Why should you start a Startup?

“You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future” - Steve Jobs

I’m originally a Lawyer, and over the years of experience in dealing with a lot of startups and corporate clients I have learned to analyze the situation in terms of 3 scenarios: 

Best case scenario; Worst case scenario; Most likely scenario.

Most of the startup founders think of the future like:

• Best case scenario: Sitting on a beach on the southern coast of Spain with a beer. 
• Worst case scenario: Your project fails, go broke, be perceived as a failure by the world.

Believe it or not but Worst case scenario is the Most likely scenario. Most of the first time founders usually fail the company and go broke, unless they have a huge trust fund.

It does sound uninspiring, doesn't it? Don't get me wrong I am not trying to demotivate you. However, there’s much to tell between those lines. You don’t need to have a sound exit to make a profit on your startup. In fact, even if you fail and go broke you might still make a profit on your startup… if you count on the intangibles, of course. Intangibles you get while failing, such as:

Grit

Having struggled in life is a hard-earned asset. Bad tasting medicine, as Steve Jobs used to say. Startups are often weeks away from dying, and founders are the only people to blame for it. Odds are against you, and every decision you make has a huge impact on you, your family, your co-founders, your company’s shareholders, your employees, and everyone around you. A very particular sense of grit builds up in your mind when facing a tough decision, as you can’t step back or vacillate, a bad decision is way better than no decision at all.

Still, everything is your fault, you’re the one to blame.

Management Skills

In a Startup, your biggest enemy is your naivety. People will try to drag you down, manipulate you and sometimes might even kick you out of your own Startup. As a founder, naivety will always put you in really bad positions. You’ll get toxic co-founders that you need to get rid of. You’ll strike a bad deal with investors that you’ll need to live with until they decide to exit. You’ll hire great people just to find out they’re not that great after all. You’ll sign overpromising deals with clients, and need to walk your way around it when the product underdelivers. 

Your life is full of tough management decisions, but the good thing about naivety is that you tend to not do the same mistakes twice. You get much more diligent after failing.

Domain Expertise

As you try to take your product to market, you’ll learn more and more about your clients. You’ll get to investigate the companies that already serve them which you probably didn’t even know about. You’ll make partnerships with industry heavyweights and work closely with them. You’ll attend industry conventions and learn about the new trends first hand. Along with your learnings, your product and sales proposition will evolve too, you’ll be on the cutting edge of your industry.

Even if your product doesn’t work out, you’re in a much better position to tackle this market after failing than you were when you started out.

Network

As a founder you’ll go places, you’ll talk to people, you will shake hands with the top elites in your field. Among clients, investors, employees, mentors and startup fellows that know you so well, there’s plenty of people to cheer you up on your next endeavour. That fellow from a neighbour startup might be your next co-founder. That junior employee might be your champion developer next time. That mentor that got to know how much effort you’re putting in could be your angel investor. That investor that wasn’t into your company, might jump in your next venture.

As many say, your network today is your net worth tomorrow. Cultivate a good relationship with those that cross your path, keep in the loop those that interest you. Even if those relationships are not fruitful right away they could be in the future.

In fact, these learnings brought to you by failures tend to compound over time. That’s why each failure brings you closer to succeeding next time.

Optimize for personal improvement while optimizing for success

As a founder, all your decisions are shaped by the needs of delivering value to your clients and bringing money into the company. Only by making those a priority you will make your company thrive. While doing this, you’re improving yourself as an entrepreneur as well. Actually, the good thing is that you don’t need to specifically optimize to learn. By pushing your company forward and battling through the hardships of startup life you’re already learning and improving on a personal level, and those learnings will compound over time and make you more likely to succeed in the future, if not now.

The moment you succeed, if you look back in time, you’ll most likely understand that all your failures and missteps along the way were actually building blocks of your current success. Enjoy the ride!