Tuesday, April 16, 2013 11:54 AM
Anyone can be a programmer. Go to school, self-teach through books or videos, etc. The industry isn’t regulated like some other professions like engineering, trades (plumbing, carpentry, etc.) or architecture (the building type). But to be a programmer, someone that can make a computer do some useful stuff – it really doesn’t take much. And there’s a whole bunch of reasons why that’s a good and bad thing. Good in that there’s a low barrier of entry for people of any age to get into programming. Bad in that there’s a lot of people out there who really shouldn’t be programming for a living, but get away with it because there’s no agreed upon standard (and how we’d even implement a standard like that could take up a whole series of blog posts).
Over the last few years, we’ve seen a new movement emerge. If 2000 marked the decade of the Programmer, then 2010 kicked off the decade of the Entrepreneur. Where we had code camps we now have startup camps, bar camps, hackathons – events that, while they may include technology, have a decidedly business slant to them. We’ve moved from “anyone can be a programmer” to “anyone can own and run a business”. You don’t need experience or schooling; you don’t even need a business plan! Just follow some steps to register your business. It’s like hobby farming, but with businesses. StartupWeekend even states on their website:
No Talk, All Action. Launch a Startup in 54 Hours!
There’s this allure of what I call “The Startup Lifestyle”. It’s all about young, fun, passionate people making money on ideas that are realized at mile-a-minute speeds. It’s wealth generation on steroids – the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme but with way more cred. If this sounds like the plot of a TV show to you…well, in part its because it is. But it’s also the pipe dream that draws in people to the “startup lifestyle”. Note I don’t say the “entrepreneurial” lifestyle, because the reality of owning and running a business is less glamour and a hell of a lot of hard work.
Having more people engaging in the economy through commerce is, in and of itself, a good thing. But, like programming, we seem to be minimizing or trivializing the effort required in engaging in business professionally. Businesses have real implications: revenue, profit, taxes, insurance, liability, investment. There’s also the aspect of viability. Not every idea translates into a valid business. I’ve come to appreciate “Mr. Wonderful” Kevin O’Leary from Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank fame. He never holds back asking the tough questions around sales, profit, and market size. Too many buy into the romanticism of business and ignore the serious and sometimes harsh reality.
Technology companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft don’t help any by pushing the pipe dream of success through their respective app stores. The message they all send is “If you can code it, you can sell it!”, yet they do nothing to help support their developer base emerge as smart business people. I approached one developer, who wrote a simple yet successful iPhone app, about speaking on his experience at one of my conferences. He declined, saying his experience was an anomaly and was not how people should go about building a software-based business.
In a perfect world, we would strip the word “startup” from our vocabulary. We’d replace it with “business”. Every business is a startup – in that it has to start somewhere. But an idea alone is not a business. A business is an organized plan and strategy to monetize an idea. In my experience with startup weekend-type events, I’ve never once heard the term “business plan” used. The focus is on the idea, the rush of creating and basing decisions on assumptions instead of analysis and research.
“Of course people will buy this!”
“Of course this will work!”
“No, we don’t have any competitors…I think…we’ll be better anyway!”
The allure of the life and overpromised success in a startup overtakes the serious considerations creating a successful business requires.
There’s also a personal danger that I see in pushing the startup lifestyle. Recently I met a young entrepreneur. Passionate about the local startup community, passionate about building things and creating businesses. A poster-boy for the entrepreneurial movement! I don’t know what happened, but my guess is that he burnt out – to the point that he tried to disappear: changed his cell phone, stopped answering emails, was impossible to get in touch with. The rise and fall of such young promise is disheartening to witness, as is the residual damage that goes with it.
We need to foster business development, but we have to acknowledge the responsibility that goes with it. Mentoring from experienced business leaders is crucial to ensure that we minimize the damage the startup lifestyle can cause. We need to balance passion, desire, and excitement with sober thought, reasoning, and discussion. We need to stop pushing short timeframes to startup success and embrace reasonable expectations and longer term business goals.
We need to talk and teach business, not wealth and fame. Otherwise, we’ll never see the long term economic impact that all these new businesses could provide. We’ll just see more casualties from the startup lifestyle.