Who Would Be Crazy Enough to Be an Entrepreneur?
The answer is me. And I’ll tell you all my secrets as to why.
“People come in here everyday. And they’re all the same. They set up one meeting and go on a long rant about how they know their dream job is… wait for it… an entrepreneur. I sit with them, and I listen, but I can’t help but wonder: Why on Earth would anyone want this job? It’s stressful, full of failures, unnoticed hard work, and unstable. You’d have to be crazy. Do these people understand what being a founder actually means? Or does the world just have a rose colored understanding, glamorizing unicorn companies and idealizing what it’s like to have “no boss”? Still, everyday without fail there are people coming in here telling me they want to be an entrepreneur.”
These are the words (or at least the idea behind them… forgive me for not remembering the exact words) that leader at the Harvard Innovation Lab said to an audience as part of a speaker series event. Given the context, the room was primarily filled with student founders, like myself, or entrepreneurial minded MBA candidates. And upon hearing the above exclamation, the room nervously laughed together.
I can’t speak for anyone who was in attendance except for myself.
But I certainly felt launched in an existential crisis and was spiraling down a hole of imposter syndrome.
Was I making the wrong decision being an entrepreneur? Did I deserve to even call myself entrepreneur (especially if I sometimes forgot how to spell it)? Was there any point to the work I was doing, or were all my efforts fruitless? Should I be spending my time immersing myself in “more typical” student-run, school sanctioned activities? Was I going crazy? — But then the speaker joined in with the crowd laughing:
“We are entrepreneurs because we have ideas that we love. We see a way that the world can be better, and no one else is doing anything about it. So we have to.”
Again, I do not remember the exact words, but the sentiment of the speaker was something like this. And with this, I felt relief. The collective first person plural pronoun made me feel included. I looked around the room, and I felt gratitude. I was happy to not only be a part of the Harvard Innovation Lab community but also to be a part of a much greater, much older community of all entrepreneurs, every single, crazy one of us.
This reminded me of my time at the Forbes 30 Under 30 Women’s Summit, I had the pleasure of listening to a role model of mine, Whitney Wolfe Herd, offer up similar advice: “When you are a world changing startup you have to change the world to start.”
So for all those wondering why anyone would be crazy enough to be an entrepreneur, my answer to you is that the world needs changing. And innovation is the way to change.
