High Altitude Mountaineering as Entrepreneurship Exercise

Sometimes it almost seems arbitrary how some young, popular and high-profile companies end up struggling to keep up with their initial hype, while some others just seem to steadily continue to grow. I believe, and also because it has been my personal experience, that the reason for this has a lot to do with how RISK is managed in entrepreneurship.

Very often entrepreneurs are seen as “risk takers''. It is believed that it’s risky to leave a well-paid, 9 – 5 job, to adventure into starting a business from scratch. You could argue that it’s actually “riskier”, long term, to stay many years in a company, develop a very specialized skill set and then be faced with an unexpected layoff or company restructuring. Taking the risk is definitely there, but it’s just a portion of it.

Truth is, successful entrepreneurs and founders are really good not at taking risks, but at MANAGING them. I can’t help but compare it to my experiences in mountain climbing. High altitude mountaineering to be precise, which is an activity full of different types of risk, including the actual risk of getting injured or dying.

When you prepare and train for high altitude mountaineering you need to consider physical risks, obviously, but also you need to judge elements like the weather, your own technical aptitudes, the route, the situation, the time of day, your partners, the list goes on. The team you choose to climb with is actually a very important risk to analyze as their capabilities in a certain situation might directly impact your possibility to survive.?

It is very likely that people view this and any other high-risk activity as just pure, unadulterated, completely irresponsible, risk taking. But people performing these high-risk activities feel in control of their actions and the situation because they have properly prepared for them and thoroughly understand the risks. There’s a mental exercise that one needs to go through that equips for the same type of mental exercises that are needed when starting a company.

And then you realize that the struggle that some startups go through is also not arbitrary at all, and that all the external factors have very little to do with long term success. Having huge amounts of money doesn’t really help. Being hyped on social media or by the media doesn’t help either. Certainly the public pressure and expectation some companies are the subject of then makes it all the harder.

I believe successful entrepreneurship requires a mental journey of risk assessment, risk awareness, risk mitigation and risk management, that has nothing to do with just being risk loving enough to leave a job and dive head-first into the unknown, especially when the risks are unknown. For sure there are always learnings from the failures, but the ideal approach should be to view founding a company as a risk mitigation activity. If you identify and mitigate the risks that might potentially take your company out of business, then you can do the most critical thing: survive long enough to learn about your market, learn about your customer, learn how to improve your products and services, and ultimately, be allowed to try these activities, time and time again, so your company can continue to persist, learn, grow and refine its product or service.