An MBA ≠ a great entrepreneur
A few tips on what makes a well-rounded startup founder, based on my own entrepreneurial experience and 25+ investments as an angel investor.
I co-founded, scaled and sold a business during 2013–2017. It was my first time running a startup, the first time I’d raised investment, the first time hiring staff, and the first time doing pretty much anything properly entrepreneurial. You get the idea. I was new to it all.
It was both the scariest and most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.
But I had no educational background in startups or business — in the sense I’d done a (pharmacology) degree completely irrelevant to the (B2C software) startup. Not that the degree wasn’t a complete waste of time and money; I’d say the BSc was actually critical in that it taught me how to think.
Since the startup was acquired in the summer of 2017, I’ve been designing and delivering business accelerator programmes around the UK where I’ve helped invest over £3m into 60 companies. I’ve also invested in 25+ businesses myself (either directly or via a VC fund I invested in last year) — and I advise and mentor early stage tech startups across a range of sectors.
Through my experience of scaling a startup to 400k users in 190+ countries, and my work investing and supporting others for the best part of a decade, I’ve seen first-hand what makes a good startup founder.
A quick caveat before we continue: the following is based on my own experiences, and is therefore entirely subjective! It’s meant as an advisory starting point, not as something you take at face value and act upon without doing further research.
Education isn’t always necessary, but entrepreneurship can be taught
Academic education is a great route to learning some of the theory around running a business. But, in my experience, it can be just that — theory — and that’s not particularly useful at 4am on a Sunday morning as you and the team are trying to figure out a particularly pressing bug, or chase down signatures to close an investment round with less than a month of cash left in the bank account.
So much of what provides the unfair advantage to successful founders is experience. That raw, learned from the blood, sweat and tears experience you get toiling away building something from nothing. That can’t be taught. You have to learn by actually doing it. It’s generally not the first or second, or in some cases even third, attempt at building something that works and succeeds. As Jeff Bezos is credited with saying, “All overnight success takes about 10 years”. On a side note, every few months, I come back to a blogpost from investor Micah Baldwin which is worth a skim on this point.
As always, there are exceptions to the rule, but it’s a real rarity for first-time founders to get it right on the first try.
However, there are a few things you can learn that can help maximise your chances at success. Good startup accelerators, mentors or support structures can be a crucial way to help first-time founders navigate the entrepreneurial journey — and provide resources to help teach you the basics of building a startup.
An accelerator was the inflection point for my startup back in 2014, and it was such a positive life experience I joined the programme team as my first full-time role after our acquisition.
For early stage or first-time founders I work with on accelerators, I like to think the programme helps upskill them (and their early team members) personally in how to fail fast, while not suffering terminal failure. It’s about helping founders to understand how and when to make the right decisions that have the biggest potential impact on their business. If you can do that, it doesn’t matter if the idea they’re currently working on fails, because they’ll then have the experience to put that right for the next..
One thing you do always need to make it as a founder is a deep understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve. If you haven’t, you’re unlikely to have the passion to stick out the crushing lows that come with the euphoric highs (often 30s after each other).
You’re not the smartest person in the room
A lot of getting it right — especially in the early stages (the advisory relationship changes as the business and entrepreneur develops/ gains more experience) — is the ability to ask for help.
Asking for help comes from acknowledging and understanding that you’re struggling with something, and recognising a need for support. You can ask for help even with your domain experience and unwavering dedication to solving the problem. The good and great founders I’ve worked with are the first to open up and ask for help, instead of struggling away on their own in the hope they can figure it out themselves.
This also aligns with the ability to receive and action feedback. It’s a great life skill; learning how to take constructive criticism, parse the feedback and figure out what’s relevant (or worth actioning). This comes back to having the domain expertise around the problem area you’re building a solution for. You can know the problem better than anyone else in the world, but that doesn’t mean external points of view won’t help you do things better.
N+1
One of my enduring memories of being CEO was the 24/7 existential crisis I felt like I was living in. You exist on a meagre diet of ever-dwindling resources, everything can feel like it’s stacked against you and, if you’re the CEO or in a similar position, you’re personally responsible for your team, stakeholders and the business’s success or failure.
But I had an incredible group of investors, advisors and mentors who I could lean on for support. This support changed as I and the business developed over its lifetime, but I knew they were there and that made the hard times all the easier to deal with. Building (and maintaining) a network of people you can lean on is a great way to make sure you’ve got the support you need when the going gets tough.
This translates to the founders and startups I work with today — the good ones are adept at keeping me in the loop with what’s going on (both good and bad) and are skilled at taking every opportunity to expand their personal and professional networks.
These are just a few patterns I’ve noticed from my time in the startup ecosystem. There are others, and remember it’s not a one size fits all situation. There are always exceptions. Who knows, maybe you will be one?
If you’d like to chat about any of this, or discuss your startup, you can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter or book an Office Hours call for a chat.
This post first appeared online as an article for the Association of MBAs — the world’s impartial authority on postgraduate management education. You can read it here.
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