I’ve been getting up at 5AM for the last three and a half months and it’s because of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. However on Monday I will graduate from the Founder Institute incubation program and I’m now hoping that Bordeaux, a city I have rapidly fallen in love with since our move here last August, will be the long term beneficiary of everything that I’ve learnt.
On Thursday June 23rd 2016 I flew back to Europe from San Francisco. When I woke up in the plane on the Friday morning it was an Air France hostess who confirmed the news that the UK had decided to shoot itself in the foot. Events since that date have made me feel increasingly disconnected from the country where I grew up and played football for. That’s a shame because I’d always intended to send my three little Frenchies across the channel for a proper education when the time came. No longer.
In the months after the referendum I realised I had a choice. Stand on the sidelines and complain that the world was going to the dogs. Or to try and use the knowledge and contacts I’ve built up over the last 20 years to do something to build a better future. I chose the latter. Applying to an incubation program in France that could teach me what I needed to know about tech startups in France (where I and my family are now set to stay), was a major step in that journey.
So what has 14 weeks of going up to Paris every Monday for 5 hours of evening classes and a further 20 to 30 hours of work in the early mornings and at weekends taught me?
We covered a wide range of topics; developing an idea, customer development, revenue models, naming and positioning, startup legal and IP, building the right team including advisors, product development, sales and traction, branding and marketing, and bootstrapping and fundraising. But more than that, I’ve started to build a network of contacts in Paris, and I walk away with three new perspectives…
Startups: I’ve realised that whilst being a startup is hard, you can and should apply a degree of structure to what you do. Many of them don’t. Whilst the very nature of startups is that they are operating in an uncertain environment so you can’t lock everything down, you also can’t work without a plan and guiding north star. I now think of life as an entrepreneur as being like a Lombard Street shaped runway, in the middle of the night, with two thirds of the guiding lights knocked out. In fact it’s a little harder than that because there’s a few other “dummy lights” that have been planted just to add a little extra confusion. Another key reason why being a startup is hard is because you have to drive down that runway quickly, and doing everything at a faster pace is by definition, more physically tiring. This need for speed comes from the fact that in a startup everyone is much more aware of money, and how this equates to time. If the plane isn’t up in the air by the time the money runs out, it’s game over. And the whole team knows and feels that every day.
Large corporates: I’ve also realised why innovating in a large corporate is possibly even harder. Whilst my experiences as an intrepreneur within EMC (now Dell) taught me a lot about this, the Founders Institute has enabled me to meet lots of entrepreneurs and see things from their perspective. I’m now more convinced than ever that in life there are people who create, people who scale, and people who operate. Entrepreneurs are creators. The vast majority of people in large mature organisations are operators. Whilst all of these profiles are required; it’s obvious to me that it’s very difficult to have unpredictable creativity alongside predictable operations. It’s oil and water, but because you cannot risk your current cash flow, you really need to put that creativity out at the edge of the organisation to give it the time it needs to blossom. Whilst other people have already reached similar conclusions, I now wonder how companies such as my own could tap into the creative potential of operators, or successfully move operators back into the newer more creative parts of the company. I often see wonderful ideas in large companies, but I also see so many of them go nowhere because there is no mechanism to harness this latent creativity. This is wasteful. At any rate I am hugely grateful for my own company to have given me the freedom to take on this activity over the last few months.
People: I’ve learned that being passionate about what you do doesn’t make it easy to wake up. It’s still hard when the alarm clock rings at 5AM. It does however make it easier for you to get up even though you’re tired. I’ve also realised that being an entrepreneur is a family affair. You can’t get onto this rollercoaster without the people around you being supportive (thank you Sandie and the kids). However once you’ve bought your ticket, you then get access to the good side of humanity; I’ve been astounded at the willingness of people to meet with me for an hour or two and share their thoughts and experiences. For people who aren’t entrepreneurs it seems like they are intrigued by us and our way of thinking and lifestyle. For people who are entrepreneurs, at least in the ecosystems that work well, it’s a sort of brotherhood thing, where people seem to accept that what goes around comes around. Every time you’re blown away by the expertise of someone, you’re reminded that you need to give back to someone else. Helping, and being helped, is actually very up-lifting and I thoroughly recommend it to everyone.
So in conclusion, I thank Nigel, Michael and Boris for giving me the impetus to disrupt myself and my sleep patterns. I’m just sorry that you won’t reap the benefits, but I’m hopeful that Maxime, Gaston and Capucine and lots of other people in Bordeaux will.
If you’d like to read the other weekly newsletters that I shared during the course, then you can find them posted in full below.
