enabled me build out prototypes for my ideas, understand the intersection between product desirability, feasibility and viability, and it was easier to have conversations now. This further made it clear that picking up programming skills to render my awesome prototypes into a functional MVP (Most Viable Product) will increase my chances of quickly trying ideas and finding what works. I fumbled at learning to code for too long but I kept at it until I stumbled on Google’s Flutter framework for the Dart programming language and I’m loving learning it so far. The best thing is its promise at native deployment for all platforms.
Cross breeding can happen both ways. A builder can also learn to discover ideas and Zoom out, by simply becoming more observant, expand reading and general knowledge base to other verticals or sub-verticals and listening a lot. Also, getting UX research skills seem to help from my experience and conversation industry wide.
In Summary: Zooming out (power of vision) and Zooming in (power of building) are two skills needed by every successful entrepreneur and/or intrapreneur. Most people are one, but cross breeding (having both) is the ultimate super power.
