Entrepreneurship Is Lonely But A Supportive Community Can Pull You Through

I have had the opportunity to conceive and run a strategy consulting service for the tech industry for some twenty years now. Like all professions, consulting has its good and bad things to it — glamor, you move around with movers and shakers of the industry, you are well-connected to decision-makers and the downside is that the work is back-breaking and you are constantly on the edge.

But you also meet amazing people -mostly entrepreneurs in my case (because I always worked with start-ups). I noticed that no matter how successful they are or how impressive their credentials are, deep inside they are like you and I. There is a soft, vulnerable place where they are anxious and desperate for care, love, and acceptance.

Between keeping the business growing and their families, investors, employees, and customers happy, they are torn on all sides, simultaneously. No matter how flashy the car they drive, this burning sense of incompleteness is gnawing their insides, tugging their hearts.

I was not an emotional coach or life coach (they would probably understand this better) but I have had some incredible stories presented to me one of which I want to share here. To let you know how lonely the entrepreneur's life is.

And why a community that supports you can be a make or break -not just in your business and career, but in life.

A Meeting Request

Here is an interesting thing we experienced a few years ago. An email requesting an urgent meeting came up and I was not sure how to respond since it came without a reference, no background, and no details. The meeting request was from an entrepreneur building telecom products and looking for help with business development in overseas markets.

I insisted we have an exploratory call and understand more before the meeting. The call revealed a passionate founder pouring out all the incredible stuff he was building but was anxious about how he would continue to stay the course. We scheduled a meeting for the following week.

The founder was running a 35+ person engineering team and had been building this operation for over 6 years. He had good experience working with telecom majors globally and was keen to build something new for the 3G market (this was a decade ago).

What amazed me was this team had built functional telecom network elements of the 3G core (this was ten years ago when 3G was the thing) and several peripheral boxes in-house on its own. There was the HLR, SMSC, MMSC, GGSN, and some rudimentary SBC, plus a few other things that were works in progress. Most were rudimentary, low-capacity NE but were functional and built to spec, passing internal tests, and ready for integration.

The setup in some way looked like a mini-telco lab with several career class test and measuring equipment, bulk call simulators, spectrum analyzers, frequency counters, and RF equipment in place. The team was feverishly working on multiple things and it was one hell of a busy workspace.

As we shut ourselves in the meeting room and discussed further, I realized this gentleman had a high level of anxiety and some serious concerns. We got into some business details and tried to understand the revenue situation, financials, and margins, and also wanted to talk to the sales team.

“An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.” — Reid Hoffman

The founder was very technical and comfortable discussing technology and how they had resolved several issues, identified improvements in standards, informed working committee groups about the same, and looked forward to enhancements in specification release documents. Almost all discussions about business and financials were elusive or subverted and covered with a doze of their internal technical genius.

Finally, I asked him — what help he wanted from us. What came out was stupendous: he wanted telco customers lined up within the next 30–90 days. I said — ‘Are you kidding? How can anyone get you telco customers or even OEMs lined up for an unknown infrastructure product in a quarter, what’s the hurry? And who are your other telco customers so far?’.

Shocking Revelation:

And then he slowly opened up. There were no customers, no sales team, no marketing, and no prospect list. In fact, there was no market interface at all. The only external world interface was with tech standards bodies, some regulatory RFC folks, and interoperability lab teams of OEMs or telco labs in contact.

“Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” -Elon Musk

There was no sales team and the word ‘marketing’ was unheard of. The founder had no idea about sales and always thought a sales team could be on-boarded after his products were ready.

So I asked the most obvious question — ‘So how are you funding this operation?’. And that’s when I fell off my chair.

He said the entire six years of operation, running a 35+ person engineering team, salaries, lab equipment, developer licenses, testing suites, office rent, and every dollar was being spent out of personal funds. The total spent over the period was about Rs 30 cr (roughly $5 mil + for the prevailing conversion rate at that time).

And I asked him what was the source of funds — was it his own savings? He said — “It was all his father’s hereditary agricultural land that was sold in parts year after year to meet the growing demands of his business. ‘My father’s land holding ran out two years ago and then I sold some of my father-in-law’s property too. Now they have no more to sell”.

Speechless and dumbfounded I closed the meeting requesting time to recover. Over the next week, I dug into the operational records and was shocked to see the truth in it all. The entire funds were personal, family wealth that had been diluted to pursue an entrepreneurial rush of adrenaline-building for one person’s dream.

In the following weeks, I even had a conversation with his parents. They had sold most of their inherited property and were now down to nothing. One man’s senseless desire to pursue his own reckless dream was threatening to bring down a complete family.

What are the learnings from this true story?

1. In today’s day and age, there are innumerable opportunities to validate your business idea in public. Build in public. Join a community or create your own, socialize your idea, seek opinions, start building small, and bring in funds from outsiders so your idea is validated and risk shared from day 1.
2. At every stage of the business growth, there are unique funds — angels, incubators, accelerators, funding houses, venture capitalists, and larger funds willing to listen to you and help validate, or fund your dream.
3. Customer and market validation is even more important than investor interests — because it is possible the investors are missing something but the customer is rarely wrong. If your idea is solving a real-world problem then there will be customers buying from you. And it is up to you to find that out at the earliest.
4. Customer-driven road-maps are best because you have some sense of guarantee that you will not fail (in most cases). Any market feedback is better than building behind closed doors and feeding the monster by selling your father’s property or your own life savings.
5. And remember, never put off sales and marketing for the last mile. Bring active sales, business development, and marketing talent into the core team at the earliest. It is never too early to engage with the market.
6. Lastly, even if you were to raise personal funds from family, do it in a professional manner with documentation, award equity, or if debt, define terms and create a path for them to recover the same. Let your precious entrepreneurial dream not be built over the grief of your family members.

“As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.”

-Ben Horowitz

A Community is your life jacket:

But the most important of it all — become a part of a community that pursues similar dreams and ambitions. You cannot build businesses in private, shutting off yourself from the world and living in a cave. You could plan in private but execute in public -even at the cost of failure.

Look at the @Internet-LifeStyle-Hub for example. A thriving 20,000 paid member club with a very high code of ethics, and value systems that are genuinely helping each other grow. The community understands that everyone needs others and is a permanent transformation zone for anyone of any age, experience, gender, background, or profession. And everyone is progressing.

In your early days of entrepreneurship, you will find it difficult to create your own community -because it needs a lot of nurturing and typically you do not have the time. So it is best to join an existing community, share your problems, listen to solutions, and even find mentors and guides. This will avoid the kind of a debacle highlighted in this story.

Sridhar Pai Tonse writes about life, tech, markets, and startups. He is an expert on Strategy and Lead Generation for startups. Follow him on https://youtube.com/@tonsepai and visit https://tonsepai.com. For more https://tonsetelecom.com.