Entrepreneurship Learning Process

March 5, 2024

BUSINESS MODELS, capital raising, DESIGN-THINKING, Venture Capital

The entrepreneurship learning process is the learning process of science and life and goes something like this. You sit around with a bunch of mates or yourself and come up with an idea that you think presents a gap in the body of knowledge. There’s something we don’t know that we want to know, and we think there’s a possibility to add to the body of knowledge and monetise that gap filling, much as a dentist does.

So, you come up with that idea and then you go about proving it by building a hypothesis. Ideally that’s a null hypothesis, proving that something’s not true, one of the concepts that non-scientists don’t fully appreciate. They think that you go and establish a hypothesis. Actually, what you do is establish a null hypothesis to establish objectivity and remove our attachment to success and innate abhorrence of failure.

A big part of the trick is to detach your ego, your hunger, your passion, your hunger for money, your hunger for success. You must find a way of detaching from all of that, making sure that you maintain your objectivity so that you can run your tests, review the results and let the results speak to you as opposed to letting your ego, fear of failure and biases take over and cloud your judgement. You have to do that whilst maintaining your hunger and passion to keep driving you forward.

Interview Part 1 - How Vitoto got Steam Rolled

Great to delve into these issues and others surrounding failure with Zhuo Lin and Huimiao Zheng, PhD students in the Department of Management at the University of Cincinnati who are researching the patterns of startup failure as they relate to capital raising success and engaging investors. We talked about this in the context of Vitoto, Moroku’s foray into video publication as well as the journey to build the next generation of digital banking experiences globally. Amongst the topics discussed were if founders should signal to investors that they have learned something from their past failures, enabling them to do better next time. If yes, how do they do that? This requires courage to reflect on yourself, to talk about your failures as a basis for establishing relationships and finding the right investors to establish relationship with who are willing to listen to your learnings from failure whilst many have an innate bias towards success, the opposite of venture, science and innovation.

Part 2 - Establishing Hypotheses and Being Objective with Failure

Part 3 - Being Vulnerable with Investors

Failure is hard. Its hard on our egos and its hard to build cultures that understand failure, its innevitability, how it points us in the direction of success, and how its powerful concrete, hard, undodgeable reality, nature is the opposite of success which never truly exists. There is always more to be done