I Am Fine: A Short Guide to Understanding a Tech Entrepreneur

Photo by Frank Tiemann. All rights reserved.

A few days before joining GroundBreaker full time, I met my friend Alex from KarmaBox for coffee at Zibetto (serious contender for best espresso in town). Alex had been in the startup business for at least a year at that point and asked me how I felt about leaving my corporate job to cofound a tech startup. I was very confident on the outlook of our startup and probably sounded like a cocky idiot, thinking I had everything figured out. I will never forget his words before we said goodbye: “Startups are anything but straightforward.” 

Just a few weeks later, his words started resonating in my head. We had just come out of stealth mode, but things were not working out as we expected. “Why are people not pouring onto our site and fighting each other to get a piece of these deals?” Ah, the naïveté of first time entrepreneurs! Reality check number one: “if you build it, they will come” only works when you raze a cornfield to play ball with ghosts. It does not work for tech startups. You need to find out who your customer is, what he wants, and then market, market, market. Building the darned thing, it turned out, was the easy part.

Then we got into the accelerator program at Haas, back at UC Berkeley. I started reading the current entrepreneurship gospel materials. I learned I was not alone on my predicament. Many first-time entrepreneurs had been there before. In fact, I had found out about my mistakes early enough to correct my course. 

I had failed to attract millions of users on day one but I was reassured that this was part of the process; the long and painful (yet fascinating) process of finding a business model that works (e.g. solves a real problem for a specific set of clients and delivers a profit acceptable to our company). To get to my final goal I had to fail many times and change the action plan each time something did not work out as expected.

This simple concept, however, is foreign to outsiders. Most people I know either perform very specific functions for established companies or have more “tried-and-tested” businesses that do not require an extensive search and validation process. When I try to explain to my friends and family that my idea has evolved from one week to the next or that I have now “pivoted” and refocused my efforts on something else or another customer segment, I notice their reactions: concern, puzzlement, condescendence, etc. “But, Stefano,” they say, “I thought your original idea was…” They seem to be holding on to my original idea even harder than I ever did.

Sooner or later, I will find out whether or not our business model is one worth pursuing in its current version, with some tweaks, or at all. I am learning a million things and enjoying myself in the process.

I hope this post is the last time I tell this to everyone: I am fine!