Related posts:

1. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #7: Ben Keene
2. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #3: Catharina Bruns
3. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #5: Robin Kennedy

Related posts:

1. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #6: Emily Kerr
2. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #7: Ben Keene
3. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #14: Zoe Hine

Related posts:

1. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #38: John Van Der Put
2. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #7: Ben Keene
3. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #14: Zoe Hine

At the beginning of 2011 we started a campaign called Start Something You Love. We kicked it off on 19th January with our big Esc winter party in front of 600 people at Guanabara bar in central London.

We are now following it up with 365 bits of advice from real people who are doing interesting and inspirational things with their lives. And we asked them all the same question:

———————————

ESC’S QUESTION: “HOW CAN I START SOMETHING I LOVE?”

ALEX’s ANSWER:

Just start doing whatever it is you’re thinking about. It’s so quick and easy to build a minimal viable product and then you can get real customer feedback quickly and check the assumptions of your product against reality.

Get a co-founder, you’ll motivate each other and it’ll be more fun. Spend time finding the right person, someone that compliments your own personality and that you can rely on. You’re going to spend a lot of time working together and go through a lot of good and bad times together.

Learn and be inspired by online resources. Communities like Hacker News and podcasts like Mixergy interviews and TED Talks. There is so much knowledge within these resources, it’s essentially a constant stream of case studies and judgements to learn from.

Don’t be put off by not having a unique idea. You can do something someone else is already doing, but do it better. There are so many examples of companies that didn’t invent whatever it is they became successful off the back of, but instead they innovated and executed the concept better. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that if there isn’t a product for it already, it’s probably because there just isn’t a need. Just find something that there’s demand for and build something better then what’s out there, then spend 5x as much time marketing it.

One of the best things about having startup is regaining some flexibility of your schedule. Learn to enjoy this. Although having a startup means working long hours, it usually feels good because you’re building something. Remember to take a break though, you should work to live, not live to work.”

From Merrill Lynch to starting my own company: www.wemakewebsites.info

• http://www.escapethecity.org/heroes/22401
• http://wemakewebsites.info/
• http://www.facebook.com/pages/We-Make-Websites/142630575781738?ref=sgm
• http://wemakewebsites.info/blog

———————————

NOW DO THREE THINGS:

• Watch this video: Start Something You Love: Escape the City…1 year on
• Comment below to tell us what you are going to start this year
• Join the revolution at www.escapethecity.org/register and subscribe to these posts (top-right of this page)

Related posts:

1. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #7: Ben Keene
2. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #14: Zoe Hine
3. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #6: Emily Kerr

Related posts:

1. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #4: Rob Cousins
2. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #2: Sarah Outen
3. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #3: Catharina Bruns

Related posts:

1. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #7: Ben Keene
2. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #3: Catharina Bruns
3. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #5: Robin Kennedy

Related posts:

1. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #50: Robin Heymann
2. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #7: Ben Keene
3. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #3: Catharina Bruns

Related posts:

1. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #7: Ben Keene
2. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #5: Robin Kennedy
3. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #6: Emily Kerr

Hermione Taylor, Esc Hero and founder of The DoNation sent us this email having attended our Esc winter party. We’ve been through many of the same emotions ourselves. An interesting read for anyone thinking of ‘doing their own thing’…

I was just bubbling with inspiration and envy as I left… pining an adventure like never before.  It was such an amazingly fitting night for me, and really got me reflecting on what I’m doing and why. My whole journey with The DoNation started as a simple lust to go on a big adventure, and cycle to Morocco… hearing Al and Ed speak really bought back that burning feeling, excitement, and freedom of adventure – something that I fear I’ve moved far too far away from now!

Both Lara and Zarine’s talks also rang so true, so painfully true… whilst massively inspiring, they also made me question wtf I’m doing to myself… I never pined for the challenging, risky, terrifying, and lonely slog of entrepreneurship, so why the hell am I doing it? I was chewing over this on the walk home, wondering why I’m lining myself up for a daunting life of managing nightmare employees, huge risk, and insane workloads, and being unable to drop all responsibilities on a whim and head off around the world on some crazy adventure.

Then I realised the answer was simple, and fully summed up in the title of your event… because I wanted to start something I love. I may not love all that’s involved – especially the employee management thing and spending my nights on financial forecasts, VAT returns, and refining legal contracts – but I sure as hell love the the cause that I’m fighting for, the potential it has to make a difference, and the fact that I’m doing something that I couldn’t be more passionate about.  It might be at the expense of my sanity and my social life, but eh, we can’t have everything…

I just need to work out how to tie another big cycle adventure into my launch plans…. hmm.

Related posts:

1. Lessons from our speakers – SSYL
2. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #7: Ben Keene
3. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #8: Richard Hume

Related posts:

1. Lessons from our speakers – SSYL
2. 3 Lessons in Bravery
3. 10 Lessons from a Mini-Retirement in Rome

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

William Hutchinson Murray (1913-1996), from his 1951 book entitled The Scottish Himalayan Expedition.

Related posts:

1. Reasons Why Not
2. Initiative, Action, Commitment
3. Our Story #3 – Eureka!

I had a really interesting interview this week with Noemi Pezderka who is doing a Phd on entrepreneurial business models (obviously Team Esc was flattered to be interviewed !).

She seemed to like what we’re doing and we had a fun conversation about what prompts people to start businesses and what gives start-ups the best chance of success.

Two things really stuck in my mind from the conversation:

1. The distinction between making money and creating value

One of our main frustrations with working for a big corporate company was the fact that while we were undoubtedly making a lot of money (or causing it to move around) it was much harder to see what discernible, lasting value our work was having. After a while we found this rather demotivating.

We were talking about the extent to which lots of start-up businesses aren’t only focused on generating profit (although obviously that’s nice). And it really clarified something in my mind – which is that Dom and I are intent on solving a problem and building something we feel passionate about.

Yes we want to make money to support ourselves, but – more importantly – we also want to create value. Otherwise surely we would go back to our jobs? Although Dom often laments the +£50k salary he would be on by now…!

Our positive experiences of swapping a stable salary (where you generate lots of money) for a venture aimed at creating something valuable (something that matters) have led us to this conclusion: It’s better to build a business focused on creating genuine value than money. It’s also a lot more fun and also probably more financially rewarding in the long run.

And this leads onto the second thing that struck me on Tuesday…

2. The importance of having a mission

There are all sorts of McKinsey studies which talk about how values-led businesses outperform non-values-led businesses. What does this even mean? Basically it means that organisations with a clear objective, raison d’être, mission or purpose do better.

Why? Perhaps because it provides everyone in the organisation and every decision with a standard against which they can measure every decision, their behaviour and the organisation’s strategy.

A mission actually comes before a strategy… I suppose if it’s the right mission it informs the strategy.

It also allows your target clients to ‘get it’… it’s a clear way of explaining what your organisation is for and why people should care. More than that, we all like stories and we all like products and services that resonate on an emotional level.

Check this out from Innocent:

Our purpose is to ‘Make natural, delicious food and drink that helps people live well and die old’.

[Staying true to our purpose will give us the best shot at achieving our vision...]

Our long-term vision is to become ‘The earth’s favourite little food company’

[... and our values: we have one core principle around which we make all our decisions:]

Our Values: ‘Create a business we can be proud of’

http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/careers/business/purpose/

I think these statements probably do two things:

1. influence all future decisions, strategy and culture
2. ensure that the organisation is focused on creating value. Not just money.

Some other great missions:

The Adventurists: Fighting to make the world less boring

Huxley Clothing: Making clothes that support British manufacturers. Putting colour back into British wardrobes.

Can’t think of any others at the moment. Know any?!

Our Mission

Escape the City is on a mission to liberate talented people from unfulfilling corporate jobs.

Everything we do stems from this objective. It is helping us build our business and it also helps people understand whether Esc is for them or not.

What do you think?

How could you build something to create value as well as money?

What’s your mission?

Related posts:

1. 10 Tests for your Startup
2. Income: Starting Up vs. A Salary
3. What you can learn from Innocent’s latest book

This is the third in a series of blog posts which track the story behind Escape the City from the original idea through to what we’ve built today.

This instalment covers – June 2009 – when we read something that showed us how to turn the beginnings of an idea into a workable reality.

Eureka moments…

We spent a lot of time in pubs after work, on the grass by Tower Bridge during our lunch breaks, and (on the odd occasion) in meeting rooms at work feverishly scribbling ideas on scraps of paper.

This was a really exciting time for us as we were learning so much about the world we were about to enter. The more we learnt, the more we understood about what we could potentially build.

From our point of view there’s nothing more powerful than watching relevant videos and reading interesting articles with your own idea in the back of your head.

We were casting our net really wide in order to refine all our different thoughts into a viable plan. Every time we read a little nugget that was relevant to our idea we would send it to each other (or log it in a spreadsheet!).

We were constantly having lots of exciting little eureka moments. Tiny in the scale of things, but significant enough for us to start building some real momentum.

Our bible?!

Then, in June 2009, we both read Tribes by Seth Godin. The book is about a pretty simple concept: that anyone with an idea and the energy to make something happen has all the tools they need to assemble a group of people around their concept.

The message resonated on two main levels:

1. It validated what we personally were doing (i.e. quitting our jobs to work on something that we’re passionate about)
2. It showed us HOW to go about building what we wanted to build (i.e. from a practical perspective: how might Esc work?)

It’s not a ‘how-to’ book – it’s quite high-level and relatively anecdotal – but it really worked for us.

We realised that the two of us wouldn’t have the power to sell ‘just an idea’ to exciting organisations (our target clients). However, Tribes showed us that the influence provided by thousands of talented professionals using our site (i.e. our tribe members) would give us the credibility and authority to be listened to by our target organisations (and, through doing so, get the entire concept working properly to help our members escape!).

It was a real penny-drop moment for us. We weren’t going to build a business… we were going to build a tribe, a community, a movement.

This felt like a far more authentic way to approach the challenge that we had set ourselves (i.e. how to help thousands of people working in unfulfilling corporate jobs to find something more exciting?) and really gave us the confidence to begin thinking about taking some serious forward steps.

Taking it to the next level…

By mid-June Dom had set off on his Yukon Canoe adventure and his parting shot was: ‘I dare you to have resigned by the time I get back’.

Not known for making careful decisions, Rob duly handed in his resignation. He actually had another plan back in summer 2009 and that was to do a Masters in Oenology (wine-making) in Adelaide, Australia. So his resignation wasn’t quite as brave as all that.

It was only later, when the Esc blog was taking off, that the Australia plan was retired and we both committed 100% to building a business around this concept.

So, despite not knowing it at the time, we were escalating (like the pun?) our commitment month-on-month… building a base that was going to be the beginning of quite a rollercoaster for us over the coming months (and years).

Chicken and egg

As we began to get our heads around what we were going to build, we realised that it would be chicken and egg: you can’t build a proper business until you have a tribe… but how to attract the tribe in the first place?!

——————————————————————————–

The story so far:

• Our Story #1 – A spark
• Our Story #2 – Research
• Our Story #3 – Eureka! (this post)

Related posts:

1. Our Story #1 – A Spark
2. Our Story #2 – Research
3. Our Story #4 – Initial Commitment

Here is a quick thought based on an email conversation I had with a friend who resigned from his bank today. He’s joining an early stage start-up in the renewable energy sector.

I reckon starting your own business or joining a start-up is a fantastic decision whether it works out or not. And here’s why…

Dom and I have been through the same thought process ourselves and it’s driven by this fear: What if everything goes wrong, the move doesn’t work out, and I can’t support myself via this new venture that I’m working in / on?

We came to this conclusion:

There is no way it will be a bad decision

Put it this way, if you’re unhappy in your job the worst decision you can make is no decision. Staying put when you’re not fulfilled is a bad move. You’ll only upset yourself further, annoy your colleagues, and become a bore to be around!

Obviously you might be staying put to save enough cash (how much is enough though?), get that next promotion, work on your idea in your spare time, etc, etc…

However, once you’ve made the leap – what could end up happening?

1. It works!

Scenario 1… it actually works out. You get to work on something that a) you care passionately about, b) supports you and c) you’ve made happen yourself. Well done for being brave enough to make the leap.

2. It doesn’t work v.1

Scenario 2… it doesn’t work out but you’re in a position to start another business. If you eventually end up starting your own business then this will have been a fantastic learning experience.

3. It doesn’t work v.2

Worst case scenario… it doesn’t work out and you have to go and find another corporate job.

We’ve spoken to lots of employers and recruiters over the past year. We’ve also seen lots and lots of job applications.

Guess what?

The ones that really stand out aren’t the ones who played it safe all the way from A-Levels through Uni and into nice, safe graduate positions (just like Dom and I did) – they’re the ones who stand out from the crowd.

If you’ve done something interesting / entrepreneurial / different as well as your corporate background then you immediately stand out and are probably worth meeting.

Another interesting way to look at it is Dom’s really valid ‘Think of it as doing a Masters’ theory.

——————————————————————————–

Obviously there are challenges, obviously there are financial and career considerations… however, the worst that could happen certainly isn’t as bad as we allow ourselves to believe it could be.

What do you think?

“Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.” – Macbeth, Shakespeare.

Related posts:

1. When a farewell work email goes public
2. We asked, you answered: work – how do you feel?
3. Esc ‘How-To’ #3: How to work out what to do with your life

Hi everyone – this is the beginning of a series of blog posts which track the story behind Escape the City from the original idea through to what we’ve built today.

Starting at the beginning – February and March of 2009 – this post tells the story of the original idea.

How did it start?

It all started with a Google search. Actually, no it didn’t. It all started with a canoe race. The longest canoe race in the world actually. It’s called the Yukon River Quest. Back in 2008 and 2009 Dom started spending more and more of his time setting himself challenges for his weekends and holidays. It helped him forget that he was finding his job increasingly unfulfilling.

He ended up building a small website to help him raise charity money for the Yukon adventure. The website was called www.fleethecity.co.uk…

February 2009

One slow Friday afternoon Dom and Rob were sitting in neighbouring cubicles on the 9th floor. Dom leaned across and whispered to Rob about the canoe race and the website. He also said that he thought there was a business opportunity for a website that helped bored office workers find exciting challenges and short-term adventures to distract them from the fact that they didn’t enjoy their jobs.

He said that perhaps he could turn FleetheCity into such a business when he got back from the Yukon in July.

Rob, not being such an adventurer, but possessing a similar feeling of ‘surely there’s more to life than this laptop, PowerPoint and Excel’, said that he thought it was a great idea.

March 2009

The Google search… For reasons now forgotten (perhaps desperation) Rob found himself sitting at work and typing the word ‘escape’ into Google. The first image that came up on the Images search was a photo of a little escape key running away from the keyboard. Try it yourself, it still comes up.

By this stage Dom was working at a client’s office over on Fleet Street. Rob copied the image and sent it to him via email. He didn’t intend anything more than to say the word ‘Escape’ to Dom through the medium of a Googled image. A strange and unintended thing then happened. Dom replied with a crazily enthusiastic email saying ‘Yes, that’s it! Not Flee the City, but Escape the City!’. By that evening he sent through a rough logo to Rob’s mobile phone.

Crazy and naive as it sounds, but as soon as the little Esc man was born we both felt like we already had a business. Little did we know that that logo was the beginning of an adventure that would see us both quit our jobs and start a business together!

{next stage of the story coming next week – watch this space}

Related posts:

1. Our Story #2 – Research
2. Our Story #3 – Eureka!
3. Our Story #4 – Initial Commitment

Some more thoughts from Paul Graham. I have been reading quite a few of his essays recently and his start-up advice is really spot on. On a slightly more philosophical level this really struck me as an interesting way of thinking about something that drives all of our working lives: the requirement to earn our living.

Why do we work?

For some lucky people work is their calling and something they would probably be doing if they weren’t being paid at all. Lots of other people do work that they’re really passionate about. Ultimately however, the requirement to earn cash to survive and support yourself and your family underpins why a lot of people do what they do.

The thoughts below essentially say: life is extremely short and many people work mainly to support themselves and their families. Starting your own business (and hopefully being rewarded with the profits) is potentially a more efficient way of compressing the ‘tedious’ requirement to earn cash through your life.

Now this is not as clear cut as saying ‘start a business and earn more than you would via a yearly salary over 40 years’. Of course it’s not. And lots of businesses fail. However, it is an interesting way of assessing risk and the amount of time you invest in pursuit of money.

‘I couldn’t possibly start my own business, it’s too risky’

Some people would say risky is staying in a job that’s not right for you. The past few years have shown that corporate job security is an illusion.

A more challenging question is this: are you willing to work the middle 40 years of your life on something you’re not passionate about in order to support yourself? Or would you prefer to try and compact that into a shorter space of time, potentially earn more, and (if you don’t love your job) have a lot more fun doing it?!

As I said, it’s not an either or question. But it’s an interesting way to think about things…

——-——-——-——-——-——-——-——-——-——-——-——-

“Speed, not Money” – by Paul Graham

“The way I’ve described it, starting a startup sounds pretty stressful. It is. When I talk to the founders of the companies we’ve funded, they all say the same thing: I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t realize it would be this hard.

So why do it? It would be worth enduring a lot of pain and stress to do something grand or heroic, but just to make money? Is making money really that important?

No, not really. It seems ridiculous to me when people take business too seriously. I regard making money as a boring errand to be got out of the way as soon as possible. There is nothing grand or heroic about starting a startup per se.

So why do I spend so much time thinking about startups? I’ll tell you why. Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life.

We take it for granted most of the time, but human life is fairly miraculous. It is also palpably short. You’re given this marvellous thing, and then poof, it’s taken away. You can see why people invent gods to explain it. But even to people who don’t believe in gods, life commands respect. There are times in most of our lives when the days go by in a blur, and almost everyone has a sense, when this happens, of wasting something precious. As Ben Franklin said, if you love life, don’t waste time, because time is what life is made of.

So no, there’s nothing particularly grand about making money. That’s not what makes startups worth the trouble. What’s important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that.”

http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html

Related posts:

1. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #7: Ben Keene
2. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #3: Catharina Bruns
3. Advice for ‘Starting Something You Love’ – #5: Robin Kennedy

Last Wednesday 40 intrepid Esc members braved the tube strike and the grumpy hordes of pavement walkers to make it to the private bar above The Yorkshire Grey. It was our first Esc Wednesday since we put them on hold to concentrate on the website over the summer (re-launch!).

Our special guests were Josh and Emily from Unlocked Guides. Just wanted to say a big thank you to both of them for sharing their time and experiences with us. Had a very sore head on Thursday – note to self: Esc Wednesdays are not an excuse for a mid-week party (well they kind of are).

Here are some things that we learnt

• Starting a business with a partner seems like a much better idea than going it alone. If you’ve known each other forever (like Josh & Emily) it can definitely help.
• Within the team take the lead on what you do best but be prepared to get involved with all the varied little tasks that come with starting your own business.
• There is no set way to do a startup – do it in the way it works for you. The Unlocked Guides team spend 50% of their time doing ‘other work’ that pays the bills. It works for them. You don’t have to conform to other peoples’ expectations of how a business should be started.
• Having an impulsive person and a voice of reason on the team is a good thing! Allow both to exercise influence at certain times.
• The single veto rule seemed like a great idea: basically if either Josh or Emily doesn’t think something should happen it doesn’t happen (i.e. they both have to be fully behind a new idea to do it).
• Strong relationships at the point of purchase are key for these guys in terms of growing their business (making sales)!
• To get your idea off the ground talk to as many people as possible in the early days
• Sweat the tiny details (e.g. the gold stars in one of the first books weren’t shiny enough. make them shinier!).
• Name-dropping helps open doors. Having a recognisable name associated with your business will increase your credibility at first meetings and make people more inclined to take you seriously.
• The city is a great place to start your career, build a network, and learn about business.
• Emily has a fantastic ‘dont spend winters in the UK policy’ – the fact that she has managed this at the same time as pursuing a career in PR, management consulting, an MBA, and her own startup is even more impressive. It can be done!
• Both Josh & Emily are examples of the fact that the traditional full-time salaried professional job isn’t the only way to pursue a successful and fulfilling career (i.e. contracting is a fantastic way to pay the bills while working on your thing).
• Starting a business doing something that interests you is really fun – they’re clearly having a lot of fun.

What have I missed?

Did you come to the Esc Wed?

What have I forgotten?

What did you get from it?

We also learnt that if you get a bunch of likeminded people in a room, feed them beer, and provide an atmosphere conducive to chatting exciting connections will happen and great fun will be had by all. Thanks to everyone who came. We’re already looking forward to the next one!

Related posts:

1. 10 things we learnt at ‘The Answer to the Money Question’
2. 10 things we learnt from Keystone Tutors at last night’s Esc Wednesday
3. ‘A Tale of Two Weeks’ – by Esc’s new US Director

“For nearly all of history the success of a society was proportionate to its ability to assemble large and disciplined organizations. Those who bet on economies of scale generally won, which meant the largest organizations were the most successful ones.

But in the late twentieth century something changed. It turned out that economies of scale were not the only force at work. Particularly in technology, the increase in speed one could get from smaller groups started to trump the advantages of size.

Large organizations will start to do worse now, though, because for the first time in history they’re no longer getting the best people. An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn’t want to work for a big company. They want to work for the hot startup that’s rapidly growing into one. If they’re really ambitious, they want to start it.”

http://www.paulgraham.com/highres.html

What do you think?

• Is small better?
• How?
• Why?
• Do we all want to work for start-ups? (probably not)
• Why is it frustrating to work in a large company?

From our perspective it’s the flexibility, independence and freedom that comes with running your own small company – as opposed to the lack of control that you (often) have over your own fate in a large organisation.

What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Esc ‘How-To’ #2: How to get an interview when your dream company isn’t hiring
2. Google serves free food!
3. 11 Ways to Use Big Finance to Help the World

… or is the volume of exciting new business ideas out there increasing?

Perhaps it’s just because Dom and I now come into contact with more start-ups because of what we’re doing and who we’re meeting.

Or perhaps more and more people are deciding to ‘do their own thing’?

Everywhere I turn I hear of interesting business ideas springing up.

Lots of them are addressing the same area but from different angles…

Check these out

Love Your Niche – The Job Curiosity Site. I think it’s going to do exactly what you would imagine it will do. Best of luck to Alice with the project.

MoveMeOn – To match candidates with a tailored set of recruitment firms / headhunters based on their experience and what they want to do next. Really enjoyed our beers with Rich & Nick – the guys behind this idea.

Launchlings – Enabling like-minded people to connect and develop their fledgling ventures in a supportive online environment. Like the name. Love the logo.

Pankhurst Page – Promoting and supporting British entrepreneurs. One half of this deadly PR duo is my sister – whose escape we helped engineer!

Similar post-launch ventures include Enternships, Open Society, The Next Challenge and Sandbox.

What’s going on?

My house-mate surprised me early one day at breakfast by geeking out about Kondratiev Waves (essentially macro-economic cycles). The theory is that entrepreneurial growth and innovation occurs most in the worst economic periods – where people are faced with a dearth of opportunities and respond with their own solutions.

Are people more entrepreneurial today than they were 10 years ago? Has the recession prompted more people to do their own thing rather than take the standard mainstream path? Has the internet made it easier than ever to start a business with no money (yes)?

Have you spotted what links all these ideas yet?

They’re united by a shared reaction against the pressure to toe the line, to keep your head down, and by a determination to spend the best years of your life doing work that matters to you.

It’s exciting to see so many proactive people deciding to reject the cards that the economy / the job market / or the corporate mainstream have dealt them and decide to do something about it, something different!

What’s your idea?

Picture courtesy of TheBlazingSaddles.com

Related posts:

1. Do it for yourself
2. Stand Up (literally)
3. Escape Diary #1: Crunching the numbers behind my escape strategy

I had a very enjoyable 4-hour train journey from Cornwall to London yesterday.

On the train I found myself reading through Paul Graham’s collection of essays.

Every other sentence has a really interesting insight / lesson – even if you don’t necessarily agree with everything he says – it’s thought-provoking stuff. And it definitely doesn’t just apply to tech start-ups.

Having saved a whole load of quotes it seemed stupid not to do something with them. So here you go…

Paul Graham on Start-ups: quotes

You can’t directly control where your thoughts drift. If you’re controlling them, they’re not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.

I suspect a lot of people aren’t sure what’s the top idea in their mind at any given time. I’m often mistaken about it. I tend to think it’s the idea I’d want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it’s easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it’s not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.

the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is, they’re not even fun.

The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?

So if you want to start a startup and don’t know yet what you’re going to do, I’d encourage you to focus initially on organic ideas. What’s missing or broken in your daily life? Sometimes if you just ask that question you’ll get immediate answers.

There are ideas that obvious lying around now. The reason you’re overlooking them is the same reason you’d have overlooked the idea of building Facebook in 2004: organic startup ideas usually don’t seem like startup ideas at first. We know now that Facebook was very successful, but put yourself back in 2004. Putting undergraduates’ profiles online wouldn’t have seemed like much of a startup idea. And in fact, it wasn’t initially a startup idea. When Mark spoke at a YC dinner this winter he said he wasn’t trying to start a company when he wrote the first version of Facebook. It was just a project. So was the Apple I when Woz first started working on it. He didn’t think he was starting a company. If these guys had thought they were starting companies, they might have been tempted to do something more “serious,” and that would have been a mistake.

So if you want to come up with organic startup ideas, I’d encourage you to focus more on the idea part and less on the startup part. Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems like the problem is important enough to build a company on. If you keep pursuing such threads it would be hard not to end up making something of value to a lot of people, and when you do, surprise, you’ve got a company.

Don’t be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that’s a good sign. That’s probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea.

I think the thing that’s been most surprising to me is how one’s perspective on time shifts. Working on our startup, I remember time seeming to stretch out, so that a month was a huge interval.

It’s surprising how much you become consumed by your startup, in that you think about it day and night, but never once does it feel like “work.”

In a startup, things seem great one moment and hopeless the next. And by next, I mean a couple hours later.

I’m surprised by how much better it feels to be working on something that is challenging and creative, something I believe in, as opposed to the hired-gun stuff I was doing before. I knew it would feel better; what’s surprising is how much better.

Several founders mentioned specifically how much more important persistence was than intelligence.

I’ve been surprised again and again by just how much more important persistence is than raw intelligence.

This applies not just to intelligence but to ability in general, and that’s why so many people said character was more important in choosing cofounders.

The top thing I didn’t understand before going into it is that persistence is the name of the game. For the vast majority of startups that become successful, it’s going to be a really long journey, at least 3 years and probably 5+.

Because we’re relaxed, it’s so much easier to have fun doing what we do. Gone is the awkward nervous energy fueled by the desperate need to not fail guiding our actions. We can concentrate on doing what’s best for our company, product, employees and customers.

That’s why things get so much better when you hit ramen profitability. You can shift into a different mode of working.

Do Lots of little things: It’s much more of a grind than glamorous.

Lots of founders mentioned how important it was to launch with the simplest possible thing. By this point everyone knows you should release fast and iterate.

When you let customers tell you what they’re after, they will often reveal amazing details about what they find valuable as well what they’re willing to pay for.

To benefit from engaging with users you have to be willing to change your idea. We’ve always encouraged founders to see a startup idea as a hypothesis rather than a blueprint. And yet they’re still surprised how well it works to change the idea.

One reason people overreact to competitors is that they overvalue ideas. If ideas really were the key, a competitor with the same idea would be a real threat. But it’s usually execution that matters:

All the scares induced by seeing a new competitor pop up are forgotten weeks later. It always comes down to your own product and approach to the market.

This is generally true even if competitors get lots of attention.

Competitors riding on lots of good blogger perception aren’t really the winners and can disappear from the map quickly. You need consumers after all.

Hype doesn’t make satisfied users, at least not for something as complicated as technology.

There is an irrational fear that no one will buy your product. But if you work hard and incrementally make it better, there is no need to worry.

Getting people to use a new service is incredibly difficult

A lot of what startup founders do is just posturing. It works.

If you pitch your idea to a random person, 95% of the time you’ll find the person instinctively thinks the idea will be a flop and you’re wasting your time (although they probably won’t say this directly).

There was one surprise founders mentioned that I’d forgotten about: that outside the startup world, startup founders get no respect.

It surprised me that being a startup founder does not get you more admiration from women.

Things Change as You Grow

When I look at the responses, the common theme is that starting a startup was like I said, but way more so. People just don’t seem to get how different it is till they do it. Why? The key to that mystery is to ask, how different from what? Once you phrase it that way, the answer is obvious: from a job. Everyone’s model of work is a job. It’s completely pervasive. Even if you’ve never had a job, your parents probably did, along with practically every other adult you’ve met.

I think the goal of an essay should be to discover surprising things.

We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is determination.

Starting a startup is like science in that you have to follow the truth wherever it leads.

the way to succeed was to launch something fast, listen to users, and then iterate; that startups required resilience because they were always an emotional rollercoaster

How important it is for founders to have people to ask for advice.

What a solitary task startups are. Architects are constantly interacting face to face with other people, whereas doing a technology startup, at least, tends to require long stretches of uninterrupted time to work. “You could do it in a box.”

People are dramatically more productive as founders or early employees of startups

A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.

This is particularly true of young people who have till now always been under the thumb of some kind of authority. Being relentlessly resourceful is definitely not the recipe for success in big companies, or in most schools. I don’t even want to think what the recipe is in big companies, but it is certainly longer and messier, involving some combination of resourcefulness, obedience, and building alliances.

If I were running a startup, this would be the phrase I’d tape to the mirror. “Make something people want” is the destination, but “Be relentlessly resourceful” is how you get there.

So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else.

it’s better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy.

Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can’t be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized. Starting a startup is a huge moral weight. Understand this and make a conscious effort not to be ground down by it, just as you’d be careful to bend at the knees when picking up a heavy box.

Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I’d choose if I could only keep one.

Understand your users. That’s the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users’ lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it’s mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.

Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That’s the reason to launch early, to understand your users. Evolving your idea is the embodiment of understanding your users. Understanding your users well will tend to push you toward making something that makes a few people deeply happy. The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service is that it helps you understand your users. And understanding your users will even ensure your morale, because when everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going.

Fortunately the way to make a startup recession-proof is to do exactly what you should do anyway: run it as cheaply as possible. For years I’ve been telling founders that the surest route to success is to be the cockroaches of the corporate world. The immediate cause of death in a startup is always running out of money. So the cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill. And fortunately it has gotten very cheap to run a startup. A recession will if anything make it cheaper still.

Related posts:

1. 52 great (borrowed) bits of advice for any start-up
2. ‘We’re gonna start a revolution…’
3. Bang on early start-up advice from Henry – Spoonfed & Bullseye Hub