Startup Weekend is a microcosm of business.
The biggest example is how in a matter of hours our startup pitch team experienced natural attrition that takes years at large companies.
As I documented in my column last week, our Bell team last month at The eFactory competition was cut in half when members lost confidence in the idea or discovered they were more valuable on another team.
I wouldn’t go so far to say 54 hours building a business plan with strangers changed my life. But it is an experience worth trying. And there were some major lessons learned.
Here are five:
1. Forget failure. The exercise teaches us not to fear failure. A healthy fear is OK; it can help to drive us to tangible solutions, but personally fear has kept me from even trying new things. Sure, the startup failure rate is off the chart. That doesn’t mean entrepreneurs are completely incompetent and unaccomplished. Million-dollar ideas are buried in a sea of failures. Entrepreneurs find them.
2. Demands full confidence. Even when it’s only at 75 percent (or less). Chris Allen, one of the event organizers, put it this way: “Fake it, till you create it.” The reality is we don’t know our ideas will work until we convince enough people to go along and try them. Building a qualified team take faking it, at times, with calculated assumptions. I see the entrepreneurial recipe as one part savvy persuasion and two parts elbow grease.
3. It’s exhausting. Intense. But it’s exciting, full of energy. This back and forth of excitement and exhaustion is par for the course. A huge challenge, and something entrepreneurs have confessed to me, is harnessing that energy into productivity. Why are so many entrepreneurs attention deficit?
4. Think fast. So many questions. I ask questions for a living, so questions are no bother. But here, I had to develop quality answers – and fast. One answer, leads to another question, leads to another answer, leads to another question. Now, I better understand why entrepreneurs and coffee go hand-in-hand.
5. Capital is king. A great idea is worth squat. Everybody has them. Just ask. A great idea with funding gets the ball moving. Now, if only I could find my billionaire great uncle.
I’m told the first Startup Weekend will birth a second, and others may limit pitches to particular sectors, say medical technologies, manufacturing or art. Keep your eyes and ears open.
Springfield needs this fledgling community. But not only Springfield. The United States needs young entrepreneurs.
A recent
Wall Street Journal article calls them an endangered species. The number of private business owners under the age of 30 is at a 24-year low – roughly 3.6 percent of U.S. households, according to WSJ’s analysis of Federal Reserve data from 2013. Five years ago, the share of young business owners was 6 percent and it was over 10 percent in 1989.
This statistical bleeding of entrepreneurs counters a nationwide buzz about startup activity, from network TV shows to local angel investors.
I don’t want to think of a U.S. economy void of the energy, ideas and advancements provided by young business owners. Startup Weekend may not be the answer, but it’s part of the entrepreneurial equation.
And for Springfield, it just might be key to determining our city’s startup identity. Boulder, Colo., is software, Silicon Valley is Web and Kansas City is med tech.
Springfield’s opportunity is now.
Springfield Business Journal Editor Eric Olson can be reached at eolson@sbj.net.
