Dialogue Across the Pacific: Confession of Two Entrepreneurs…

Eddie Hartman (Co-Founder of Legalzoom) and I (Founder of IIX and IIX Foundations) are friends who like to muse about life across the Pacific Ocean. Despite the separation of 16 hours of time zone, work, family, friends and life we find a lot of mundane and not so mundane things to ‘muse’ about. Here is such an exchange…

Edward Hartman to Durreen Shahnaz

September 15, 2017

Please let me know what you think of the article below

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/business/entrepreneur-young-trouble.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

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Durreen Shahnaz to Edward Hartman

September 15, 2017

Interestingly, I actually agree with quite a bit and could see a lot of myself in the article (crazy; great sense of self-worth; bored out of my mind in school; breaking societal rules.. but not stealing.. I was always on a strange moral high ground... I was always happy to give away little that I had but stealing.. no way!...). The key in the article was 'moral disengagement' -- I do see that a lot with men in general.

I completely agree that the right mix for a successful entrepreneur is the venn diagram of rebel, moral engagement and consulting training (you need that problem solving skill set). 

In terms of me, I am what I am -- crazy and intense coming from a restrictive Muslim society -- can you imagine what would have happened to me if I actually grew up in the open society of the US – and even as a white man?

What was your take on the article?

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Edward Hartman to Durreen Shahnaz

September 17, 2017

When I read it, I thought - "wow, that nails it. That describes me, it describes my Dad, it describes many of the entrepreneurs I have worked with." We are all told we are smarter than the average bear, or we come to believe it. It is not a linear smartness - I have no doubt the average CalTech student is smarter than I am - but rather a functional smartness. We are more likely to see the winning move, identify the strategy, find the path forward. We can see that the emperor has no clothes, and perhaps convince others that the emperor does indeed have clothes.

And then you think: Why are boring and predictable people in charge? Small moments of acting out follow, subterfuge, sabotage, skipping class. You think you are special, and you act accordingly.

Eventually you grow up, of course. You learn to play within the rules. But that sense of specialness remains, waiting to be harnessed.

An entrepreneur can recognize another entrepreneur. That’s how I know that this applies every bit as much to you as to me. You are just the same. No sari can hide you.

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Durreen Shahnaz to Eddie Hartman

September 19, 2017

Your comment, ‘You are just the same. No sari can hide you’ made me think. You are right. I was an entrepreneur even without knowing it. I was influenced by entrepreneurs who did not know they were entrepreneurs themselves…Allow me to explain.

Growing up in a conservative Bengali, Muslim society, we had to adhere by endless ‘societal’ rules. In the middle class families like ours, rules for the boys (which of course were far less than the rules for the girls) were that you had to study hard to be doctors, lawyers, bankers, engineers or civil servants (in our colonial system – being a government official through a civil service exam was and still is a big deal). Rules for the girls were you study hard to get in to university but then to become a good wife to your doctor, lawyer, engineer, banker or civil servant husband (I still remember endless cousins and Aunts who studied, ‘Home Economics’ – basically training to be a good wife).

The word ‘entrepreneur’ in this set up did not exist. What did exist was the ‘dirty’ concept of a ‘business man’. A business man was someone who was basically a trader -- a wheeler dealer of sorts. It was assumed this person did some ‘business’ of illicit nature (business was always assumed to be illicit). Do note, there were no business women. The only association of a woman on the ‘business’ side was she was unfortunate enough to marry one. That means the woman did not fare well in the marriage market and got to pick from the bottom of the barrel. I had a couple of uncles (by marriage) who were business men but I never really knew what they did and they never volunteered their profession other than try to show off their new acquisitions – houses, cars. Such shameless flaunting of wealth did not go well with the family.

Interestingly, throughout my childhood I had an entrepreneur right in front of my eyes who went out of her way to hide it. This entrepreneur was my mother. Since I can remember, my mother would do things to supplement my father’s meager government salary but she would do it in a way that nobody would found out about it because it was truly shameful to be caught in selling anything.

My mother would raise chickens in our backyard and sell the eggs to the local store (well, she would send me or my sisters to sell the eggs). She had a whole recycling business going on where she would resell to the factories all our paper items, bottles, tins etc (she was an environmentalist even without thinking about it). My mother was an excellent baker so she would bake bread and cakes and sell them at the store. Her yearly windfall was the fair grounds of Ladies Club where her Chatpatti (local savory snack made from lentil) and pickles were best sellers. I asked many times why we don’t sell the Chatpatti sauce as ‘Lily’s Secret Sauce’ – she remember she just laughed it off and said, ‘we don’t run businesses in our family’. My mother was an entrepreneur without ever knowing the word. She embraced the profession without acknowledging her prowess at it. 

As years passed and my parents’ financial situation got better, she even became what might be termed today as a ‘venture philanthropist’. She helped start at least a dozen businesses – supporting (without expecting financial return) relatives and former family employees to start small businesses – a tailoring store, sari stores, convenience store, taxi service etc. I remember, on April 15, the first day of the Bengali New Year, all these business owners would line up at our door to have my mother sign their New Year accounting books (it is a Bengali tradition to start everything new on New Year) with my mother’s signature because they all treated my mother – the Venture Philanthropist as their luck charm. It was so exciting for me to see my mother sign her name – Lily Rahman and share the sweet that the business owner would bring (our way of celebrating – eating Bengali sweets). She would be so proud. Those are some of the moments I remember my mother being very happy. 

Now, interestingly, this is the same mother who took away my stamp collection when she found out I had expanded it by making ‘pen friends’ (I had two – one in Germany and the other in Netherlands) and having them send me stamps. I was also such a good stamp trader (girls did not collect stamps and so I pretended, to the neighborhood boys, that the stamp collection was my brother’s) that I ended up with stamps as old as 300+ years. Looking back that stamp collection would be probably worth more than $10,000 today. Well, I had to say goodbye to my collection when my mother found out about my stamp business and creative stamp-gathering network. She gave away my precious collection to one of my male cousins. Needless to say, to this day, it is a sore point for me.

Entrepreneurship is definitely a calling. I remember, over the course of my career, no matter how much I steered towards the ‘calm professions’ (if you can call banking calm..) I could not be happy. Yes, I did the work and did it well but I just wasn’t happy. I also definitely had the arrogance that I saw the right path to solving the unsurmountable development issues that nobody else could. I wanted to create my own thing and I wanted to connect markets, people, finance, development – I wanted to change the world. I knew I could do it – no matter how difficult it was.

We entrepreneurs are wired to create, change and challenge. I don’t think we can ever stop. Entrepreneurs are born not created. We don’t need incubators or accelerators to come out and thrive. We will come out and do our thing no matter where we are – a garage in the US or in the kitchen in Bangladesh.

And, yes, you are right, a real entrepreneur will always recognize and respect another real entrepreneur no matter what gender we are or what we are wearing..…