A few days ago, I came across a question on Quora that sparked my interest. “What [is] the best network for developing entrepreneurship skills?” And I couldn’t help but backcast, as Mike Maples Jr. at Floodgate would call it, which I shared a bit more here. Looking at the entrepreneurs I know who have achieved some modicum of success, how did they build their entrepreneurial skills?
Taking it a bit further, what is one skill that they have that made all their other skills much easier to acquire and/or hone? And I could only come up with one answer, which is understood in various nominations. Resourcefulness. Scrappiness. Creativity under pressure. Staying lean. Frankly, their ability to hustle.
“The best network”
What is the best network for developing entrepreneurial skills?
The simple answer: One you build yourself.
The longer answer…
Entrepreneurship is a career that requires you to hustle. Likewise, a network you build yourself from reaching out and cold emailing has the potential to be stronger than even the best of networks out there. But entrepreneurship can come in two flavors: a hobby and a lifestyle.
A hobby or a lifestyle?
If entrepreneurship is a hobby, there are amazing collaborative:
- Slack groups,
- Subreddits,
- Facebook groups,
- Quora spaces,
- Meetup groups,
- Conferences/trade shows/expos,
- You name it, it’s out there.
But it will be akin to sitting in a classroom and learning the theory and conceptualizations.
If entrepreneurship is a lifestyle, you need to learn by application. And unfortunately, you’ll need to develop scar tissue from making real mistakes outside the classroom. You need to hustle and find what works and doesn’t work for you. Two of my favorite venture firms, 1517 Fund and Hustle Fund, invest in founders who do exactly that. Unlike many other venture funds, it’s in their thesis. Learn by doing. Learn by hustling. While there is merit in literature and academic institutions, you are learning at the pace of the system. And when you’re a founder, often times, time is not on your side.
In a parallel, an entrepreneur once described the bifurcation as a “lean-back” versus a “lean-in” activity. A “lean-back” activity would be watching a sitcom, picking strawberries, or typing a simple response to an email chain. Whereas a “lean-in” would be playing football, playing a competitive first-person shooter game, or fixing a bug in the code 2 hours before a product launch. Entrepreneurship, as you might guess, is a “lean-in” sport. So is networking.
There are two French words I often allude to – savoir and connaître. Both mean to understand. Savoir means to understand on a superficial, factual level. Connaître means to know on a deeper, emotional level – to be deeply familiar with. As an entrepreneur, the lifestyle you choose is often not passive, but an active one, or some might argue, an aggressive one. One where the clock started ticking before you started. Sometimes, before you were even born. Ben Horowitz makes a brilliant comparison between a peacetime and a wartime CEO. From his piece, I’ll quote two of his juxtapositions:
“Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win.”
“Peacetime CEO has rules like ‘we’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number 1 or 2.’ Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number 1 or 2 and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule.”
Where you’re required to make decisions in difficult times, and if you don’t understand a concept or a skill to the level where it’s engrained in your bone, you will fumble more often than you run touchdowns. Part of the reason why second-time, third-time entrepreneurs usually perform better than first-time entrepreneurs.
I graduated from a stellar university, UC Berkeley, located at one of the epicenters of Silicon Valley/Bay Area, where I got my economics degree and a certification in entrepreneurship and technology. I took a number of classes that allowed me “to learn and hone” my entrepreneurship skills. While there were a handful, I came out feeling I was equipped with the knowledge to take on the world. When I put them to the test, I realized I knew nothing. When faced with reality, I didn’t know how to deal with edge cases since edge cases are rarely taught in the classroom.
Most communities and classes teach entrepreneurship skills in abstractions, making it easier to understand. Even this blog post is, in many ways, an abstraction. They rarely teach the edge cases ’cause frankly, there are too many “what if’s”. But as an entrepreneur, you need to be ready for the “what if’s”. For anything and everything. And over time, what transcends the individual skills you have is having a mental model to hedge yourself from future edge cases.
I once asked someone what being an expert meant. And I really liked his answer, as it stuck with me all these years. He said, “An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes in a very narrow field.”
Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash
Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!
