Types of False Entrepreneurs — Are You One?

A Generation of False Entrepreneurs — Part II

This is a continuation of my previous article, “A Generation Of False Entrepreneurs”. In this post, I’ll elaborate on the types of false entrepreneurs I’ve noticed over the last few years.

In my last article, I made the claim that we’re raising a generation of false entrepreneurs. Modern day entrepreneurship has been plagued by narcissism. We’re stuck in, what I like to call, the most sophisticated clusterfuck of this century. To fully understand this phenomenon, let’s look at some of the archetypes such people often sort into..

As we established in the last piece, there are no official qualifications required to becoming an entrepreneur. But being a dropout certainly seems like an unofficial one.

There is nothing wrong with dropping out per se. If half way through your college you realize that it’s obstructing you from achieving your dreams, or the cost is becoming a burden, then that’s a legitimate reason to dropout.

That’s also the reasoning behind most of the popular dropout stories that you hear, from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg. The problem arises when it becomes cool and trendy, which is exactly what has happened in the last decade. When people start dropping out just for the sake of dropping out, you know that they are screwing up.

I was at a Hackathon recently when one of the guys participating started sharing his story. Towards the end of his speech he said, “I’ve been a dropout for the past one year” meaning that he had skipped college right after high school.

What occurred next just left me perplexed. The entire crowd present at the event literally started applauding. They were cheering at the mere fact that he had skipped college. Do I really need to explain any further?

Just like the sugarcoated failure stories, being a dropout has become a badge of honor in the startup culture. This is our fault. We’re responsible for idolizing only those dropouts who made it, while the reality is that most do not make it, and the majority of Millionaires are often college graduates.

It is true that one size doesn’t fit all. Some people are naturally curious, while others need to be triggered externally and college can be a safe environment to do just that. In an attempt to divert from the norm, to refuse to follow the herd mind, we are making the grave mistake of creating an alternate herd mind.

Schooling doesn’t work for everyone, but it does for some. Going to college or dropping out is a personal choice, and we should just leave it to them instead of trying to promote any single mindset.

This is Eric. Once in a while, Eric comes up with an absurd idea and is just bewildered that no one has built something like it before. He thinks that he must be genius for coming up with such a self-claimed brilliant idea that he know for a fact will change the world. He even starts constructing quotable statements for when the media will interview him about his eureka moment. As you might have already guessed, Eric is suffering from the “idea person” syndrome.

He is always so thrilled with his ideas that he just cannot wait to meet his own Steve Wozniak to help him build them. He is even generous enough to offer equity to the developers who actually do all the work, that is once he becomes the CEO of this soon-to-be Billion Dollar Company.

He even makes people sign an NDA every single time they ask him to reveal his golden ideas. And when you do reluctantly sign those silly papers, you find out that his “genius idea” is nothing but another “Uber for X”

If you recognize yourself with any of Eric’s characteristics, then you, my friend, live in a fantasy. There is no such thing as a successful idea person, just like there is no such thing as a successful dropout. Your idea doesn’t make you anything and the exact value of your idea in the real world is absolutely zero. You have been fooled by the the startup world into believing the fictional character.

The pretentious idiot is a walking example of everything that is annoying and wrong with the current startup culture. They are attracted to the celebrity status of entrepreneurship. They are desperate to be featured in newspapers, blogs and magazines. Again, the blame comes down to the way we treat entrepreneurs, as if they are men of some special breed who will magically push the world forward, just by the virtue of being entrepreneurs.

Officially, their occupation is being the CEO of a legally registered company, but their real daytime job is networking with other entrepreneurs by attending every single startup conference in town. Their startup is nothing but an empty vessel, an ornament to decorate their hipster lifestyle.

Here’s a simple method to figure out whether you’re an pretentious idiot or not. Answer this question with all honesty — what matters more to you, what people think about you or what people think about your product? If it’s the former, then you are sadly a false entrepreneur and you should do something about it.

The greedy tycoon is the startup entrepreneur who believes that you should always take more than you give, a mentality responsible for the persistent economic inequality that we see today. They enter the field of entrepreneurship with the one-track goal to become filthy rich, and couldn’t care less if the poor are getting poorer.

Unlike the pretentious idiot, a greedy tycoon actually owns a successful company that generates real revenue, which is a good thing but with the wrong attitude. They understand that the free market can be controlled and manipulated, and realize the power of equity percentages. They then use this knowledge to suck in vast amounts of cash into their bank accounts, while sitting in their cozy office with a smug face.

Now you might question what is wrong with any of this, after all no one is entitled to anything and it is the executives of the company who mobilize the people working for them, thus rightly earning their wealth.

The thing is through, and correct me if I’m wrong, while we have properly defined the poverty line, there is no such standard in place to measure the rich. Meaning, there is no limit to how much one can earn. And that is a bad thing, because we live in a world of limited resources, and when few people start reserving large percentages of it for themselves, we create an unhealthy economy that is stagnant and slow, which is naturally prone to a financial crisis.

I’m not saying we should not blame individuals for their poor choices in life, but our economy, by the nature of its design, has many built-in cracks, and sometimes some people fall into these cracks. So how do you solve such a complex problem? Honestly, I have no clue. I’m not a qualified economist, but a maximum wage and a basic income for everyone, makes a lot of sense to me.

Being an entrepreneur is not a luxury, it’s a burden. It’s a responsibility on your shoulders to produce quality products, provide employment and serve the needs of your customers. If you happen to be a greedy tycoon, realize that this is not a casual game of monopoly, so please stop contaminating it.

The last thing to discuss is the startup bubble, or is it a bubble? A lot of people seem to think so. It’s no secret that venture capitalists are pouring in too much money into flimsy startups without any proper growth model. These startups might look lucrative by number of users, but take a peak into their financial records and you’ll notice their shockingly high burn rate and an embarrassingly low profit margin, that is if they are making any revenue at all.

But I want to talk about a different kind of bubble, the social bubble. I believe that the false perception of entrepreneurship that has been inflated in the last decade is gradually deflating. And in a way, by writing this article, I’m participating in it’s downfall.

This could result in VC’s being more careful with their investment, instead of throwing around money to find the next big thing. It could also result in startups wanting to get out of the “startup zone” as soon as possible, detaching themselves from all the circle-jerking, to build established companies.

In other words, the glass half-full view is, the false entrepreneur attitude is gradually going to wash away. And due this self-correcting nature, it is safe to say that we might probably be entering the next golden age of entrepreneurship.