Entrepreneurs or Ventures?

As you know from following my posts, I'm involved in entrepreneurship education. This is important to give context to the title: where does our collective focus go? A bit too much on the ventures; not enough on the entrepreneurs? I'm biased because the school I'm launching with my team is focused on building entrepreneurs; nonetheless I'd like to have this discussion with you. 

When I started thinking about a school of entrepreneurship 2 or 3 months ago, I did what every normal person would do: what's already on the market? Who's doing what? How does it work? What are the results?

The good news is that we're many, all over the world, to build initiatives around supporting and promoting entrepreneurship; and helping entrepreneurs reach their goals or dreams. However, unless I missed something, every one of them is focused on the ventures, not so much on the entrepreneurs. Let me precise my thought because it's open for interpretation and I can already hear you disagreeing! ;-)

When it comes to entrepreneurship, we all expect smart people to come up, not only with a great idea, but with the execution of a great idea. We expect them to have gone through the sweat and pain of getting to a point where investors can put some cash on the table; and then everything that goes with funding growth.

We all have an idealistic idea of what being a successful entrepreneur means. We look up to famous entrepreneurs. And we try. The enchanted world of entrepreneurship is a favorite subject for the media; and we're all guilty writing posts about what we think of why Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, or Richard Branson made it so big. I'm guilty too.

But there are still a lot of real questions that remain unanswered. I don't think that this Wonderland is helping entrepreneurship at all. Clearly, only a very few become insanely successful. There's nothing wrong about having the same ambitions; I personally encourage big ambitions. However, we shouldn't let wantrepreneurs wonder the no-mans-land and fall, because we all know that they don't have all that it takes to make it on their own. We know they'll fall; so why wait that they ask questions before we give them the answers? It doesn't make sense to me.

Entrepreneurial education is a must.

If you look at all the initiatives that have been taken around the world as I have, you'll count mentoring programmes, bootcamps, incubators, accelerators, events or communities. They take place over a weekend, or from a week to a couple of months. They're great, but once again, they focus on entrepreneurs who have a venture in their hands.

The most critical aspects of their venture has already been dealt with; then it's make or doom. If the venture, and its early execution, aren't judged good enough, they're sent packing. Those who only have an idea usually don't even get attention. Yet, most of the entrepreneurs attending those events or programmes all have one thing in mind, and one only: find the miraculous investor.

In this "game", the entrepreneur is never the focus; only the venture. If the venture is judged to have potential, then the entrepreneurs behind it get attention, or scrutiny. Never the other way round. 

This would all be well if we lived in healthy economies and we didn't have millions of people to put to work. Taxes have to support those in needs and in difficult times as in the past 10 years, this is a greater burden. To have a good, well-paid job is a condition to getting out of the mud. 

Today, I came across an article by John Hope Bryant. In his post, John mentions that most business undergraduate students, when asked, would like to work at Google, Disney, Apple, Nike, E&Y, Deloitte or Government. This is the big business syndrome that I spoke of about entrepreneurship ideals. 

The same way John Bryant advocates the need to better support small businesses to generate the needed jobs instead of always looking up to the big corporations (and it's a universal syndrome by the way) to produce them, we also need to advocate the need to nurture entrepreneurs out of people who wouldn't think of taking that route. We also need to teach entrepreneurship to the aspiring entrepreneurs before they go on the road. Their future success is at stake.

The team at the Robin School of Entrepreneurship is now counting two co-founders with strong business education backgrounds: Dr. Maciej Koczerga and Dexter Tan. They have made the experience to talk to students about entrepreneurship at a time when they worry about their future and maybe are confused about the messages they hear. 

John Bryant says it well in his post as well. We are expected to go to school, and then college or university, and then to get a job. But then what happens when there is no job? Will they naturally become entrepreneurs? If mentalities are indeed "old school", will they get the needed support from relatives and friends? And even if some of them do get this support, aren't we sending them to their doom?

Whichever way we look at the problem, we always go back to square one: education.

In the context of entrepreneurship, education has to deal with two problems:

• We have to teach people not be afraid of the water; and
• We have to teach them to swim before they can jump in the water.

A the Robin School of Entrepreneurship, we don't necessarily believe that we have to teach people to deal with their fears first. Instead we believe that the fears will go away as they learn to swim.

This is the best analogy I can think of; I find it illustrates well the process of learning entrepreneurship. And in this context, clearly the focus is on building entrepreneurs. Their venture isn't in question, whether they apply their learning to a venture in real-time or not.

We believe that through this method we can achieve multiple goals:

1. Nurture more people into entrepreneurship and help as many as we can out of unemployment; whether they're already in that situation or heading towards it.
2. Prepare wantrepreneurs to build stronger ventures that would have greater probability to meet selection criteria at incubators or accelerator programmes.
3. Help reduce the proportion of entrepreneurs that fall flat on their face at the first hurdle.

We also hope to change mentalities in the long-run. If wantrepreneurs came out of programmes like ours better equipped to face and overcome the challenges of entrepreneurship, maybe the other actors of the ecosystem would start considering the entrepreneurs as much as their ventures from the outset.

We think this is an interesting and equally important point. A bad idea doesn't always make a bad entrepreneur. Very good, promising entrepreneurs may hide behind the wrong ideas or ventures. The latter might fail but the entrepreneurs might deserve the attention their ventures didn't get. 

I came across an investor in France who buys IP and then looks for entrepreneurs to make those into successful ventures. I'm not entirely familiar with the actual process and selection process, but this sounds like a great idea. Very talented, skilled and passionate people don't necessarily have to come up with an idea; they could be given one to perform well.

When you walk through the land of entrepreneurship, as I do, you can get excited by the prospects of what may be possible. The ambitions have to be huge, because the problems to solve are equally enormous. If you're not in the entrepreneurial scene, and if you hesitate throwing yourself in the rip curl, you don't have to be excited; all you need is consider the fact that entrepreneurial education is now available through the Robin School of Entrepreneurship.

You can learn all about entrepreneurship without the need to call yourself an entrepreneur, aspiring entrepreneur, wantrepreneur, and so on. Just come as you are, young, unemployed, student, full of questions and doubts.

Find out for yourself what great entrepreneur you can prepare to become.

Thx!

The Robin School of Entrepreneurship is a 26-week online programme starting October 5, 2015. Learn from entrepreneurs, mentors and investors all the challenges you'll face. Connect with peers and mentors. In April 2016, you'll be ready to take it all on!

This is our launch year! Take the programme at half-price.

Reach out for more information.