How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up? | Recruiting & Job Search, New York City Start-up blog by Marc Cenedella

How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?

There’s an old joke about how to make a small fortune in angel investing: start with a large fortune and invest it in angel rounds.

I guess you could say the same thing about how to fail at an entrepreneurial venture: start a new company and then do everything that could be reasonably expected of you.  And that’s how you fail.

The world is not set up to make your venture successful, and in fact almost everything conspires against you and your new company.

Because there is no natural constituency for the entrepreneurial venture, there is no way, reasonably, you can expect yours to survive. Customers aren’t clamoring for new vendors, employees aren’t looking to make half as much for their hard-earned skills at a firm that has a 50% chance of dying every day, and investors aren’t interested in taking risks or putting money into pipe dreams.

The conceit that a new venture has a shot of winning at all, under any circumstances, was unknown throughout history, is still laughable across the globe, and remains rare even here in the United States.

And that’s why it takes a special person to succeed.  Notice I said “special”.  Not charming, philanthropic, beloved, clever, popular, persuasive, capable or handsome.

“Special”.

You know, I’ve attended several dozen “entrepreneur breakfasts” here in New York City hosted by various internet luminaries or fellow entrepreneurs over the past eight years since I started TheLadders.  Entrepreneurs can make good use of the dose of inspiration that comes from sharing, in the camaraderie of the breakfast table, the stories of challenges overcome, obstacles conquered, and victories won.

And while it’s never easy to tell which businesses and which people will win big this time around, it’s pretty easy to tell who is going to fail.

It’s the polite, patient, purposeful people.

Being an internet entrepreneur requires a certain antic disposition, a degree of self-immolation, and a dorkish obsessiveness with seeing the digital bits line up in a row.  Not just an enjoyment, not just a desire, but a gut-level craving, an existential need, to see the machine come to life.  That burn that flares so intensely in the dark of the night that it awakes you: to  stare at the ceiling, to wonder expansively, to turn every part of the creation over and over and over in your head as the clock flicks the minutes into the small hours.

Many, perhaps all, who come to entrepreneurship want the fame or the fortune or the fellowship, but it is only the ones who need it badly enough that will suffer through.

I remember sitting next to one very, very nice woman at one of these entrepreneurial breakfasts in 2007.  She had a great idea and a clever execution for an advice site — something like Daily Lit for the self-improvement set.

I asked what the URL was; she said the site wasn’t live yet.

I asked when it was going live; she said, with some pride in the accomplishment, that they’d already spent 18 months on the design, copy, coding and business model, and were lining up famous names to endorse the site when it went live, which they were preparing for next year at about this time.

She asked me if I had any advice for success.

I said yes.

“Put down your fork.

Get up from your chair.

Walk out this door.

Go to your office and call all of your team together. Lock the door and let everybody know you are not opening it or leaving the office until your site is live and accepting customers.”

I suppose another characteristic of entrepreneurs is our directness : )

Well, of course, she objected: that’s not practical, it’s not considerate, we still have planning to do before we’re ready for launch, and it is essential that we be perfectly positioned because you only get one shot to go live with a consumer brand.

And you know what?

She was absolutely right.

But so was I.

You see, being an entrepreneur is unreasonable.  It is arrogant.  It is unusual.

You are asserting that, despite the presence of 7 billion other people on the planet, and a US economy that produces $14 trillion in goods and services each year, and over 100 mm white collar workers in our country, that you, little old you, have come up with an idea, a business, a company that none of those other wonderful human beings have thought to invent yet.

I mean, c’mon, there’s no denying that it’s arrogant to say that you are right and everybody else was wrong to not see the wonderful opportunity that your company is pursuing.  That they were fools to just leave the dollar bills waiting there for you to pick them up.

And part of that unreasonableness is realizing that you are in a fight for your company’s life every day.  Every day that you are not “live” is a day you’ve lost the opportunity to make an impression.  Every day that you’re not bringing in cash is a day that you’ve lost the chance to expand your payroll.  Every day that you’re not pleasing customers is a day that somebody, somewhere else, will.  Perhaps they’re not doing it as well as you know you eventually will, but the plain truth is that they are pleasing them today and you’re not.

So here’s my 3-step checklist to figure out if you’re failing as an internet entrepreneur:

1. Is the site live yet?

Yes: you’re likely failing, but at least you’ve got a chance of getting some feedback from real, live users, which may, if you’re smart and perceptive, decrease your chance of failure a little bit.

No: you’re failing.

2. Do you have free customers yet?

Yes: well, now you have a shot to establish relationships. And if you listen carefully and not pridefully, you just may have a tiny chance of hearing them correctly and improving your customer experience from awful to plausibly bearable.

No: you’re failing.

3. Do you have paying customers yet?

Yes: congratulations! You have reduced your chances of failing from 100% to 99%.  There are many more chances to fail along the way, but you have graduated to some of the more interesting ones.  Good show!

No: you’re failing.

If, when you wake up in the morning, the answer to any of the above questions is “no”, then you’re failing. Not failing tomorrow, or next month, or next year, but failing right now, today.  As you read this…. Now.

And what you need to do, what you must do, is to spend your entire day focused on changing the answers to yes.  Desperately, immediately, fully.

The very nice polite woman who had purposefully set out to make an enormous splash with her internet company did indeed get it live the next year, and her patience paid enormous dividends… to her competitors from vertically-focused advice sites.  She struggled along for a couple years and then failed.

You will too, if you’re still reading this, and not locking the door to the office…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 at 7:11 am and is filed under Start-up. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

A good call to action...

eXo Platform kicks off “the year of PaaS” and extends enterprise portals to the cloud

Yesterday, Gartner declared that 2011 will be the year of Platform as a Service (PaaS). Not only does this mean we’ll be seeing a wave of innovation but also a consolidation of various offers over the next few years.

Well, we’ve perhaps already witnessed a bit of consolidation. Like with VMware’s acquisition of WaveMaker just last week. This acquisition – which took place only a few months after Cloudbees bought Stax – should naturally strengthen VMware’s PaaS range.

As for innovation, new offers are also starting to pop up – especially with Amazon Web Service’s launch of Elastic Beanstalk in January. More traditionally an Infrastrure as a service (IaaS) provider, AWS seems to be clearly making its way towards PaaS as well. The product (still in beta) is designed to let developers upload their application and then keep their hands off while the system automatically handles deployment.

And coincidentally, eXo Platform is also launching a new cloud-based service for java developers, called eXo Cloud IDE. The Franco-American company is the publisher of a user experience platform for java, aiming to make java applications and websites faster to build and easier to deploy. Cloud IDE, which will be in private beta through the 2nd trimester of 2011, is the first of a series of free services to be provided in the eXo cloud services package. This hosted environment facilitates social coding and the collaborative development of gadgets and mashups that can be deployed directly to popular java PaaS. In the future, the team says it would like to extend support beyond java to cover additional programming languages like Rails, .NET, Node.js, and Play.

The company – which recently nominated the former Director of Red Hat France, Yann Aubry, to lead the company’s sales efforts in the EMEA region – has also announced the launch of eXo Platform 3.5, a multi-tenant user experience platform for java systems. In addition to multi-latency and cloud management capabilities, the new platform apparently features a number of improvements making it easier to write, test and deploy gadgets, mashups, HTML5 and content applications.

The company founded in 2003 closed a €4 million Series A round with Auriga Ventures and XAnge last year. eXo – which been called one of the “three musketeers” of French open source (alongside Bonitasoft and Talend) by French Newspaper La Tribune – says that it seeks to provide the shortest and most efficient path to the cloud for java enterprises with its new offers. Developers, feel free to chime in.

eXo Platform image

Website: exoplatform.com
Location:San Francisco, California, United States
Founded: 2003
Funding: $6M

eXo offers the next generation of Java middleware designed for the new era of cloud-based services. The eXo Platform makes Java websites and applications faster to build and easier to deploy, and offers modern features such as content, collaboration,… Learn More

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See what you think Phil, any implications for MS? Either from potential tech/dev perspective or maybe just how we see the world...

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