Unmasking the startup bubble
Is starting your own venture worth
it? Experts analyse the pros and cons towards the path of success
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has been teaching MBA students for more
than 15 years. When he first started teaching, all his students wanted to work
for corporate giants like Goldman Sachs, IBM, and Unilever. A decade later,
Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon were the big draws.
“Now, the vast majority tell me, ‘You know, I’m going to be a
startup guy. I’m launching something. I’m going to create the next big X, Y,
Z’.”
“Who are we to crush their spirits?” Chamorro-Premuzic says.
“But I think we have a responsibility to inform people that the probability of
attaining that is really, really, really low, and that to actually attain it,
they’re going have to sacrifice so many things.”
Today, Chamorro-Premuzic is a psychology professor at Columbia
University and the chief talent scientist at Manpower. In one of the opening
chapters to his 2017 book, The Talent Delusion, he explains why
many ambitious people today would be better off working for an established
company than trying to build their own business. Yet many of these youngsters
are hypnotised by stories of entrepreneurs who, against the odds, made it big.
Even if they’re not prepared — personally or professionally to launch a
business, they forge ahead anyway.
“People feel like, ‘Oh, I have an idea. I don’t like the idea of
having a boss. I’m going to be the next Elon Musk,’” Chamorro-Premuzic said.
“It’s not that easy.”
The sex appeal of an entrepreneur
Morra Aarons-Mele, the founder of Women Online and The Mission
List, appears to have coined the term “entrepreneurship porn” in a 2014 Harvard
Business Review article, to describe “an airbrushed reality in which
all work is always meaningful and running your own business is a way to achieve
better work/life harmony.”
In the article, she makes the point that entrepreneurship is
hardly as liberating as it can seem: “Starting a company doesn’t mean being
freed from the grind; it means that the buck stops with you, always, even if
it’s Sunday morning or Friday night.”
Diving in
Too many aspiring founders think entrepreneurship is about ‘diving
in’ and then there’s the problematic notion that starting a business is all
about taking risks. “There’s something a little bit inherent in a lot of
founders’ psyches of, ‘You’ve just got to dive in,’ that it’s the type of thing
that you can’t go and learn about before you do it,” said Noam Wasserman, the
founding director of the Founder Central Initiative at the University of
Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. “The common misconception is
that “you have to fail, learn from that, pick yourself back up,” he added.
Wasserman’s observations recall those of Wharton professor Adam
Grant. In his 2016 book, Originals, Grant wrote that, contrary to
popular belief, the most successful entrepreneurs don’t quit their day job to
start a company. One University of Wisconsin study found that entrepreneurs who
kept their day jobs were 33 per cent less likely to fail than those who don’t.
Recent research also reveals just how important it is to wait
until you have enough experience before building a company. An MIT study found
the average age of a successful startup founder is 45. The study authors found
that work experience explains much of the age advantage. They write in
the Harvard Business Review, “Relative to founders with no relevant
experience, those with at least three years of prior work experience in the
same narrow industry as their startup were 85 per cent more likely to launch a
highly successful startup.”
businessinsider.in
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