Are You Sure You Want to be an Entrepreneur?

On the orders of Spain’s Queen Isabella to bring back riches, Christopher Columbus set out for uncharted waters in 1492. While discovering vast new lands assured his place in posterity, Columbus’s real triumph was uncovering vast beds of oyster pearls off the coast of Venezuela, a rare natural gem that the queen coveted beyond all else. The “pearl rush” that Columbus started way back when is not unlike the rush to entrepreneurship underway today, a surprising outcome in a challenging time.

And more to the point, the beloved pearl provides a lustrous metaphor for the joys and pressures of entrepreneurship, something I’ve discovered personally and as a result of recent interviews with the founders of four start-ups. Though each of the entrepreneurs I interviewed offered pearls of wisdom worthy of an entire article, this provides a deeper dive into the collective mindset of entrepreneurs, especially the type of founder that is prepared to bootstrap their company from inception to market introduction.

It takes an irritant to get started

OpenInvoWhile the proverbial “grain of sand” is a myth according to Wikipedia, it does take “an irritating microscopic object [to become] trapped within the mollusk’s mantle folds” for a pearl to get started. For entrepreneurs, the irritant can be as simple as personality type. According to Emily Lutzker, the founder of OpenInvo, an innovative resource for idea generators, “I only had one ‘real job’ once and was told I was disruptive in the workplace,” thus necessitating her entrepreneurial journey.

BennuSometimes the irritant hits the founder personally. Ashok Kamal, founder of Bennu, explained that, “like any good business, the idea behind Bennu was born out of a problem–the obscene amount of garbage being dumped into landfills.” Jeff Stier, got the idea for the voice tagging utility called Blurts after a voice message from his daughter was annoyingly and irretrievably deleted. And Jesse Middleton, founder of GetMinders, a service that reminds people when to take their medicines, got the idea when thinking about his grandfather who has Parkinson’s and the toll it was taking on him and his family.

Growth usually requires outside help

It was the rarity of natural pearls that made Columbus’s discovery so important in the 15th Century. Today, more than 99% of the pearls sold are the result of human intervention through a 20th Century process known as cultivation. Not surprisingly, entrepreneurs are almost always dependent on the help of outside resources, both in terms of capital and expertise. What is surprising is how many boot-strappers find those resources close to home from friends and family. Noted a grateful Lutzker, “I didn’t ask for money, [friends and family] volunteered.”

GetMindersOutside help also comes in the form of advisers who can add layers of experience. Offered Bennu’s Kamal “You can avoid a lot of unnecessary mistakes by establishing an advisory board from the outset.” “It’s easy to neglect this task in favor of immediate concerns but once we recruited seasoned and candid advisers, Bennu become much more efficient and productive,” added Kamal. In Jesse Middleton’s case the critical advice was more home grown, as his “wife gave [him] a kick in the ass to really get the ball rolling!”

Success has its own measurement scale

As long-time leaders in the pearl trade and the first to patent a cultivation process, the Japanese also established the unique weight measurement scale for pearls known as momme. For modern day entrepreneurs, measures of success tend toward the benevolent, hoping that their products and services make the world a better place. Explained Lutzker, “I’m a bit of an idealist and I want to live in a world that fosters and rewards things that make us human and celebrates our differences.” Added Middleton, “getting our product in the hands of millions that need to remember to take their medicines would be pretty amazing for us.”

BlurtsMany entrepreneurs share the ability to see beyond the making of their first “pearl,” measuring success in terms of helping others grow their own. Offered Kamal, “I hope the business will outgrow its founders so at that point, personal success would mean being in a position to help aspiring entrepreneurs to achieve their dreams.” Similarly, Middleton noted, “I’d like make it to a point where I can invest in other’s ideas that can make the world a better place.” Added Lutzker, laced with the irony that bedevils boot-strappers, “I’d like to think that success is still a starting point, not only a result.”

You still have to beat the odds

Naturally occurring pearls of a decent size are literally one in million. Columbus and Co had to harvest hundreds upon hundreds of oysters in the West Indies just to find a single pearl worthy of their faire queen. So it is with start-ups, hundreds are conceived while few achieve notable success. Beating these odds takes an indomitable spirit. Explained Stier, “if you’re not passionate and pigheaded about what you believe in even when everyone is a naysayer, you’ll never get it done.”

Kamal took this a step further, suggesting that entrepreneurs needed to be more than thick-shelled, “I’d subject the [would be entrepreneur] to a psychological exam to ensure that they are just crazy enough to start business.” Acknowledging the ups and downs, comes with the territory. Noted a cash-challenged Stier, “the depressing moments have to be outweighed by the moments of joy, like knowing we’ve birthed something from our mind that other people are talking about.” Concluded an undaunted Lutzker, “Yeah, sure I knew it would be hard–when are worthwhile things not hard?”

Final Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I became a bit of a pearl diver myself when I agreed to help Jeff Stier with the launch of Blurts.com. For you angel investors out there, I’ve recorded this Blurts for you Click on the following links for the complete interviews with Lutzker, Kamal, Middleton, and Stier.

The Ups and Downs of Being an Entrepreneur

Why did you want to be an entrepreneur in the first place?
My career started in a creative corporate environment, the advertising world.  But  the idea of someone monitoring and curating my ideas didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to run with my ideas and figure out for myself if they were good or bad; not have someone else tell me.

Where did the idea for Blurts first come from?
I was working hard at a major ad agency and not seeing my kids a lot.  They kept leaving voice mail messages for me, and I kept saving the ones I thought were really special like: “Daddy, I know you couldn’t be here but I scored my first goal today.” One day I went to play one of my favorite saved messages for my wife but it was gone, eaten by the voicemail devils.   Losing that voicemail stabbed my heart emotionally much like losing the only picture I owned of my beloved dog growing up. At the moment of that loss I realized that under the right circumstances and as told by the right person—- a voice mail or a voice memory, or a blurt— was as important a media for saving and sharing memories  as text, photo or video.

What does it really take to be an entrepreneur?
The three P’s:  passion, persistence and patience.

Did you have any major pivots?
I’ve evolved the business model at least three times in response to market direction and consumer behavioral shirts.  Because I was at JWT I was as the forefront of the convergence of brand story telling and user generated content. I thought to myself what better way for brands to encourage consumers to be part of the online conversation then by suing their voices.  By letting them literally be heard.  This was a major moment for us.  Also the concurrent rise of mobile and social media which has created an online environment in which millions of people want to share everything including their voice and opinions.

Talk to me about the challenges of raising that first round of money
The first round was the easiest in many ways. It was an emotional appeal to friends and family. They were mostly older and I said you’re at an age when you’re starting to look back and understand what your life story and history was. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily tell that story in your own voice and have it preserved for generations to listen to?  That struck a cord.

Give me a sense of the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur
Not everyone has the immediate emotional connection with Blurts that I want them to because Blurts is my baby.  I hate when they give me a blank stare which means they just don’t get it.   This happens all the time in money raising to. Every high net worth individual, VC or angel has their own point of view.  Sometime I’ll have a meeting one day and the potential investor rails on the model for X reason.  The next day in a different meeting a different potential investor LOVES X.  This drives me crazy.  Can everyone please just make up their minds and get on the same page?!

Is there a moment as an entrepreneur, where you say “What am I doing?”
I have a moment like that almost every day. To keep going forward those moments have to be balanced by moments of exultation which we are lucky to have our share of.  For example, a couple of weeks ago the  #1 video news site in France ran a two minute story on Blurts.  They get 19mm unique monthly viewers in the US and over 50 mm globally. When we saw that we were like “wow!, we’ve birthed something, from scratch that people are talking about. Without those moments I think many entrepreneurs would be jumping off cliffs.

There’s a lot of angst. A lot of time, effort and thinking invested into the business.  There are people you inevitably disappoint along the way and you try to limit those. But no matter what happens you have to stubbornly stick to the vision because if you didn’t have stubborn visionaries you would never get past the naysayers and the bumps along the way.  I have to say that life during a company’s early growth is not the most pleasant or healthiest  way to live.

Did you have any epiphanies along the way?

I remember the CEO [Note to reader: that would be me] of our agency  walking into the room one day after we had been through meeting after meeting and  he said, “it’s not easy making something simple.” If you’re going to build a utility like blurts make it stupid simple.  In the end we did that.  We spent a lot of time and effort that I wouldn’t take that back for anything in the world. Because everyone talks about how easy it is to use  blurts to infuse passion and nuance into flat unemotional tweets. photos, texts, emails and more.

What’s next?
We’re at a tipping point:  great reviews, fantastic and expanding partner base, and  growing usage.  We’re looking for the next level of financial partners. Strategics who not only bring money but also experience, relationships and a passion for disruption and change.  Partners who share our vision for building a global open mike and soapbox that makes it easy for everyone to be heard in the social sphere…with the texture, tone and authenticity of their own voice.