Why Are Entrepreneurs That Way?

How does an entrepreneur think and what is that unscratchable itch that drives them? From time to time I ask myself these very questions and when I need a little perspective, I turn to the wisdom of Thoreau. These two paragraphs come from the final chapter of his book Walden:

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Why Start a Company When You Could...

There's a lot of opportunity out there and I've been hearing some interesting insights from several entrepreneurs recently who've been very much against the idea of someone starting their own company. The argument is that there is so much risk in a pre-revenue venture (after all, creating something from nothing is the hardest part). So then, they ask, why wouldn't you:

1. Join a revenue generating start-up? A huge part of the risk has been taken away and the question isn't as much 'whether this will ever work ' but how we can now tweak the business to grow revenues. You won't get anywhere near the same amount of stock but a lot of people have made good money this way (and built their networks through venture backed companies).
   
2. Buy an existing business that's stagnant. Again, the hard part has been done. There are businesses out there that are profitable but stagnant making between $100k-5mm a year. So rather than trying to start a business why not raise some private money and flip the company around?
   

The moral is that there are a lot of undervalued assets out there that can use an individual's talents just as well as any bright new business idea.

Viral Marketing & Design on FaceBook

A very interesting area I'm working on right now is Viral Marketing and Viral Design. As progress on Triip continues to move forward (predicting Launch in early December!) the team has been asking a lot of questions on how to launch our FaceBook app & how to add features that will optimize virality.

The presentation below is a stripped down (sorry!) version of a deck I created to show our engineering team how Marketing and Viral Design are essentially the same thing on a social media platform. The objective is to logically break down the question of 'how to do we get 100000 users?' into simpler parts and see what actionable steps we can take to reach success.


FB App Virality Drivers