There is a core anomaly between the ease of starting businesses today and the challenges around funding their growth and discovering market fit.
There is almost no friction to start something.
From tools to build with and pay as you go services to host on. From a plethora of early stage capital. And most important, a culture that has embraced entrepreneurship as a legitimate occupation.
It has never been easier to run with a hobby and see where it goes. Never been more possible that your tiny niche could become a global game changer.
The flip side is that while it certainly easier to start something it has become increasing difficult, and much more expensive, to find true market fit if not scale something to a success.
This has turned 360 degrees in my career.
When I first started raising capital it was a challenge to raise your initial funds. There was less funding available as the cascade of capital from successful startups was just beginning to trickle down. The idea of seed funding was in a neonatal state.
It’s much better now, just very different dynamics that have resorted the challenges.
The truth of course is that entrepreneurs are chasing the impossible.
Creating something new from an idea that could become a household brand is the work of the wonderfully obsessed and the unflinchingly unrealistic.
Then as now both.
To change how we as a society work, play, connect and share our lives brings amazing satisfaction—and sometimes wealth–but the odds of winning are not great.
The very framework that this happens against has changed dramatically.
The thresholds for market proof today are as ambiguous as they are stratospheric in most cases.
The attention spans of the consumer for trying new things has diminished to a nanosecond. Capital needed to get started is everywhere. The capital needed to grow it, more and more challenging to get.
You can simplify this to say that there is just so much noise that makes it harder to break through, the odds of success less and less, and the cost to get there increasing all the time.
That sounds to me like an excuse.
My takeaway after a career of doing this is that it has always been hard, damn near impossible actually.
I just see it as uniquely different today on three fronts:
The number of failed companies and emotionally exhausted entrepreneurs will dramatically increase.
This is the exhaust of the process and it will fall on the culture of today to mollify. We give lip service to the acceptability of failure but this is an emotional scar that foreshadowed the emergence of the entrepreneurial psychologist.
Those with capital to invest will become both more powerful and formative as they doll out funding in controlled pieces.
The upside is that from the best investor, the ability to mentor their investments increases. But the innate discordance between the portfolio view of an investor at the top of the funnel, and the single focus of an entrepreneur at the bottom will inevitably increase.
The net of these moving pieces is that the truly impossible is becoming possible to a broad population of entrepreneurs.
A founder with a big idea can truly believe that they can change the world. Not as an isolated instance but part of a culture, with strange analogs to the old Hollywood system that supports this.
We all see the obvious—the issues of creating more accessibility to this funnel to all economic classes, the recent awareness of the emotional toll of failure and the rising tide of wealth creating more for itself.
All this is true but whether it is easier or not, less expensive or not, doesn’t really matter.
What matters is that the impossible has become simply more possible.
That’s a truth that overshadows everything else and makes it worthwhile.
