Social Entrepreneurship: A Fiasco of an Intro
Running a company is difficult, but not for the reasons I imagined. I expected to make tough decisions, face criticism (of the nonconstructive variety), and feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work and effort required to develop a startup. And I have done, and continue to do on occasion, all of those things. I did not expect, however, to ever face the issue of having too much well-meaning support and advice.
Let’s backtrack for a moment: When a longtime mentor asked me to blog about the lessons I have learned as a college student running a startup, I was ecstatic. After all, when I started Giventure, I honestly believed that running the company was as simple as building an app and letting it loose in the world. (Spoiler: It’s not.) Having severely underestimated the crazy journey I had agreed to take, I wanted to share my personal experiences with other young aspiring entrepreneurs to prevent them from making the same mistakes I did. (You are welcome and encouraged to create your own mistakes though. Just stay out of mine.)
The enthusiasm slowly waned, however, as I spent weeks agonizing over how to structure this blog series. First drafts included cheesy taglines covering everything from “Finding inspiration and developing an idea” to “Identifying need and tracking impact” and “Gathering and structuring a new team.” Watching my arsenal of scrapped posts gradually conquer my desk, I realized that I was perpetuating the same broken cycle of knowledge transfer that motivated me to start this blog series.
Back to the point: Everyone from Fortune 500 CEO's to your neighbor’s dog has an opinion on how to best run a company. Everyone means well. Everyone wants to help. Listen to them all. Take notes, nod, and ask questions, even if the advice directly contradicts what an equally reputable source has said. The fact is that several founders will do all the “right” things and will still watch their companies go bankrupt. If there truly were a standard recipe for success, we would all be the next Bill Gates or Elon Musk. This brings me to…
Lesson Number One:
Do not blindly accept this lesson, or any of its successors.
Instead, absorb all available information. Make an educated decision. Record the results. Create conclusions. Identify the gaps in your knowledge. Repeat. (To my fellow scientists: Sound familiar?)
Through this blog series, I hope to share the steps I took to revise my own decision-making process, and the lessons I learned while learning not to learn lessons. You won’t find a “Seven Steps to Startup Success” or “Five Facets of Every Famous Founder” here. Join me again next Manic Monday for a fiasco of a follow-up, or you can follow the entire series here.
