(really) entrepreneureal

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: