(really) entrepreneureal

Startup funding, in many respects, buys you freedom.  The freedom to work away unfettered by daily concerns like paying the bills and keeping the lights on.  The freedom to hire the very best and keep them.  The freedom to focus 100% of your attention and energy on one thing and one thing only: making your business work.

That said, funding also imposes restraints.  Accountability to investors means no more slow going, opportunistic growth.  There might be a little less fun to be had, too, since your major decision filter is now “will this help the business (make money)?” And if you want to work with people who are as passionate as you are, a good salary has a way of making it difficult to tell the committed apart from the ladder climbers.

So what to do – would you take the money?

I’ve recently been reading a lot on tech startups – the successful ones, anyway.  Books like Founders at Work, coverage from magazines such as Inc and FastCompany, and loads of stuff from the web.  If I took all of these anecdotes to heart I certainly couldn’t be faulted for assuming that startups have an amazing growth trajectory that looks something like this:

This is what happens when A. literature focuses only on success cases and B. the cases are the likes of Google, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, etc, etc.  The picture is definitely skewed, and I feel the pain of budding entrepreneurs the world over who feel they have to have such meteoric growth or risk being judged a failure.  Whatever happened to doing things for curiosity’s sake?  Since when did an IPO or exit strategy become the holy grail of entrepreneurship and startups?

How can we make the space for people to have fun?

I struggle with similar pressure every day.  I spend countless hours daydreaming about the millions of ideas that I want to try out, but have to fight the urge to figure out a business model, or include the words “Series A” in my thought process.

Which is precisely why the idea I’m currently pursuing has absolutely no financial purpose whatsoever; no pot at the end of the rainbow, just a (hopefully) fascinating experience.

Oh, and this is more likely what a true startup trajectory resembles: