Being an Entrepreneur
The story no one tells.
“The emotional ups and downs were the biggest surprise for me. One day, we’d think of ourselves as the next Google and dream of buying islands; the next, we’d be pondering how to let our loved ones know of our utter failure; and on and on.” — Paul Graham
Everyone talks about “this” or “that” entrepreneur that built something and became a billionaire, as if it was something that suddenly happened over night. What nobody talks about is the damn hard path you need to travel in order to get from idea to IPO (or any cash-in/success event).
Seriously, being an entrepreneur and having a startup is not as easy as everyone thinks it is; it is a path not everyone actually wants to cross. Don’t get me wrong, if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, and not just one who “dreams” about being the next Mark Zuckerberg, you need to be emotionally prepared to be knocked down on a daily basis, from failures to big sacrifices — this is a big crazy roller-coaster and everything (the up/down sides) can happen in the very same day within the same hour or 5 minutes. Are you ready to give up things you love? Are you ready to step out of your comfort zone? Let’s break things down:
Your life goes to background
Running a company is not like having a job. Before you notice it, you are spending all of your day on your startup, not just because you love it, but also because you really need to. You get to think about it day and night, but it never feels like “work” it is more like a lifestyle.
Having said that, this is where the fun begins, because in order to give your startup the 150% of your time needed, you have to put aside things, like watching a movie, hanging around with friends and all that many other things you used to do before you started your venture.
More importantly, what happens when you, the founder, have a family? For me, leaving my son and wife as I moved out to another city for growing my startup was one of the biggest sacrifices I’ve ever made in my life.
You need a thousand pounds of perseverance
There will be times when you’d think this is bullshit and you’d prefer to throw everything away; that’s a normal reaction. If this happened to be so easy, everyone would be doing it and there will be no more excitement around entrepreneurship.
The key for success is perseverance; you need to be persistent and confident about what you’re doing even when times are tough. For myself, when I felt I was going nowhere on this journey, a small amount of inspiration gave me the motivation needed to keep going.
As Javier Murillo, from MyCoffeeBox, says, the startup venture is just like the final layer of the Rubik’s cube, when you feel everything is messed up, you just perform a couple of movements and suddenly everything is fixed.
Get out of your comfort zone
Getting out of your comfort zone, at will or forced by the circumstances, activates your survival instinct, and thus, makes you be more proactive, because, well, your life is in danger. That’s why it is important to adapt as soon as possible and that’s when you start to innovate in so many ways.
When you are in a comfort zone,meaning when you are “professionally established”, it’s hard to innovate or disrupt on something, because, honestly, you don’t need to.
When I got accepted into the 500 Startups in Mexico City, I mistakenly though this was the golden ticket. I built the product, I now had funding, what else could be left? That made me enter a comfort zone for a short period of time, preventing me from performing many tasks I had in mind prior starting the acceleration program.
It is easy to get in a comfort zone, but it is not that easy to get out. Be careful and be brave to get out as soon as you get trapped by one.
Take advice, but don’t betray your instinct
As an entrepreneur, you have so many levels of knowledge you’ll need to polish on the way up to success, but we sometimes forget that we started this because we knew there was something missing and because we had the passion for doing it. Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of following all the advice they get, even when the vision gets betrayed; this only leads you to an infinite loop of doing nothing, because your instinct wants to do something, but your advisor said something totally different.
So, the best way to do it is to take all the advice, process it, and then make a decision based on the facts. If it doesn’t fit on what you think is good for the company, just don’t do it, no matter who told you so.
Never give up
I know, I’ve told you before to be persistent, but sometimes, as persistent as you are, you’d think, or being told to give up on your idea/startup, this is, because most of the people will think you’re crazy to keep going, but what you gotta know is that the people crazy enough to think they’ll get it, they eventually will.
I once was about to quit on Cloudadmin, because I was making assumptions on what I thought was going to happen, however, I didn’t and now things seems to have improved in the near term.
César Salazar, once told me: “I can’t tell anyone to quit, even when I know for sure they will fail, just for the very reason I once was there, people used to tell me to quit, because this wasn’t doing good at all, but I was that persistent that this eventually happened to succeed.”
Conclusions
Indeed, running a Startup is damn hard road, but looking back and watch your evolution is amazing. It makes you a better person, enhances your skill-set and most of all, having a great execution of your vision, at the end, pays all the bills.
All comes to a simple question: How bad you want it?
