Starting a company is cool. Just don't be a wantrapreneur.
What is that? An entrepreneur is a business person who has a passion for what they are building and a deep seated desire to make a fundamental change in their corner of the world. They make money as a secondary consequence of changing the world. They are not chasing it.
A wantrapreneur is a wannabe entrepreneur that talks a big talk and does little else. They may label themselves a serial entrepreneur, but all their startups have been flops because they were chasing money, not change. They sound great, they know the buzzwords, they have a big smile and a hearty laugh. But their business acumen is thinner than water on a rock.
I attended a tech function recently that was put on by a wantrapreneur. I had a conversation that went something like this (names and story changed to protect the innocent...ok, maybe not innocent, but not to embarrass anyone).
Me: Hi there, I am a jerk. What do you do?
Wantrapreneur: I just started a new company. I am a serial entrepreneur, this is my 8th startup.
Me: Wow, what does your company do?
Him: We are in stealth right now, I can't really talk about it. But it is going to be huge! We use Drupal and advertise on Google.Me: How can you be in stealth and advertise on Google?
Him: We advertise that we are in stealth. It's killer marketing.
Me: OK....what about your other companies. What did they do?
Him: One of them sold janitorial supplies during the bubble and ramped to a million uniques a month. I sold it to Marsh & Broad. Great exit.
Me: Martian broad?
Him: They were a private company that was involved in early stage aggregation for second channel oriented B2B wholesalers in the demand chain through a holistic web based portalization of consumer oriented strategies in a P2P paradigm on an open source platform that was heavily widgetized and sprinkled throughout social media in an ad revenue model. They advertised on Google.
Me: Are they still around?
Him: No, they were ahead of their time and became a victim of the bubble. Declared Chapter 7.
Me: I hope it was a cash deal.
Him: No it was for stock. But that stock was worth $50 million during our lockup!
Me: What was it worth after?
Him: Like I said, they declared Chapter 7.
Me: So how was it a great exit again?
Him: You are clearly new to startups. Any exit is a great exit.
Me: Right. What about the other companies?
Him: They were all great ideas, but they were either too early, or we ended up with investors that were short sighted and couldn't see the vision of what we were trying to do. So they pulled the plug. Venture capitalists are so demanding..."How are you doing against the milestones? How is customer sat? Is the product release
on track? Blah blah blah..."
Me: I see....
Him: One of my companies was going to be the next Google. But after the board got their knickers in a knot over how much we spent on office furniture one of our competitors stole our idea and now has a $100 million business based on what we were doing.
Me: Umm...isn't Google bigger than $100 million? Anyway, why did they win and you didn't?
Him: Like I said, I got stiffed with a bunch of VCs that didn't have any vision, all they cared about was the business. I mean, how can you recruit serious talent if you only spend $600 on your chairs?
Me: Excuse me, I need to remove a hangnail.
Don't be this guy.
