The career dilemma for startup entrepreneurs

Leaving your day job to launch a startup is a big and difficult decision to make. It is made especially difficult because the skill set needed to run a startup is very different from the one you need to make a career in BigCorp, probably even more so if you have a technical background (like me). 

How are they different? This is a gross oversimplification but let’s say there are three main activities performed in any company:

• Producing. In a software company this is what the developer or designer is doing. They build stuff.
• Managing. This is all the overhead activities that comes with more people, larger projects and multiple offices. It’s everything from managing customer requirements, writing change requests and setting salaries.
• Selling. Selling is the act of bringing your product to your customers. For simplicity’s sake I include marketing here.

If you have technical background and want to make a career in a large company, most likely you will end up managing something or someone. Unfortunately, very few large companies have good career paths for technical roles. Even worse, “programmer” is usually at the bottom of the food chain and a so called “architect” will be spending more times in meetings with PowerPoints than actually producing (coding). I have spent years managing requirements in large telecom projects, for example. 

When it comes to selling, very few people in a large organization work with actually driving and increasing sales. It’s usually a question of managing existing customer relationships. So, the skills needed look like this:

A corporate culture where managing is the most important skill will be characterized by endless meetings, a lot of document overhead, lots of middle managers (often competing with each other in political struggles) and long decision times (often months or even years). 

In a startup, on the other hand, there are basically just three roles: hacker, designer (both producers) and hustler (sales). The skills in a startup look like this:

Yes, managing will be important some day in the future, but not when leaving the corporate career path and starting something new. 

So there is the dilemma: you’re not just saying goodbye to your corporate salary, you’re also saying goodbye to skills that will reward you in the corporate career ladder. A hard choice.

Of course another way to look at it is: do I want to spend the rest of my life having endless meetings, working with document overhead, fighting political struggles with middle managers and spending most of my days without moving the needle? 

Perhaps the choice isn’t so hard after all.

What is entrepreneurship and how does it relate to innovation?

I love this definition of entrepreneurship:

Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.

Compare this to the following definitions of the word “innovation”:

“Change that creates a new dimension of performance.”
-Peter Drucker

“The introduction of new goods (…), new methods of production (…), the opening of new markets (…), the conquest of new sources of supply (…) and the carrying out of a new organization of any industry”
-Joseph Schumpeter

“Innovation is a new element introduced in the network which changes, even if momentarily, the costs of transactions between at least two actors, elements or nodes, in the network.”
-Regis Cabral

“The three stages in the process of innovation: invention, translation and commercialization.”
-Bruce D. Merrifield

So then what is the relationship between entrepreneurship and innovation? Two sides of the same coin? Perhaps. Entrepreneurship takes the perspective of the individuals or the organization that drives the change while the innovation is the change itself. While they are not the same they certainly walk hand in hand.

Jobs of the future: services, super-brands and startups

The machine and the man. Photo by me.

Automation is killing the job market, not China. That’s the message in this post recently posted on Hacker News.

I’m not sure I agree.

I can see two very clear trends when it comes to where new jobs are created.

One is the shift from industry jobs to service jobs.

Did you know that globally, farming has been the most common profession since basically the dawn of civilization up until about a decade ago? Now it’s service jobs.

Humans helping other humans, this is a type of jobs that will never go away because humans have qualities (“the golden scarcities“) that machines can never possess regardless of if they pass Turing tests or not.

Forget the factory worker, I want to see more hairdressers, singers, gardeners, interior decorators, designers, artists, coaches and ocularists.

The second is the bleeding edge of innovation and super-brands that have shorter and shorter lifespans. The share of the economy belonging to the mega-corps is decreasing. Smaller and faster is the way of the future. This is the era of the startup economy. The only thing that will remain big are the brands – mindshare.

So there you have it: services, super-brands and startups.

That’s what the economy will look like the next 50 years. Heck, it’s what it looks like today!

At least the part that’s working.

Photos from SSWC 2011

Sweden Social Web Camp is an unconference held on an island in the Blekinge archipelago in souther Sweden. I’ve written about it before so this time I will just post a few photos I took. Perhaps I will get back with a longer post for this years edition, there was a lot to digest.

You can find my Flickr-set here and the group with photos from everyone here. There are currently 1346 photos in the group…

These are the ones I took and that I’m pleased with.

Anna on the rocks.

Jocke in the tree.

Jumping from a cliff.

Winning.

Flying.

The Brit (there can be only one).

I’ve got the power!

Tents and geeks.

We’ve got a jumper!

Good times.

All the photos (except two that didn’t upload for some reason) are also on Google+.

Wealth

“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.”
– Henry David Thoreau

2010 in review – this blog in numbers

This blog is hosted on WordPress.com and they just sent a summary over last years activities on the blog.

Hm. Only 14 blog posts. I need to speed up this year. Hopefully, that would increase the visitor count as well. Also, there seems to be a bug in the mail generator. I didn’t have  2 visitors on my busiest day, March 3, I had  2709 visitors that day (I was on the front page of Hacker News).

The WordPress.com stats mail below:

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2010. That’s about 31 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 14 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 136 posts. There were 3 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 379kb.

The busiest day of the year was March 3rd with 2 views. The most popular post that day was It’s going to take five years.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were news.ycombinator.com, reddit.com, Google Reader, twitter.com, and blog.inklingmarkets.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for kinds of money, different kinds of money, ola ahlvarsson, bredbandsbolaget, and blocket omsättning 2009.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

It’s going to take five years March 2010
9 comments

Build a system, not a product December 2009
30 comments

Different kinds of money June 2010
2 comments

Money is failure September 2009
4 comments

Your business idea as a promise August 2009

Väntar

.

Posted via email from Dagens Bild

The Art of Profitability

This was one of my favorite books 2009. The book was written in 2002 by Adrian Slywotzky. It’s an unusual business book, written in a storytelling style.
It’s a classic teacher-student story where we get to follow a young man being tutored by an experienced entrepreneur. A very light read filled with nuggets of wisdom.