{"id":194,"date":"2011-11-02T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2011-11-02T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rudebaguette.com\/?p=194"},"modified":"2019-05-03T18:48:44","modified_gmt":"2019-05-03T16:48:44","slug":"young-entrepreneurs-jump-into-a-space-too-quickly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/2011\/11\/young-entrepreneurs-jump-into-a-space-too-quickly\/","title":{"rendered":"Do French Entrepreneurs have Enough Experience?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The startup mentality is great: \u201cthis is wrong; I\u2019m going to fix it.\u201d <\/strong>This kind of innovative thinking disrupts how we travel, talk to friends, look at data, keep track of fans, spread music, and more\u2026. In the startup world, quite often we see former employees of big companies creating a startup because their experience in big companies gave light to a problem.\u00a0When they speak in interviews, we hear things like:
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t like the way I had to use X to do Y, so I created Z to do it faster and better.\u201d<\/p>\n

–Successful Entrepreneur<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Cut to the budding young entrepreneur – a student looking for an alternative to working for BigCorp., a fresh graduate interning at a startup, or anyone taking considering taking the leap from boring job to startup job. He reads up on his daily tech interviews in order to learn as much as he can about the entrepreneurial world, and he comes across this video. Applying the lesson to his own case, he thinks, \u201cDoing A seems really hard, and it isn\u2019t Social, Mobile, or Local. I\u2019ll make B in order to make A easer and better!\u201d
\nWhat\u2019s the problem here? Is it that jump-to-conclusion<\/strong> addition of trendy features? Well, maybe… but that\u2019s not the point here<\/a><\/strong>. The problem is young entrepreneurs to enter spaces in which they have no experience. While the former, successful Entrepreneur had a long history with working in his space, identifying it\u2019s weaknesses, and deciding that no sufficient product existed already; the budding entrepreneur decides to enter a space and THEN begins to identify its weaknesses.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re trying to disrupt a space, count how many collective years of experience in that space your founding team has…<\/strong><\/h2>\n


\n\"\"<\/a>
NOT a future entrepreneur...<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\n…When I say years of experience, I don\u2019t mean as users, I mean as employees.\u00a0I recently spoke with a startup with a young team that\u2019s trying to disrupt how we do online dating. I completely agree, from a user\u2019s point of view, that the reputation, interaction, and methodology of online dating could use an overhaul. When talking with them about their product, I curiously asked who among the team had worked at an online dating company before \u2013 none of them. I then asked who among them had extensive experience doing online dating \u2013 they all had accounts to the major brands, but I had a feeling none of them had any real experience meeting someone through online dating.
\nAs an entrepreneur, this makes me dubious in terms of joining a project like that. As a journalist, this makes me less inclined to write about their cause. And for VCs and Angels, you can bet your boot-strapped behind<\/strong> that they\u2019re going to ask this, and unless you have a mentor or investor who is a king in your space, you are going to have some real trouble convincing investors that you are the team that\u2019s going to disrupt that space.<\/p>\n

Be wary of what you don\u2019t like\u2026 it might just be you!<\/h2>\n

I think the idea of disrupting a space with which you\u2019re familiar is an especially important idea in France (along with many other young<\/strong> startup ecosystems). In the same way a teenager gets a nose-piercing to rebel against their parents, it is an easy jump to take a bad personal experience and assume that the answer is to disrupt that space \u2013 such as the education space in France. While it\u2019s great to try to improve every space you\u2019ve ever felt disappointed you, I think the fact of the matter is that, \u00a0in the same way that someone who had a terrible user experience is much less fit to disrupt that space than someone who made a career out of working in that space, a country with a better reputation in a space is more fit to disrupt that space.
\nBefore you “get a nose-piercing,” think about how many other “teenagers” have thought to get nose-piercings in order to rebel against “their parents.” If you’re not the only one you know who’s done it, what are the odds that your\u00a0nose-piercing is going to disrupt a space?
\nCheck out some of our other articles, or leave us a RUDE comment below:<\/em><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \u00a0Where will the Mothership Land?<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/li>\n
  2. Diversity in French startups: a really (un)touchy subject<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/li>\n
  3. What’s wrong with being a copycat?<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The startup mentality is great: \u201cthis is wrong; I\u2019m going to fix it.\u201d This kind of innovative thinking disrupts how we travel, talk to friends, look at data, keep track of fans, spread music, and more\u2026. In the startup world, quite often we see former employees of big companies creating a startup because their experience<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":64791,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[113],"tags":[9053],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-finance","tag-solomo-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudebaguette.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}