I’d rather be an entrepreneur than a regulator!

I have said it before and I will continue to say over and over again: playing at being an entrepreneur is the hardest thing I have ever done in the last 20 yrs.

Working in banks as an ops monkey was far from being easy: seen as not the most intelligent resources around (still happens to me a lot these days), a cost waiting to be cut and a pair of hands to be used on a lot of applications and spreadsheets. Brawn won time and time again over brains.

If I had one purpose back then was to learn a lot, get shit done and move upward and onward. I loved the chaos because it made me focussed on the task at hands and it awoke the tiny leader in me (I wrote about it here).

The hardest thing of being an entrepreneur is mostly about giving ourselves a fighting chance of survival which comes from two sources: funding and selling.

·     Funding is a soul crushing experience and I will share my experience at a later stage once we have a longer outlook on our survival.

·     Selling is a yo-yo activity and the constant chasing makes me feels like a dung-beetle pushing emails down its hole.

In August, I was on a panel @ the MIT lab in HK and I was asked what was the hardest bit with selling…Andy Chan from Qupital shared his experience of picking up a phone directory and going through 50 calls before he had a positive answer for a meeting. It made me think: in the B2B space particularly with advanced tech capabilities like ours and with our big vision, we do not get rejected.

We are kept hanging: “yes, I really like what you have but let’s have another meeting when you have features x and y”, “I like the design of your app but I need to see how we can collapse our existing apps into one”. Bladibladiblah…In the last three years, I have never gotten “Alex, you and your product suck, get out of my face”.

Whilst I am (mostly) a nice guy, I am direct and I can take constructive feedback!

I was on another panel last week in Hangzhou (I think I have spoken 35 times this year, an average year so far!) and I was asked how regulators could deal with innovation. I started my monologue with this: being an entrepreneur is the hardest thing I have ever done but it is nothing compared with being a regulator particularly since GFC. Snore, snore, snore…

What I mean by that is that there is a fundamental tension between regulation and innovation simply because regulation is about the known and innovation is about the unknown. (I have shared my definition of innovation here before)

Also to engage in innovation you have to be fundamentally humble about your own knowledge and not so humble with your vision.

·     Humble because we deal with the unknown, we will break things, make mistakes, encounter unforeseen roadblocks and outcomes, fail a lot and succeed a little.

·     Not so humble because the vision has to be big enough to be impossible to reach; it has to address a big enough problem to matter beyond making money (I don’t have a problem with making money but the journey and the purpose are what matters to me).

To (over)simplify, I am talking about a constant tension between the “I know” and “I don’t know” paradigms.

I used to know, well I was paid to know, or at least had to find out. My expertise and experience in certain areas were put forward as a guarantee I could be trusted and more importantly that I could resolve issues, move forward, improve, i.e get on with it.

As a manager I couldn’t say I didn’t know, mind you I didn’t do any innovation back then. 

I was improving workflows, systems with the aim to cut “the fat” (nice definition for those who get cut and who shldn’t have been there in the first place had we have the right architecture in place!). I was putting out fires daily.

As a manager, I couldn’t be true to myself, I couldn’t be humble: I had to know.

From the regulators’ standpoint, the fintech world is complex, exciting but also frightening. Technology moves faster than they can fathom so having the latest shiny tech in a sandbox is a nice way to get educated. You can’t control what you can’t comprehend or foresee.

A lot of progress has been made throughout the world using sandboxes and I am all too aware of the manpower needed if sandboxes were to become real innovation labs. I had a few conversations with regulators and their expectation was for us to be near launch and do a safe market rehearsal through their sandbox, which means being at a more mature stage than where we were.

I really think that done properly a sandbox is the right way to do things: putting a number of ? I don’t know ? together not just a fintech testing its product market fit but as well as a joint approach around a specific issue.

Different agendas, viewpoints are ok as long as the sum of ? I don’t know ? produces a ? I know ? that stands scrutiny.

Be humble, be best in class!