It’s a Community, not just a Business

How I regained the excitement about entrepreneurship at the?Conscious Entrepreneur Summit

I decided to attend this conference without much information or expectations. I met the host,?Alex?and his wife Laura, at Wisdom 2.0 in San Francisco. He talked about this conference briefly and he got me with the word “conscious”. Then I got curious; how would a word “conscious” jibe with “entrepreneur”??? As I myself am exploring my own entrepreneurship, I decided to join and flew to Boulder, CO, to answer my question. This conference was full of so many moments of valuable insights and deep connections, which was so refreshing to the degree that it was shocking (more explanation on why it was “shocking” at the end).

Insight #1: For entrepreneurs, it is essential to be conscious.

1. Conscious of oneself?— because “why” (of doing business X vs. Y) has to be clear in pouring the limited resources such as attention, capital, and time for entrepreneurs.
2. Conscious of others?— because there are so many people involved in entrepreneurship — spouses, family, business partners, employees, investors, and customers.
3. Conscious of the society and world?— because what entrepreneurs do have implications for the society and world, the system they belong to, whether it’s big or small.

Whereas we talk about #3 — the external impact of entrepreneurship — quite often, we rarely talk about #1 and #2 — the inner & relational work of entrepreneurship. This conference provided an amazing opportunity for participants (a mix of entrepreneurs and investors) to engage in the inner work and relational work of entrepreneurship. This was quite a refreshing surprise, as I’ve never seen or experienced such a focus in other entrepreneurship or startup conferences in Silicon Valley for my entire 19 years of career in the tech industry.

Soul Biography: Inner View, not an Interview —?Nic Askew

In this beautiful session, Nic walked us through how we could descend below the facade and connect to ourselves and each other truly. In contrast to typical interviews with so many empty words, in this “Inner View” with simple silence, Nic has been creating biographies of our souls. I had a chance to experience this magical Inner View with him at the conference, just looking into his eyes in silence, while his camera looked intensely at me. Without any questions and answers, I was able to express myself. I understood myself and I felt understood. I could relate to myself and him as I was, raw, incomplete and whole. What a gift it is to be fully present to ourselves and others! With our full presence only, we can connect and share with each other so much. Words are not necessary. You can check his beautiful work of Soul Biography?Here.?You can perhaps create your own version of “Inner View”. It’s very simple. Just sit in silence with your loved one (friend, partner, dog, cat), looking into their eyes for one or two whole minutes. I highly recommend you experience it yourself.

Creating a Conscious Company —?Vlada Bottnik?(CEO of Marco Polo) interviewed by?Sue Heilbronner

We often show up in certain personas, leaving our true self hidden. Sometimes, it’s out of the need to protect ourselves, when we feel unsafe or fearful. In the entrepreneurship world, it feels almost natural always to show up in a certain persona, or wear a different mask that’s not my true self. Why? Because we want to look smart, successful, convincing, and confident to our spouses, family, business partners, employees, customers, and investors. However, when we continue to mask up in personas only, it gradually suffocates the congruence in us, creating the sense of fundamental unease.

How can we prevent us from burying our true self under so many masks we get habituated? By checking in with ourselves and being aware of which persona we’re showing up. The conscious leadership coach, Sue Heilbronner, did an amazing exercise with the founder and Co-CEO of Marco Polo, by probing which personas they show up in different contexts.

After all, there is nothing wrong with personas; we just need to get curious about our deep need that called us to show up in a certain persona and tend to the need.

Insight #2: A Community, not just a Business

The common perspective we take in entrepreneurship is that it’s all about business. It looks like it on the surface, but that’s not what entrepreneurship is about. At the core of it, it’s about a community; a community of people who are so passionate about certain ideas and who like to work together to make the ideas work in the world. No one can do this alone and those who boast about their success that they were self-made; they are delusional.

So when we talk about entrepreneurship, it’s not just about founders. It’s about their life partners, family members, best friends, business partners, employees, investors, coaches, mentors, and many more who are involved in actualizing the idea. At this conference, we got to explore the depth of this entire community of entrepreneurship altogether through very vulnerable and honest dialogues.

The Founder Journey — a Husband & Wife’s Perspective with?Linda Kim?(MD, Co-Founder and CEO at Moon Mental Health/ Founder LuvLuk)?and?Yong Kim?(CEO of Wonolo)

During their openly vulnerable conversation, the word that kept resonating within myself was “compassion”. There was so much compassion in the relationship of this entrepreneur couple as they supported each other through their entrepreneurship journey. Their entrepreneurship was able to survive thanks to that compassion in their relationship; and equally, their relationship got strengthened to another level, because of the compassion they could cultivate in that entrepreneurship. Beyond their success as entrepreneurs, I think their compassionate relationship with extreme honesty and love is a real testament to their entrepreneurship.

From the Streets to Venture-Backed to VC —?Clarence Bethea?interviewed by?John Hill

Usually entrepreneurs’ journeys are often described as a “Hero’s Journey” —this is how media covers “successful” startup founders. In the Hero’s Journey of entrepreneurship, what people often focus on is the glorious return from the abyss at the end of the Hero’s Journey; however, it’s the experience of the abyss that makes the glorious return meaningful. Moreover, heroes don’t get to rise from the abyss by themselves; they get to rise with help from so many people on their journey. Clarence was so courageous to share his vulnerable experience of the abyss as an entrepreneur and how he wants to support other heroes, more women and people of color in entrepreneurship, as he was upheld by the community in his own journey.

The New VC Mandate: Bringing a Human-centric Focus to a Human Capital Business —?Matt McCall,?Tim Chang,?Lisa Mikkelsen

I confess that I got jaded with cliches and streotypes of entrepreneurs and VCs, living and working in San Francisco and Silicon Valley for 13+ years. I got weary of the single-minded pursuit of success. Of course, I don’t mind success per se, but I grew more uncomfortable with the attitude of“Anything goes for success”.

Given this deep bias inside me, it was shockingly refreshing to hear VCs talk about bringing a human-centric focus to VC, which is intensively a human capital business. Matt McCall, Tim Change, and Lisa Mikkelsen demanded all entrepreneurs to ask themselves about?“Deep WHY”?for their business, rather than just wanting to be a “unicorn”.?The growth or scale at any cost is a very unconscious agenda; hence, dangerous for the business, too. This lack of consciousness in entrepreneurship often deludes entrepreneurs and make them dishonest to themselves and others around them about the business. Eventually, the lack of honesty becomes a starting point to undermine trust in their work. In business, this could manifest in many forms — losing customers, losing the market, losing talents, and losing money; a disaster for both entrepreneurs and investors.

So how can VCs help entrepreneurs stay conscious of their own shadow and blindspots, being honest with their own “Deep WHY”? These VCs ask three questions to remember.

• Do you know your core wound?
• How does it show up in your life?
• How did you integrate it into your life?

None of these questions were about CAC/LTV ratios or how much money to raise. Shocking, isn’t it?

Insight #3: Inner Work, Outer Impact

The stats are dark about the cost of entrepreneurship.?On average, only 1 out 10 startups become somewhat “successful”.?The cost of this success is beyond money. According to the?study by Dr. Michael Freeman at UCSF,?entrepreneurs are 3x more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, stress, and fear than the average population.?They are also 10x more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder and 2x more likely to have suicidal thoughts.

Considering the odds and the cost, entrepreneurship is a crazy and irrational option to choose among many things we can do in our life. Yet some of us still want to do it and that’s also how humans have progressed as a species by creating new ideas and pursuing them. So, the question comes down to how we could do it sustainably with resilience.

According to the?joint research in 2022 by Seoul National University Hospital and dcamp, a leading startup incubator, in Korea, the intrinsic motivation was a strong indicator for entrepreneur’s resilience. In other words, when entrepreneurs were well aligned with their values for their entrepreneurship, they could bounce back from hardships in their entrepreneurship journey and could stay much more resilient against mental health risks as a result. Intrinsic motivations were about the sense of self-actualization in the process of entrepreneurship vs. achieving monetary success and gaining a higher social status as a result of entrepreneurship (extrinsic motivation).

For this intrinsic motivation, everything comes down to being extremely conscious of the inner “why” — “Why do I want to pursue entrepreneurship?” — and connecting it to the values that matter most to ourselves intrinsically. Is this necessary for the success of a startup? You could argue that there are many examples of startups out there, of which success wasn’t grounded in the solid intrinsic motivations of entrepreneurs. This could be true if the definition of success is just superficial (e.g. money, power, status). But if we take into consideration the toll it might have taken for the overall sense of wellbeing of entrepreneurs and their community, then many entrepreneurship success that looks like it on the surface can’t be called a success after all. The recent examples of Theranos and FTX are great examples when startup endeavors wreak havoc societally, due to the delusion of entrepreneurs; the outcome of being unconscious.

At this conference, there were so many great examples of inner work by entrepreneurs, investigating & questioning their intrinsic motivations.

A Journey of Awakening —?Keith Ferrazzi

Keith Ferrazzi is already a well known & successful businessperson, a leader and an entrepreneur. Yet I found it so inspiring that he was not hesitant to show that he’s still?“becoming”. As a well-known figure in entrepreneurship, I didn’t expect him to be utterly vulnerable and open to share his heartaching stories from the origin and in-betweens. The painful events happened in the past, but the stories are still present with him. Yet with consistent focus on inner work, he’s able to extract valuable insights from those stories.

• Entrepreneurship is about co-creating and co-elevating with others in the culture of care.
• We need to move from the “leadership” to the “teamship”.

An awakening means transforming the experience of suffering into love. In the context of entrepreneurship, this means that we renew the intrinsic motivation through consciousness in each step of the entrepreneurial journey, so that we could continue to work passionately for the work out of love, rather than fear of failure.

Modern Wisdom, Ancient Roots?—?Srikumar Rao

Dr. Rao explicitly pointed out so well how entrepreneurship is an inward journey, rather than an outward journey. He said “When the inward journey happens, the external world recognizes it to suit the inner world”; in other words, inner work leads naturally to outer impact. He said,

“The vast majority of us are in prison but we don’t want to get out of the prison; what we want is just better food.”

This is such a salient point, because the excessive drive to “successful exits” or “become the next unicorn” may not actually help entrepreneurs to achieve that goal. Rather, they could achieve what they want, if they are clearly aware of their own intrinsic motivations. Focusing on inner work, they could get this level of clarity.

“Form follows consciousness.”

Being present at this conference, interacting with many participants, listening to the speakers, this phrase kept ringing in my head. It’s from the?Theory U. What does this mean? As the quality of my listening co-shapes how the conversation unfolds, the quality of results in any social system is a function of the consciousness from which the people in that system operate.

I love imagining about what it was like in the early days of Silicon Valley. Books like?“The Power Law”?by Sebastian Mallaby?and?“Make Something Wonderful”?by Steve Jobs?show us the beauty of entrepreneur spirits through the origin stories.

In 1957, eight traitorous semiconductor scientists wanted to leave the Shockley Semiconductor Lab led by William Shockley, the Nobel Prize winner and a not-so-good boss, and start their own business. Two bankers from the East Coast decided to back their business idea up with a collection of capital they raised from various investors (the modern concept of LP). Their new firm became “Fairchild Semiconductor”, which started making?silicon?transistors at a time when germanium was still the most common material for semiconductor use. Among these eight scientist were Robert Noyce (Cofounder of Intel), Eugene Kleenex (Cofounder of Kleiner Perkins), Gordon Moore (Creator of “Moore’s Law”), and many others who went on to found the first generation startups of Silicon Valley. Arthur Rock, one of two bankers, who backed up the idea of these eight entrepreneurs, later described this time that the capital “liberated” entrepreneurs and their ideas.

Steve Jobs and Apple were also examples of an entrepreneur and ideas that were liberated by Venture Capital. After he got fired by the board at Apple in 1985, he spoke to Newsweek:

“I personally, man,?I want to build things. I’m thirty. I’m not ready to be an industry pundit. I got three offers to be a professor during this summer, and I told all of the universities that I thought I would be an awful professor.?What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them.?I respect the direction that Apple is going in. But for me personally, you know,?I want to make things. And if there’s no place for me to make things there, then I’ll do what I did twice before. I’ll make my own place. You know, I did it in the garage when Apple started, and I did it in the metaphorical garage when Mac started. ” (Excerpt from Make Something Wonderful by Steve Jobs)

I think this comment by Steve Jobs describes best what it was like in the early days of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. What fascinates me the most about entrepreneurship isn’t the glorious outcomes from it but this pure motivation to make great things. It is so innocent, simple, and honest that it even feels naive. For Steve Jobs, “make something wonderful” was the single most important intrinsic motivation. He was?conscious?about his intrinsic motivation and everything else followed after that, in the form of three companies (Apple, NeXT, and Pixar), and their enduring impact on the next generations of entrepreneurs, industry, economy, culture, and humanity.?Form follows consciousness.

I don’t think he’s the best example of a conscious entrepreneur, as he could have been a little more conscious of others in his entrepreneurship journey, too. However, since his consciousness has become almost like an archetype of entrepreneurship, it shows us how powerful and critical it could be, to cultivate a better version of conscious entrepreneurship collectively in order to create more wholesome future for all. Because —?Form follows consciousness.

I admire entrepreneurs for their drive to make wonderful things and pursue crazy ideas to “make a dent in the Universe”. That innocent motivation to the degree of naivité truly created many things possible such as the Internet and the Artificial Intelligence, and will enable many unknown great ideas to come to life in the future. But the downside impact of unconscious entrepreneurship could be devastating, as much as the upside. From the individual wellbeing of entrepreneurs as in mental health to the wellbeing of the entire humanity and all beings on earth, because?technology (“form”) follows consciousness.

During the?“Connection Dinner”?I hosted to connect with other entrepreneurs in the conference, I felt immensely inspired by everyone at the table. There were nine of us, who are deeply interested in leading each of our entrepreneurship journey consciously, constantly questioning our assumptions and making efforts to stay grounded with our values. The spirit of “Conscious Entrepreneur” was palpable in this community. Thanks to them, I was able to pull out of the cynicism about entrepreneurship that has been imbued with money, power, and status in Silicon Valley, and regained my deep enthusiasm and appreciation of entrepreneurship, with much clearer view on my own intrinsic motivation for my entrepreneurship.

I am deeply grateful to?Alex Raymond?and his collaborators for hosting this amazing gathering and growing this great community of conscious entrepreneurs.?All the entrepreneurs out there who are serious about their work — I hope you to join the Conscious Entrepreneur Summit next year!