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Entrepreneurship sucks! Know when to get out!

There is a significant danger in promotion of “entrepreneurship” without fully understanding the ups and downs. Where ever you look nowadays, there are so many people calling themselves entrepreneurs or promoting it. It’s a trend. Very few talk about the dangers of it.

Don’t get me wrong, we need entrepreneurs to move the society forward. We need them more than ever, given the volatility of the global political system and the climate change.

But not everyone can become a successful entrepreneur. I don’t mean success by the number of millions or billions you make it at an exit. You can be successful with less, based on your own metrics.

During my 14 years of being a tech entrepreneur, I struggled to break away from it due to so many failures. But I made the switch this year and I feel I am off the rat race. I’m now working to build a successful business, but not as an entrepreneur but as a business person.

Entrepreneurs are those who take excessive risk working on a challenge that will change an industry, or at least they think, they can make a drastic improvement.

When I started ebdex in 2004, I wanted to make companies get paid faster by bringing a novel technology to market through e-invoicing exchange.

When I started edocr.com in 2007, I wanted to deliver an ROI for every publicly shareable document a company would produce. Some companies spend over £100,000 producing awesome documents with rich content. After few weeks, they stopped getting circulated. I wanted to put them in long tail and get more and more people to consume content.

When I started Unified.vu in 2015, once again, I wanted to change the world. I wanted to increase productivity of every knowledge worker. I wanted them to make the best decisions based on all the data available out there that was not available before due to lack of access to certain systems.

Whilst I had attempted to build 10 ventures over the 14 years, above three were the most entrepreneurial. There was a significant risk of these becoming successful.

In 2018, I switched to become a business person. I am now on a 5-year journey of creating a sustainable low-risk business but it’s a service business unlike an entrepreneurial business. It’s a people business instead of a highly scalable technology business.

………I need to write more..

Published inKnowledge