Really, I'm bored and that's why I'm blogging. I can't get products out of engineering as fast as I can invent them, so I'm left to lose my blogging virginity... Yes, this is my first blog.No fault of engineering, I just can't shut my mind off. Even after engineering gets started on the ideas, I change my mind. Pretty sure they all hate me. I'm taking some PHP programming classes at JCCC in the fall, so I'll have a better appreciation of what they go through. Hope I don't learn enough to ruin their lives.
I have met some interesting people at Venture Fridays that sparked this post. These people are from all walks of life and have ideas all over the map, from technology to retail. They are pretty smart people with a lot of enthusiasm for their ideas. I'm an entrepreneur at heart and an idea person, so being around these people is like crack to me, not that I've ever been on crack. I feed off of the energy and creative power of the mind. There is an energy field (and alcohol field) at these meetups that can't be beat. Everybody has an idea and there is no such thing as a bad idea (I'll reserve that for my next post).
Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur, but nobody wants to jump off a cliff. Begs the questions: Can you be a part-time entrepreneur? Can you work a normal 8-5 job and innovate at night?
I'm sure that entrepreneur success can be measured on a bell curve with some normal distribution. Most of the entrepreneurs live in the middle of the curve, barely making ends meet, teetering between making a dollar and losing a dollar. The successful entrepreneurs live to the right of the curve, making enough money and enjoying enough success to stoke a good size ego. This is the lucky 10-20 percent. The remaining 80 percent-plus are destined to languish with no sleep or money until their next idea or until they adapt. My guess is that the successes rarely materialize from the original idea, but save that for another day.
Of course the answer is YES, you can be a part-time entrepreneur, but your chance of success is drastically lower. You just shift the bell curve and not in a good way. Necessity is the mother of invention (I think Obama said that when he was working on his birth certificate last year). If you eat, live, sleep, and yes, drink your enterprise, you have a much greater chance of success. If you don't know when you will get paid or how you will pay your bills, you tend to work harder and be more creative. You tend to build things quicker and simpler. You tend to hear the market. You ARE your product or service. Part-time entrepreneurs probably have 1/100 chance of succeeding. That would imply that full-time entrepreneurs are 10X more likely to succeed by jumping off the cliff.
Do you just close your eyes and jump? No, be aggressive, but don't be stupid. Plan your course. If you are starting a venture that you hope will cash flow $100K/year and you are making $200K/year at your current job, you better really hate your current job. If you are making $30K/year and work on your venture part-time, you have a likelihood of making $1K (1/100*100K). Is it worth spending all that time and energy to make that happen? If you jump off the cliff, quit your job, you have a 10-20 percent chance of making that $100K, or a likelihood of making $10K-$20K (10-20 percent*$100K). Is it worth jumping to make close to what you are currently making? My answer is always yes. I would rather work for myself and enjoy the misery my own creation causes than the misery of somebody else's creation.
I've jumped off a lot of cliffs and had some bad landings, sometimes with my eyes half open. I want every person at Red Nova Labs to make that leap every day with every decision. We want to work with people that want to jump off a cliff. We want to give them the advice and/or infrastructure to move them further to the right on the bell curve and have a higher chance of success. At the end of the day, it is all risk/reward and we can't be afraid to fail or there is no risk.
