Masterclasses in entrepreneurship

• November 17, 2011

By Francis Moran

Two of the many events at last week’s Waterloo Region Entrepreneur Week featured presentations by young entrepreneurs who were generous in the sharing of personal stories and business and life lessons learned. Ryan Blair is a self-confessed former hoodlum and street-gang member who eventually embraced “legal entrepreneurship” and has built and exited a couple of companies. Y Combinator general partner Garry Tan shared his journey from “born employee” to reluctant entrepreneur and the lessons he learned along the way.

Here are a few of the things I heard that I really liked.

“You have to figure out what the customer is afraid of and become a solution.”

Several times in his presentation, Ryan returned to the theme of listening to customers and building what they’re looking for. I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. This synched very well with Garry’s statement, “Most things are solved very poorly.” The key nugget here is, don’t go building something before you’ve figured out if anyone needs it. The good thing, as Garry noted, is that there’s a lot of opportunity to build things people need or to fix things that were built badly in the first place.

To put his conviction on this point to the test, Ryan said he “went and sat in my customers’ homes and had dinner with them” so he could understand exactly how to reach them.

“Be a contrarian. Conventional wisdom is useless to an entrepreneur.”

In searching for that problem to solve, an entrepreneur has to be way out in front of the curve. If a problem is already in the news, “it’s too late for an entrepreneur,” Garry said.

Setting and constantly measuring goals “is the number one reason for my success.”

Any regular reader of this blog will know that I am a measurement fanatic. Here’s the key thing about goals, however, something that I think Ryan also understood: They’re not a guarantee of anything and failing to hit them ought not to be an excuse for blame and finger-pointing. Rather, they are yardsticks against which we measure progress. If you don’t set them in the first place, you have no such measurement tool available and how the heck do you know if you’ve arrived if you never decided where you were trying to get to in the first place? And failing to hit them — either by over or under-achieving — calls for analysis of the assumptions on which they were based and an assessment of the activities that were undertaken in support of achieving them.

“The only thing that really matters is actually building stuff.”

While this gem came from Garry, both he and Ryan repeatedly sounded the mantra, get’er done. In Garry’s case, the key point is that you can learn entrepreneurship only by doing it. In Ryan’s case, it was a call to action. “It’s real easy to make sense of the world by making excuses,” he said, with a clear reference to a drug-dealing father and misdirected teenage years that would have given him ample reason to continue wallowing. When things go wrong, redouble your efforts. Ryan, who had days of runway left before turning around his current enterprise, said, “When you’re faced with extinction, it’s real easy to get disciplined.”

“The competition can copy us, [we] just can’t [let them] catch us.”

Don’t worry if competitors follow your lead, Ryan said. In fact, if no one tries to copy what you’re doing, you’re probably not doing anything terribly worthwhile. As a previous advisor of mine once said, you are never so vulnerable as when you are incredibly successful because that’s when lots of new entrants — or, worse, big companies with far more vast resources — will enter your market. They key, as Ryan said, is to stay ahead of those copycats and new entrants.

“Do everything.”

I loved this short quip from Garry. He told marketers to crack that Ruby on Rails book and expand their understanding of how code is written and products are developed. Similarly, he counselled designers and developers to put themselves inside a marketer’s head and “worry about how people are actually going to use the product.”

“The really dangerous thing about (business school)…is that people come out and just want to manage and advise.”

While I don’t fully agree with this statement by Garry — I know lots of business school graduates who are hands-on operators who get the job done — there is a danger that entrepreneurs will surround themselves with too many advisors and spend too much time and money on counsel instead of focusing on execution. At the same time, however, when entrepreneurial startups grow up, they need professional management, something for which not all entrepreneurs are well suited.

“Fanatical customer support.”

Any regular reader of this blog knows that a core belief of mine is that superior customer experience is the only sustainable competitive differentiator. Startups must hive all the closer to this wisdom; those first customers will make or break the entire venture depending on how well they are treated.

[I am grateful to Communitech live bloggers @TerreChartrand and @ajreinhart for tweeting some of the nuggets I used here.]