It has been exactly 2 years since I
decided to close my previous (and first) startup. After pondering over it for a
few months now, I have finally officially kick started my new startup. I decided
to start it with one of my previous co-founders, but am still on the hunt for a
third member. My last startup, which began as a winter break project, became
surprisingly successful and led to the creation of Faqden Labs. We shut down
the startup due to various reasons, which will be discussed in later blogs.
Until 2011, I launched almost one
iOS app per month. The process of going through the opportunity assessment,
product discovery, building a MVP product, and finally launching it was very
gratifying. The rush of launching a new app and marketing it cannot be matched by
anything else. Since December 2011, I have been busy with my job from Yahoo to Personagraph, now combined that with my kid and I’ve
had no time to think of a new startup idea or pursue an app, which made me miss
that rush in my life. I am currently the co-founder of Personagraph, which was
built in an incubator model. Incubators as entities have capital and they
attract entrepreneurs looking to build businesses. It is like building a new
business unit inside a large company.
I am sure you have heard of the term Serial Entrepreneurs;
people who love to start company after company and are unable to do anything
else. There is another category of entrepreneurs called Parallel Entrepreneurs
who start multiple companies simultaneously. A parallel entrepreneur is someone
who can’t do one thing at a time. They need to be working on multiple startups
at once to feel accomplished. Serial entrepreneurship put all their eggs in one
basket, so to speak. “If VCs spread their risk across numerous companies, why
should not we”, says Scott Rafer, 38, the former CEO of the search engine
Feedster. You can’t be a parallel CEO, but you can be a parallel entrepreneur.
The key is to have a full-time dedicated CEO running the store once the idea
has been proven.
I wanted to use this opportunity to touch a little bit on
what you need to ask yourself if you are a first time entrepreneur. Before
venturing into any start-up it is critical to ask yourself if you have what it
takes to be an entrepreneur? There are many ways to tell if you have that inner
spirit, that burning desire to be better than you were the day before, and to
really determine if you've got the potential to develop a genuine entrepreneurial
mindset. Below are few traits discussed by Matthew Medney (Founder & CEO of
DOG Media NYC) in one of his blogs which I am summarizing here:
You need to be a natural born leader and this is something
you will know very early on in your life. Have you always been the captain of
your football team or any sport team you played? Are you incapable of turning
off your brain, always conceptualizing new ideas 24/7 365 days year round? You
always dig deeper and try to understand the ideas at a deeper level and
emotional level. You are obsessive with a never give up attitude (almost a
Richard Branson Syndrome), are motivated
by people who perfect their art/skill, and are inspired by greatness and have a
collective mind. It’s never been work to you everything you do for your company
is fun, engaging, and exciting. You've never felt that you've truly worked at
all.
Unlike the school playground, the entrepreneur world is kind
to misfits. Those square pegs may not have an easy time in school, they may be
mocked by jocks and ignored at parties, but these days no serious successful
startup can prosper without them.
The mental qualities that make a good entrepreneur resemble
those that might get you diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome: an obsessive
interest in narrow subjects, a passion for numbers, patterns and machines, an
addiction to repetitive tasks, and a lack of sensitivity to social cues. A lot
of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs find the symptoms of Asperger's
"uncomfortably familiar.” Some people joke that the internet was invented
by and for people who are "on the spectrum", as they put it in the
Valley. Online, you can communicate without the ordeal of “meeting people.”
ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder - people who cannot focus on
one thing for long) is another entrepreneur affliction. As David Neeleman, the
founder of JetBlue says: "My ADD brain naturally searches for better ways
of doing things. With the disorganization, procrastination, inability to focus
and all the other bad things that come with ADD, there also come creativity and
the ability to take risks."
