“You have a solution for everything” he said. We were sitting in my office, tinkering around a project that was so screwed it seemed impossible it will be ever finished. A never ending agony of the project manager, project owner, developer, designer – everyone. It was one of those projects that you don’t know why they managed to survive this long, why it was not already dumped and used as an example of what not to do.
During my tenure at Core Incubator I’ve seen more than 100 ideas pitching for funding. Out of those 100 ideas 10 were worth listening and 1 was worth investing in. These numbers are enough of a reason to give up playing in the early-stage VC field. So let’s be honest about all of that and agree that the “startup scene” in SE Europe should go back to school.
Fear of failure is a common emotion when stepping into entrepreneurship. A lot of very good talks share the mantra of embracing failure not as failure alone but as a completely natural part of the learning curve. By failing we learn how not to do things. But there is a big problem in this process. More often than not we fail without having a clue why we failed.
My first job ever, although I wasn’t paid for it, was to play music at a local radio station in my home town. It was a short career that pivoted to producing commercials, but it left such a profound mark on me that I still wish I could go back and make it a permanent job. I never wandered into DJ land or any kind of live performances. The studio, the airwaves and me. That is still my dream job.
My first steps into programming were tinkering with ASP and Access (later replaced with MSSQL), and for many many years I’ve played only on the Microsoft playground. Although I never upgraded to .NET as a programmer, I kept working in Microsoft environments and remained skeptical about anything that was on the other side of the fence, just like a typical MS fanboy would.
About a year ago I took over the position of CIO at a Slovenian retail store chain. Well, to be honest, I did not take over anything as that position did not exist when I joined the company. They had 17 stores, about 80 employees and a yearly turnaround of 7M€. And an unfinished ERP implementation.
Recently I fell over a presentation about #bmgen that expanded into some topics like “categories of startups”. The moment I saw the list I clicked pause, went to take a glass of water and tried to restart my brain. It did not help. Somebody is actually trying to categorize startups. You wanna create a startup? Well, pick a category!
In the past couple of months I’ve encountered many calculations, plans, expectations about whether buying hardware, leasing it, or going full-cloud is best. The features of cloud vs anythingelse are clear and are not a topic here, but the discussion of what is cheaper got me thinking and calculating. And here is the result.
In the last few months, nothing matches the number of times I’ve seen the “change the world” goal being tied to the entrepreneurial world. From very positive to utterly dysfunctional examples, the paradigm that entrepreneurs should/want/try to change the world made me think about the whole perspective and try to understand the underlying expectations and implication that “pressure” has on all entrepreneurs.