Entrepreneur in Startupland
“I’m late / I’m late / For a very important date. / No time to say “Hello, Goodbye”. / I’m late, I’m late.”
~White Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland
Pursuing our dreams is so immersive sometimes that it can transport us to a different reality.
Last week I visited Startupland: Silicon Valley. To be honest, it felt like a different reality. Maybe I simply fell asleep and everything was just a dream.
Entering the land was no easy task.
At the airport I had to enter, literally, by the small door. The door[knob], officer Achiapo, told me it was simply impassible. Being born in Colombia is apparently a curse for the locals who highly believe everyone has come to stay.
I had to eat several hours of sour treatment, to finally convince them that I was just there to discover the ecosystem.
Once in you can sense how everyone is chasing the white rabbit. They urge you to go fast and to execute ideas, to be the first to please the capitalism queen. Well, to be fair, it is not about capitalism, it is about changing the world [as fast as you humanly can].
Building a billion dollar company can take a lifetime, and I think that is why I like Silicon Valley’s mentality. In Startupland, that lifetime becomes a few years, excelled by the thirst of chasing that white rabbit.
The ambiance can be overwhelming at first.
If you’re not focused enough in which way you want to go, you can easily forget that you are allowed to figure out what inspires you.
That hurry can imprison your mind. I think that is why the overconfident French caterpillar we met affirmed that French people were not what it needed to build his business.
When you settle for something less than what you really desire, you destroy your chances, and you finish resentful with the world you’re trying to escape from, because you won’t be able to show your true potential.
Probably the caterpillar got too much into the vibe and forgot it is not about the French culture but about the startup cultural mindset.
Because it’s all about an awesome culture, right?
As the people at the Square table at the tea party would say: Creating a culture is what brings people together, it creates mechanisms that work by themselves, without having adult supervision all the time. A culture creates knowledge workers, executing and planning without even thinking about it. Pretty cool, uh?
Hey, and don’t forget that it is also about entertainment. Visiting the colorful giant of the Silicon Valley, can leave a little bit of the taste of Disney Land. How else can you get the most brilliant people in the planet to work for you? Employee perks have a different definition in this land!
Startupland is a breathtakingly exciting place.
It is hard to describe why, but there is magic in the air. Even the nightlife is different. It feels so unreal, it is like looking at the face of a smiling cat.
From an outsider perspective, people are crazy over there. But that is actually a good thing, because the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do!
Being there infects you with the craziness. You quickly begin thinking differently with the feeling that everything is possible.
You understand that life is not a straight line, and that you are allowed to fail, as far as you are willing to start up again. How hard can you get hit and keep moving forward?
At the end of the day you’ll be excited to be alive, and to share that collective vibe of wanting to succeed.
In retrospect.
All that experience could have been a dream for all I know. What is certain is that making an idea become global, it’s not about yourself. We have to strive to find extraordinary love for something. Only then, we will tap into an extraordinary path.
Because being successful is about how many people go in the same direction with you, chasing the same white rabbit before it finishes its tasks...
