What You Know About Startups Is Wrong: How to Navigate Entrepreneurial Urban Legends That Threaten Your Relationships, Your Health, Your Finances, and Your Career by Reddy KP

Author:Reddy, KP [Reddy, KP]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Published: 2018-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

5. Leverage Great Relationships

After years of being an entrepreneur, I’ve learned a hard truth: We are not calling the shots. The universe is.

People who become entrepreneurs were often at the mercy of someone else’s authority in previous work environments. Once they strike out on their own, there’s a tendency to become intoxicated with the newfound freedom and power. They believe executing on a plan—whether it’s to hit a milestone or raise your next round—is all it takes to make that plan happen. This sense of control isn’t real because there are too many moving parts.

Navigation in the startup world is less about having street-by-street, turn-by-turn directions, and more about having a compass. Roadblocks that are out of your control continually pop up, and sometimes, you hit a dead end. I’ve found, however, there’s always more than one way to get where you’re going.

In 1997 at The Reddy Group, the first product my partner and I built focused on engineering and construction management via the web. Engineering and construction were what we knew, and we wanted to create solutions for those industries, which were dysfunctional and difficult to organize. Mistakes are expensive, often brutally so. We invested a huge amount of time and energy in our product, but the world of technology wasn’t what it is today. You couldn’t whip out your iPhone, take pictures, and send the photos to the cloud.

We knew the industry, we knew what we were doing, we had a plan, but guess what happened when we went to market? Not enough people had computers—some of the companies we approached had one or two computers total. Believe it or not, people still thought the internet was a fad that would come and go, like laser discs. Peyton and I had borrowed against our credit cards to start the company, and we eventually realized we had no idea what we were doing. Fortunately, we were able to pivot. We sold the product to other industries such as telecommunications. But for too long, we were stuck thinking we had it all figured out and were trying to market to the industry we thought we knew .

The Antidote to Ego: Beginner’s Mind

When you believe you are in charge, your ego gets rolling like a snowball down a hill, becoming bigger and bigger. You fall into the trap of thinking everyone around you is stupid. But startups are about experimenting to figure things out. Nothing is known.

Many people come to startups from top companies like McKinsey, the global management and consulting firm; there, they were heavy hitters at sales and driving business. As entrepreneurs, they’re shocked when they don’t have the same results. At big companies, however, the sales often come to you via phone. In a big corporation, you’re running around the decks of a battleship. In a startup, you’re in a rowboat. You’re beaten by storms and waves, trying to figure out in which direction to go and how to survive.

Brian worked at the accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young for fifteen years; it was his first job out of college.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.