What I've Learned about Entrepreneurship in the Last 12 months.

Below is a "mash-up" of collective learnings from Dr. Robert Wuebker, Eric Ries, Dr. Taylor Randall and others during my experience at The David Eccles School of Business about the space of validating a new business idea and leading in an ambiguous environment. This is a rough paraphrase with a lot of my own interpretation of what's been passed on to me, not just in lecture halls but in live-round field drills at The Foundry, Dash & Cooper and recently Template Cafe.

The thing about entrepreneurship is that most people think that it is a smaller version of running a large, corporate company. The space of starting a company is nothing like that - it's completely different. It's not about writing a plan and executing the plan. It's about getting your ass to the tarmac, selling your face off, taking customer feedback, pivoting the direction of the company and repeating.

This is what it means by no plan survives reality. You must keep setting up experiments that test your stated assumptions about the space you are operating in and simultaneously reveal the assumptions that you didn't know you had. Eventually, the experiments get so large that you can no longer fund them yourself -it is THEN and ONLY THEN that you start having conversations with investors. Even then, you aren't convincing them that you have a business that's going to work, you present a series of case studies (your experiments) and the logic of taking the next step.

How you actually make this happen through the conduit of a team is management science that is not researched very much and, despite numerous attempts is not taught very well.

How do you become a good leader? You lead. You get on the court and practice enrolling others to put their heart and soul into a possibility for little or no immediate compensation. Every time you lead, it costs you the person that you thought you were. You will make mistakes and bad decisions and you will have to live with the fact that those things affected people's jobs and the livelihood of their families. It is the messiest, slimiest profession in the world - which is why there are so few of them and even fewer who get to be called "great" leaders.

Do not read business books about leadership. Read biographies about great leaders. Gaining insight about how George Washington finally figured out how to start winning battles will be more valuable than a whole library of New York Times Bestsellers.