All the time I hear capital.
Capital, capital, capital!
If you just give me the money I need I will be the next Unicorn.
But is that true?
Jack Ma, John Bezos, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg would disagree wholeheartedly.
Even non-tech companies like Berkshire Hathaway started with little and after learning how to manage little, the learnt how to manage a lot.
As an entrepreneur who has yet to bud (due to making all or most of the mistakes new businesses make), in my own humble opinion the most important resource to an entrepreneur is their mentality.
McKinsey calls it an entrepreneurial mindset and they have books that patent it as the McKinsey way.
But this entrepreneurial mindset is the same scientific method that has existed since:
- You observe a phenomenon
- You form a hypothesis
- You test you hypothesis with experiment
- You make a conclusion on hypothesis and may have to run further experiments
That is basically what new businesses are doing, they see an opportunity in a problem, hypothesize a solution, test it in the market until they get a workable business model that can scale.
The only difference I see is in the speed at which entrepreneurs experiment and pivot.
This is also why data scientist are so sort after and why a PhD holder is a gold mine in the job market.
My problem was my arrogance. I had capital. I felt I could spoon feed my customers my own model; so I went through multiple developers and programmers to get the product I wanted (which they still failed to do) without any feedback from my consumers.
However, mindset, like almost everything else, can be changed by our choices.
God bless.