“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
–Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Perhaps I’m the one with the problem, but I just need to get this off my chest…
In September, venture capitalist Jim Goetz spoke before more than a thousand curious people at the CED Tech Conference in Raleigh. Goetz is a partner with Silicon Valley-based Sequoia Capital and for two years running has been voted Forbes Magazine’s “Midas List” top VC investor. In the start-up world, he has rock star status. Goetz has invested in some big-time winners like WhatsApp, Hubspot, and Jive. But after his talk, I was left feeling a bit disgusted. It wasn’t because of his comments, and it wasn’t the conference itself. Goetz’s advice was thoughtful, useful, smart, candid, and thoroughly interesting. The conference itself was amazingly beneficial.
What rubbed me wrong was how it all went down while Goetz was on stage. Let me set the scene. The “fireside chat”-style Q&A speech format turned into a “corporate and political-gain session.” Barf. Only dignitaries were granted the privilege to ask questions. There was the governor, the state’s treasurer, the divisional president a Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the head of the 16-campus North Carolina university system, the chancellor of UNC Chapel Hill. Shall I go? Oh, oh, sorry—there was one token student who’d earned her way to the stage for a question. Each dignitary was formally introduced, their rear end was dutifully kissed, and then they waltzed onto the stage. Once on the podium, each read their sycophantic remarks, bragging upon whomever they were representing, and then they finally asked their well-phrased, pre-written questions—clearly scripted by their PR staffs. Norovirus-caliber barf.
What’s my point? you might be wondering. My point is the irony arising from the spectacle. Many entrepreneurs’ primary motivation to start a business is to escape big-business mentality, arrogantly-bragging-upon-their-organization mentality, contradictions between what they say and what they do, over-the-topness in general, and their sickening overuse of clichés and platitudes (e.g., “Innovation is at the core of who we are as an organization”—could a’ fooled me).
Many (not all) entrepreneurs’ main inspiration for starting their business isn’t because they want to change the world, or because they have discovered some wiz-bang idea; it’s because they saw the corporate bullshit wherever they previously worked and wanted to get the hell out. That was one of my top motivations in starting First Research, and I’ve interviewed plenty of other founders who had a similar stimulus. One, Wes Aiken, who started hugely successful Schedulefly, was motivated because he was sick of the BS at First Research (i.e., management team meetings, corporate retreats, HR policies, etc.) and wanted to escape. It’s difficult to escape the BS cycle unless you have the chutzpah to strike out on your own and determine your own career destiny.
Researchers have investigated what it is about founders that makes them do it. Some have concluded, throwing up their hands, that what makes entrepreneurs tick is simply a mystery. Management guru Peter Drucker points out: “Classic economists …including the Keynesians, the Friedmanites, and the Supply-siders… cannot handle the entrepreneur, but consign him to the shadowy realm of ‘external forces,’ together with climate and weather, government and politics, pestilence and war, but also [with] technology.”[i]
Others have identified what they believe are the “essential qualities” of entrepreneurs. One of the most respected investigators, Manfred E.R. Kets de Vries, clinical professor of leadership at INSEAD, one of the world’s finest business schools, is the author, co-author, or editor of more than thirty books and 300 papers on the psychology of entrepreneurship. In his influential 1977 paper, “The Entrepreneurial Personality: A Person at the Crossroads,” de Vries writes that entrepreneurs often struggle to succeed in mainstream business and have defiant, odd-man-out personalities: “He is perceived by other people as a ‘deviant,’ a person out of place, frequently provocative and irritating because of his seemingly irrational, non-conformist actions and provocative ideas.”
Bill Aulet, senior lecturer on entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, when asked in a CNBC interview what the stereotypical entrepreneur is like, also highlighted how iconoclastic and headstrong entrepreneurs are: “First of all, they have the spirit of a pirate. ‘We’re doing things differently!’ They disrespect the existing authority. And this is what we at MIT call ‘creative irreverence’ or ‘taking on the man.’”[ii]
I’ve found this to be true of many entrepreneurs, and I myself struggled with the constraints of corporate management described by Kets de Vries. So next time you see some corporate-gaining pundit on a stage, channel your frustrations by starting a company. Everyone wins!
Oh, and what’s an alternative to having the dignitaries parade up on stage and ask Jim Goetz questions? Crazy idea here: just let real entrepreneurs causally ask Goetz whatever they want. I’d be very surprised if they opened each question with a PR announcement bragging about how innovative they are. That would save us all a bunch of time AND make the session something much more than an eye-rolling/snore-fest.
[i] (Drucker 1985)
[ii] CNBC video interview online: “Entrepreneurship guru: ‘Need the spirit of a pirate’ Thu, 8 Aug ’13 | 6:35 AM ET
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