Up till the early 2000s, growing up in a household where the sole breadwinner is an Entrepreneur presupposed a financially unstable environment. My dad has been running his company as an IT service provider since 2006. Times have changed a lot, since.
Back then, being an entrepreneur meant that you ran your own company. Today, there’s an added element of “unique value proposition”. That implies that cafe owners may not always be classified as entrepreneurs – unless they provide an unique contribution to the audience.
This socio-cultural shift in understanding of Entrepreneurship has a myriad of implications. It means that entrepreneurs can now retire under 30, they can now gain investor interest just at the prototyping phase if their idea is unique and valuable enough. It also means that service providers like my dad can only enter the scene after the product has been created by someone else, and no one would create an IPO-worthy product under his own intrapreneurship wing if it is only going to credit the company and not them as individuals.
That’s all the more reason for the up and coming generation to shoot for other galaxies. Disruptive startups become Unicorns. In basketball (and most other contact sports) there’s a basic principle of “running into space” – one should run to spaces that are not crowded so that they can get the ball from their team mate without being blocked by the opponent. Likewise, a key takeaway we learnt from the venture simulation exercise is that it is not only important for startup ideas to be wild and out of the ordinary, it has to be way ahead of time – run into space and explore the untapped areas of discovery – to truly capture the market.
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