A well-known entrepreneur was in my city giving the keynote at a local tech conference. Since I teach entrepreneurship, I offered my students extra credit for attending.
I wish I hadn’t. His advice was terrible.
The entrepreneur was from an older generation. Not that being old inherently means a person gives bad entrepreneurship advice, and the core issue I had with his advice had nothing to do with his age. The core issue was that he’d built and sold his massively successful tech company decades earlier. It was so successful that he had “f-you money” (yes, that’s a technical term), and he never needed to work another day in his life, so he hadn’t launched a new company in decades. As a result, his advice about building companies was based on an old, out-dated, and unnecessary model of entrepreneurship that no entrepreneurs should follow in 2023.
Unfortunately, whether they realize it or not, most entrepreneurs are still following the same, old-fashioned entrepreneurial model.
The basic gist of the speaker’s story was that he and his co-founders built an important piece of software a few decades ago. They had the idea for it, wrote a business plan, raised lots of money to build it, then, once they had the money, the developed the software, began selling it to people, went public, cashed out, and now he occasionally keynotes conferences between trips around the world on his private yacht.
(OK… I made the last part up about his private yacht. But I assume it’s not too far from the truth.)
It’s basically the archetype of a startup success story. Since half my students attended the entrepreneur’s keynote, and I didn’t want them blindly following what they’d heard, I decided to spend a few minutes at the start of my my next class refuting some of his more old-fashioned ideas about entrepreneurship.
“Raise your hand if you attended the extra credit talk from last week,” I asked once class began the following Monday. A large number of…