How School Is Failing Entrepreneurs Every Day?
A lot оf grеаt еntrерrеnеurѕ hаd іѕѕuеѕ wіth traditional education and many do not hold соllеgе dеgrееѕ. Many entrepreneurs are more action-based than knowledge-based. Entrepreneurs don’t care if they don’t know how to do something that is taught in school, they are more likely to find a creative solution around that or to connect the dots in an innovative way that still gets the job done.
The rigid format in schools provides the opposite in that things must be done this way, every time, by the book, and if the textbook doesn’t say you can, then you can’t. This is not the way of the entrepreneur.
I hope my story will serve as an inspiration to you out there. As the cofounder of 9to5.ai, I can tell you that it’s not all about education. My inspiration came from my dad, who is a successful entrepreneur that never went to college.
Though, he still believes that school is the way for me to achieve my success. This is probably because he wants to tell the world that his son graduated from this amazing school just like every dad in the world would do. Unfortunately for him that’s not the path I want to follow. School is not how I want to become an entrepreneur. Schools are built to churn out employees; I want to create jobs not look for one.
I sat him down one day and told him my decision to drop out of school and asked him to give me the money he was investing in my education. His reply was that of a typical dad, telling me the market was a sucker punch. I had already made up my mind up and I replied by telling him I’ll take it on the chin like a man.
Right after the conversation, I set up an e-commerce platform in Qatar. It took me over a month to fully prepare the site, which is also linked to Facebook ads. It was not slow at the beginning, a normal phase for all startups because of the few customers I had visiting my site and actually doing conducting business.
I finally figured it the problem… it was all about time. Consumers are not very patient and don’t want long waiting times to receive their merchandise as is the case with drop shipping.
Finally, I tried using a local supplier and was able to make quick sales selling iPhone X but still not through my platform. So when my dad’s business partner called me to his office one day, I said to myself maybe is the breakthrough I needed.
Out of nowhere, he told me that he wanted us to start an avocado business together. He said he already had a supplier who was based in Kenya, but what he didn’t have was a middle person involved and that middle person turn out to be one of the Co-founders of 9to5.ai today, Loyan.
After discussions with him, it turned out that he had nothing to with the avocado business and it was a friend who owned the farm factory back in Kenya and he was doing a favor for the friend. It turns out that Loyan was actually in the tech industry just like me but he was more interested in Enterprise software — it’s funny how a conversation about forming an avocado business could shift to tech business. Yet, we kept in touch and continued discussing our ideas until he stumbled onto another idea which was offering third-party SAP & Oracle enterprise software support services to clients by improving support & reducing annual software maintenance fees up to 50%.
I started to build a landing page, got a copywriter to finish up the website, and we integrated our website and our client portal to Jira so we could fix client tickets issue if they signed up with us. I started cold calling and booking appointments with chief technology officers of top companies in Qatar, but they were not very interested because out of five chief technology offices only two really understood the model and the two chief technology officer that understood the model couldn’t close due to the requirement to update their system from the old version to new version (which could take 6 to 7 months). Because of their outdated systems, they had to stay with their current vendors.
What we noticed in all the meeting we had was that they had a problem when it came to hiring tech roles. Loyan and I decided to take the bold step to help these clients to solve their problem by finding the right candidate for the upgrade project. Loyan come into play as a technical recruiter and handled all of the clients’ placement orders. Meanwhile, I was doing all the candidate sourcing and booking meetings for Loyan to do the screening part.
Soon after that process, we realized the final screening process of time-to-hire was a month between the candidate and hiring manager. Recruiters were underwhelmed by the experience and unhappy in general with the overall state of the recruiting and outsourcing industry. I came to realize that the bar was simply set exceptionally low. Loyan and I felt the urge to take action, so we set out to create a better hiring marketplace platform.
Our new startup, 9to5.ai, is a hiring marketplace to help automate the recruiting process by creating better matches for hiring managers and candidates, resulting in a faster, easier, cheaper, and happier hiring process.
From candidate to your next employee, the recruitment process is filled with a lot of procedural work. The process of finding candidates and acquiring their CVs, the screening, the interviewing, the feedback you have to give every time, the onboarding of your employees and their payroll issuance, all add up to wasted time and money on your side.
This is where 9to5 comes in. Thanks to our AI-powered platform, we change the recruiting landscape for the better. We provide assistance from beginning to end, from sourcing, qualifying, AI-enabled opportunity matching and scheduling. In my early days as a young entrepreneur, my greatest lesson learned from all my failed attempts was the lack of product market fit analysis.
Why I think school failed me is because, I’ve learnt through my failures and self-taught from idea to building the product to measuring the data and pivoting as fast I can in a very short time. Whereas I could hardly ever achieve this trait in school.
