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Taking the Leap
I SPEAK AT STARTUP EVENTS around the world, and eager young people often come up to me and ask, âShould I start a company or get more work experience first?â
I always respond by asking them a question in return: Why do you want to do it? Often, I can see that they are thinking of launching a startup only because everyone else is doing one. Or theyâre afraid theyâll miss out. Or they read about how exciting it can be. Or they think theyâll get rich quick. None of these are good reasons. What I want to hear is that they have a burning passion to solve a problem and have identified a strong business opportunity they believe in.
For most people, I recommend not starting a company if they are on the fence. Why? Because itâs no fun if youâre not 100 percent committed. In fact, it can be torture. Being an entrepreneur means you will be taking on a lot of risk and a lot of stress. Do you enjoy working all the time? Are you happy giving up your weekends and nights? Do you want to suffer under the worst, most tyrannical boss in the world: yourself? Do you think itâs wise to gamble away your lifeâs savings on a wild dream? Do you revel in alienating, annoying, and neglecting your family and friends? Do you like being short on money and fretting over the next payroll? Can you tolerate relying on underpaid employees who may quit at any time? Are you ready to jump on the biggest emotional roller coaster of your life and not be able to get off? If so, then by all means, do a startup.
Seriously, you have to be a special type of person to appreciate this. Itâs not for everyone, and if you lack the conviction, you probably wonât survive. You have to ask yourself: Is it worth the pain? If you hesitate, then youâll regret it. So, get a real job and never look back. Let other fools suffer while you enjoy dinners with your family, weekends at the spa, long lunches, and watercooler banter, all while earning a steady paycheck. Thatâs not a bad life.
You have to ask yourself: Is it worth the pain?
Most of the time, the people who ask me the question about starting a company or getting more work experience first are college students who have no idea what they want to do with their lives. For college students, the answer is obvious. You are young, you donât know much, and you can clearly benefit from experience in the workplace; so why not get some real-world exposure first? It canât hurt to learn how companies actually operate. The same advice applies to everyone, whether you are twenty-two or fifty-two years old, whether you have no experience or have worked for someone else your entire life. If you want to do a startup, begin by thinking like an entrepreneur and acquiring the necessary skills before taking the leap.
To do this, you need to find or create the right job. If you feel your current job is a dead end, with no room for growth and experimentation, and you want to become an entrepreneur, then you need to identify the type of job that can become your ideal training ground. Your number one goal should be to learn as much as you can as fast as you can. Whatever job you decide to take, it should be one in which you can maximize your learning. Choose a job not based on salary, title, or security, but on where you think you can grow the fastest. Look at what responsibilities, resources, and latitude youâll be given. Once you take the job, donât wait for anyone to teach you. You must own your jobâjust like you own a company. You need to constantly be finding ways to add more value, move the business forward, navigate around obstacles, and come up with innovative solutions.
Donât worry about upsetting your boss. Itâs fine to rock the boat. Itâs fine to fail. Itâs fine to act like a fool. Thatâs an essential part of being an entrepreneur. Itâs even fine to get fired. Youâll find another job. Whatâs not fine is sitting at your desk doing the same repetitive tasks day in and day out. If you do this, you are not cut out to be a startup founder. It might be easy and comfortable, but you wonât go anywhere.
Mark Cuban, the host of the popular TV show Shark Tank and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, knows a lot about when to quit a job. His first real job was at Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh. âA lot of my peers at Mellon were just happy to have a job,â says Cuban. âI wanted to be more entrepreneurial. I took the initiative.â He started a group called the Rookie Club, where heâd invite senior executives to a happy hour to talk with the younger employees. Then he went a little further. He started writing a newsletter. He did updates on current projects. He even tried to inject a little humor into the staid banking atmosphere. He thought his boss would love him for doing these things.
Instead, Cubanâs boss called him into his office one day and ripped him a new one. âWho the f**k do you think you are?â yelled the bank manager.
âI told him I was trying to help Mellon make more money,â says Cuban. âHe told me I was never to go over him or around him, or heâd crush me. I knew then it was time to get out of there.â
After tending bar for a while in Dallas, Cuban landed a job at Your Business Software, which sold PC software to businesses and consumers. At the time, this seemed like the ideal job to him. It paid $18,000 a year plus commission.
âI was happy,â recalls Cuban. âI was selling, making money. More importantly, I was learning about the PC and software industry and building a client base.â
About nine months in, he got an opportunity to make a $15,000 sale. He was going to make a $1,500 commission, which was a big deal to him at the time. Cuban asked a coworker to cover him at the office. He called his boss and told him that he was going to pick up the check. Cuban thought his boss would be thrilled. He wasnât. He told Cuban not to do it.
âI thought, âAre you kidding me?â I decided to do it anyway,â says Cuban. âI thought when I showed up with a $15,000 check, heâd be cool with it. Instead, when I came back to the office, he fired me on the spot. I had disobeyed him.â1
Thatâs when Cuban decided to start his own company, and he never looked back. He knew that everything heâd done up until that point was about learning as much as possible. He understood the computer industry, what it needed, and how to make sales. He used that knowledge to grow MicroSolutions into a company with $30 million in revenues. A few years later, he sold it to CompuServe. He used this windfall to launch an internet radio startup, which he later named Broadcast.com. The startup grew like crazy. This time around, he wound up selling his company for $5.7 billion to Yahoo!
Take Cuban as your role model. Keep pushing yourself. Donât settle for mediocrity. Itâs better to work for free at a job that challenges you than to get paid to squander your most precious resource: your time. Time is what matters most. Time should equal growth. Thatâs the only way to progress. Your brain is the most important asset you have. You canât let it atrophy. You need to exercise it daily, pushing its limits so you can see just how far you can go.
Time is what matters most. Time should equal growth.
Thatâs the only way to progress.
Your brain is the most important asset you have.
Look for those opportunities where you feel you can make a real difference. Then dive right in. Donât worry if you donât know what youâre doing. You may flounder around, but you canât swim if you wonât get wet. Find someone you truly respect to mentor you. Go out of your way to befriend those exceptional people who have the ability to change everything and everyone around them. Offer to help them for freeâeven if it means staying up late and working weekends. Thatâs how you compress the learning curve.
Before taking the leap to launch your own startup, try a variety of different jobs. Make a plan to learn as much as you can about all aspects of business. How does the company scale? What makes it so successful? Why do customers buy the products? Position yourself to interact with various departmentsâfrom engineering and logistics to sales and marketing. Understand exactly what they do and how they do it. How does the company acquire customers? Whoâs in charge of the procurement? Is there a search engine optimization guru on the team? Who are the top salespeople, and what are they doing right? How did the company build its brand? Go as deep as you can.
The size of the company doesnât matter. There are always opportunities for you to learn. Consider it your MBA in how enterprises work. You have a chance to dissect the organization, like you would a frog in science class, and understand it from the inside out. No matter what you decide to do with your future, whether itâs to rise up the corporate ladder or start your own business, this approach will benefit you. Youâll discover what you like doing and what youâre naturally good at. Youâll also figure out the types of jobs you shouldnât be doing.
If you do decide to take the leap and actually launch your startup, you will discover that the most obscure pieces of knowledge can suddenly come in handy. Itâs hard to predict what youâll need to know in the future, but every little bit of experience helps. Most entrepreneurs I work with lack at least one or two key areas of expertise when they launch their companies, and sometimes this can lead to problems.
For instance, I mentored a group of engineers who founded a startup. They were brilliant at coding but knew nothing about generating business. These engineers believed coding was the hard part, and that business development, marketing, and public relations was the easy part. They thought that all they needed to do was build a better product, and the customers would come. Only, the customers never came because no one knew their product even existed. The engineers hadnât brought anyone onboard who could help them with marketing or public relations because they didnât believe it mattered. Even worse, they thought it was a waste of money and time. So, they ignored the problem and continued coding. They added new features, optimized the servers, and scaled the back end. But, sadly, none of this helped, and their startup failed.
This is an extreme case, but even assuming the founders of a startup understand that they need help in marketing, PR, and sales, they often donât know enough to hire the right people. The best way to hire someone is to have done the job yourself, so you know what to look for. If you have no clue as to what the job entails, itâs hard to find the right people. This is all the more reason to have tried a lot of different things. You will know when to fill certain positions, what qualities to look for, and what the work entails.
Nearly every job affords a learning opportunity if you look for it. If you canât find it, then quit. And while youâre searching for your next job, learn on your own. Remember, everything you do in life adds up, so your goal should be to make sure you are exposed to as much as possible each step of the way. This is how to best prepare to take the leap.