DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

After decades of futile discussions and discourses, the question in the not-so-enterprising minds remains the same — entrepreneurship, an innate quality or could it be acquired?

The battle rages on. Are entrepreneurs made, or are entrepreneurs born? Quite honestly, I think the entire debate is overrated. Entrepreneurs are those who are known for their tendencies of wanting to stand out, and hate to be clubbed as part of a tribe, or class of people. And if that’s the logic we are going by, those who argue on identity aren’t quite representing the original variety of the same.

Vijay Anand

But that too is a rather rash standpoint. Please don’t send me hate mails yet. Let’s take the case of starting out — There are two phases that every entrepreneur goes through — the chaotic phase and the execution phase.

Ideas are born out of chaos. You have to get a mental image of a quarry where there is nothing but dust and rubble all around, and you just happen to come up or stumble across something worth shaping, sharpening and polishing. Lo and behold, an idea is born. The crux of this process is that idea generation is all about breaking patterns. Ignore all the what-ifs and buts, and just think as a crazy person’s mind would think. Logic and rationale could park themselves out of the room for the moment. Then comes the next step, as the pitch gets ready — execution.

People often ask me if entrepreneurs need a formal education and whether it helps at all. While some people are born and raised with naturalistic tendencies to do certain things a certain way (education, after all, is just a template of best practices), most others could use some help. Those who are naturally inclined will find the process too boring and smothering and will drop out of the molding process and start the race early; but not everyone who drops out and starts early makes it.

Formal education, however, has its perks. It especially comes in handy when the execution bit starts to play out. The idea has to spread beyond just the mind of the founder — rationale and behavioral elements start to make their play as the team starts to form and it becomes a crucial element to unite everyone in the vision of what is being built. People who have gone through an education or training usually posess the ability to communicate and build up that vision in a fast paced manner. Those who haven’t but are born with talent simply define their own culture — not something that everyone can do. There are too many people who fall in between the cracks and perish during this process.

If you look at what happens at the ideation stage though, the process is the same as any creative artist; where something is created virtually out of nowhere and probably resembles the act of the creator in ways more than one. Perhaps, that’s where the ego gets built. But most simply can’t proceed beyond that. It can be a high to come up with new ideas but without execution, it really doesn’t make a difference. One could walk up to a person who has built a successful venture through years of hard work and talk about how once they too came up with an idea like that but any reaction more than “So what?” is giving it too much credit.

There is further segregation of this ideation phase. There are folks who can define a radical new concept and then there are those who can streamline and optimize processes. People who have been in the industry, seen enough of what goes on, and have comprehended the intention behind it all, can in a lot of ways, propose ideas and solutions that will optimize things to become more efficient. They too could be entrepreneurs, right?

So, what then is the advantage that a naturally born has over a trained one? Not much, really. The fact is that humans, being what we are with our new and radical ideas and our lure towards it, naturally tend to praise off-beat and novel ideas, without giving much credit to what in most cases truly makes the world go round. One set of folks push the boundaries of creation, the other make what exists into better performing assets and machines. Both are equally important.

I’d still come back to the original premise: An entrepreneur seeking identity in a word might be at a misplaced comfort zone. The word by itself doesn’t mean much — just that it denotes a person treading into a rather new territory or activity, and standing against the odds. Entrepreneurship just happened to be the trend of the season, very soon enough terms like activists, artists, and revolutionaries might replace it — just like innovators and inventors were adored past season. If you ask me, don’t get stuck up with what you are called, focus more on what you are to be doing — thats how legacies are built.
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Vijay Anand is a serial entrepreneur, the founder of Proto.in, and the Vice President (Incubation) at IIT's RTBI. He tweets at @vijayanands. To write to the author, please send an email to dare@cybermedia.co.in with the subject line 'Vijay Anand'. Disclaimer: The views expressed here are that of the author and do not represent the magazine's.

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