Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Dr Brainerd Prince
I have always found myself happy and thriving in the first stage of a start-up. There is a certain adrenaline rush, with all the buzz – late nights of never-ending work, exciting conversations, brainstorming and ideation leading to intellectual breakthroughs, all of this keeps the energy level super high.
Having been a serial entrepreneur for a few decades in the social enterprise space, with serial failings to my credit, I have had the joy of these experiences a few times in my life. I am referring to the first two years of all the projects I have done. Exhilarating, exciting, and exponential growth! I remember when we published InTouch India, a monthly youth magazine. The night before it went to print was pure crazy! The many strategy meetings that went deep into the night as we kept thinking about how best to ‘touch’ or transform India. I remember setting up The Tent, a café with a difference, in North Delhi, and the joy of doing many rounds of the markets on Panchkuian Road or the Munrika market in South Delhi, or the Kirti Nagar furniture market in West Delhi, and picking out every piece of furniture and furnishing for the café. One of the most exciting projects I have done is setting up an inter-religious community where people from all faiths could sincerely ask deep questions about life. I had to sadly walk away from it one day, realizing it had become too religious for me. Although the community itself had grown to over 200 members, the vision I had for the community never really took off.
When the adrenaline stops rushing, the buzzing ceases and the energy lies dissipated, often one finds that the start-up has not taken off. One should stop and wonder what went wrong. Often, one is already replacing a dying project with another project and the cycle begins all over again. But one must stop and wonder, reflect and stare at the face of the start-up paradox full on.
I woke up rather early this morning, so I thought I will have a chat with my sister who was just getting ready for dinner in the US. Till about a year back, my sister worked in perhaps the largest non-profit in Minnesota as an Accounting Supervisor in the Conservatorship Programme. She was responsible for all the accounting staff in her programme and gave leadership to the programme which was worth about 50 million USD.
However, last year she took a step down to join a new start-up finance company because of its vision and mission which is to train and empower minorities into financial leadership in the world of Non-profits. She felt that this vision gave a deeper purpose to her technical accounting skillset and being at that age in life when one is looking for Maslow’s self-actualization goals, she took the leap and joined this brand-new start-up. It has been a year and the start-up paradox hit her! And for two hours we talked about it.
I am going to share three insights about the start-up paradox that every entrepreneur, start-up enthusiast, and dreamer must keep in mind and have a plan to engage with,before taking the leap.
No experience of the vision
Every start-up has a raison d’etre for its starting up – a new vision that it wants to accomplish, something that it wants to rethink and reimagine. This new vision is often a break from the old way of doing things. It often seeks to create a product or service that does not exist, something brand new.All this sounds wonderful. Every person in its ecosystem and every stakeholder is convinced by this new direction and vision. Then, where is the problem?
The problem lies in this – while the vision and direction are towards something that is new, the people executing the start-up are old. In the case of my sister’s start-up, all the founders were normal accountants. Of course, they had a new vision, a desire to do something new. But they themselves in spite of their best intentions had absolutely no training in what they wanted to do and accomplish through the start-up. All of them had been trained in and had experience in the old ways, in the old school of thought and practice of accountancy. They had zero experience of the new vision. Just because the start-up team can make presentations and pitches, and persuasively communicate about the new vision, it does not mean that they have any experience of it.
This is huge because human life works in a certain manner. The Freudian Id or our sedimented self with our primal urges and our experience-conditioned reflexes drive our behaviour. Therefore, while the new vision demands new behaviour and patterns of action, what actually comes out as our performance is firmly dictated by our ‘old self’. This gap between our ‘old self’ and our ‘visionary self’ is unbridged and this births the start-up paradox. Especially when the going gets tough, the constraints tight and the budget depleting, old behaviours naturally kick in and the new vision takes the backseat.
Spirit of learning
The start-up demands that one possesses an agile spirit of learning. The old behaviour patterns and knowledge will not do. Therefore, one needs to be constantly aware that one needs to learn how the new vision works. This will take us out of our comfort zone. The paradox here is, often the start-up team has certain expertise which brings them together. However, this expertise belongs to the old pre-start-up world. To tell an expert that she needs to put her expertise to a side and learn everything afresh is not an easy ask. One’s identity is linked with one’s expertise. Learning requires a certain agility which often decreases with the increase of expertise.
The ability to go against one’s proven beliefs and knowledge, and to say that one does not know, is the beginning of wisdom. However, doing this in the real world is tough. In a start-up, everyone needs to be in this new space of learning. If the past knowledge and skill systems worked, then there would be no need to start anything new. One of the primary premises of starting a start-up with a new vision is that the old paradigm does not work.And if the old paradigm does not work then learning a new paradigm is required to make the start-up work and fulfil its vision. Therefore, one may have to put aside decades of learning and accomplishments, and perhaps even unlearn them, so that they are ready to learn new ways of being in the world. When this does not happen, the old paradigm and the old ways of doing things creep into the new start-up, and the very purpose of starting the start-up gets defeated.
Imagining new structures
Finally, if no one really knows how the new vision works, and therefore every start-up team member needs to be in a learning mode, then, start-ups are all about building a new way of being in the world, which is the main thrust of this meditation. Start-ups then are not merely about innovating new products and services, new ways of making money, or even about creating new value. Start-ups have this unique calling to equally imagine and lay out the new structures that will hold the new products and services.
There is a story told about wine and wineskins. If we make new wine, and put them in the old wineskins, then, the old wineskins will burst and the wine spills out. The old wineskin or the old structures are unable to hold the new. Therefore, one requires new wineskins for new wine. While it might be fun to make new wine, it is not a matter of fun to create new wineskins. This is hard work and often highly counterintuitive. However, the long-term fruit of the start-up lies precisely here, in one’s ability to create new wineskins.
What do we mean by new wineskins? Wineskins hold the wine. In other words, wineskins are the systems, processes, and structures, that deliver the start-up products or services. Innovation must primarily happen at this level for the start-up to be a success.The values that drove the vision of the new start-up must be embodied in the new structures and systems. The old wineskin or the old structures, processes and systems will stifle the new vision and kill it even before it is born.
But this does not mean that there is a complete disconnect from the past. If one has certain expertise, it means that they have mastered certain structures,systems and processes in the past. Then, this also means that they possess the ability to learn structures, systems and processes. All one has to do is activate this learning mode and be open to learning and executing the new processes, systems and structures required by the new vision.
One could view start-ups as birthing new lives. One has got an opportunity to live afresh yet once again and reinvent oneself. A start-up not only creates new products and services, not only new structures and processes but also new humans. The site of a start-up is pregnant with opportunities for learning how to do life differently.
I believe, all humans must experience the life of a start-up at least once in their adult life. The start-up context gives us an enormous opportunity to restart our own life – perhaps experience a second birth or a rebirth in this life itself.
Dr Brainerd Prince is the Associate Professor of Practice, and Director, Centre for Thinking, Language and Communication, Plaksha University.
