Visionary or opportunist – find out who you are
To embark on a successful entrepreneurial journey, we must know who we are. Vivek Wadhwa had a popular article on techcrunch called “Can entrepreneurs be made” analyzing schools of thoughts on this subject.
I think there are only two kinds of entrepreneurs: visionary and opportunist.
What is a visionary?
The most memorable definition of “visionary” that I heard was a talk given by Ctrip.com (largest Chinese travel site) founder and chairman James Jianzhang Liang, a 39 year old man with a net-worth of $300+ million. In the entrepreneurial context, James thinks one sets out to do something because he has a vision. He then casually defined “vision” being something one gains from deep understanding/experiences within certain fields. As such, visionary is a person with a vision. Because of the unparalleled domain expertise needed, Start-ups founded by visionaries usually are funded by high profile Angels or VCs and have longer cycle before it gets to profit or sustainable business model. Google, Aardvark, Twitter are visionary-founded companies. Paul Graham’s Ycombinator encourages entrepreneurs to start project that people want as if it’s “non-profit”, do not think about business model. Hence, Ycombinator produced many great technology startups with deep vision that aims to change the world.
What is opportunist?
Opportunist is a daydreamer, someone with a lot of ideas, restless, unsettled. If visionary is someone with superb intelligence and expertise, opportunist is somewhat plain in comparison, but could be relentlessly resourceful. Someone who is so motivated s/he will go to the end of the world, or skip all sleeps to seize an opportunity. Entrepreneurs who are opportunists often do not necessarily want to save or change the world. They started up due to sheer desire to make it better for him/herself, family, to be independent, or they stumbled upon an opportunity so good that they carried on and became a runaway success. Companies started up by opportunist usually do not have ground breaking technology, and often case, they were not funded by high profile VCs before they even reached profitability. VC’s money, if any, simply worked as a weapon to reach bigger economy of scale. “Lemonade stand type” entrepreneurs are usually opportunists. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Michale Dell (dell.com), Kevin Rose (digg.com), Gurbaksh Chahal (sold startup to become later valueClick.com, now working on gWallet), and many other non-technologist entrepreneurs in the tech fields created many great firms that make the world better place. Entrepreneur turned Angel Mark Suster thinks it’s critical to “Validate that you can make money before starting.” in his popular blog post “Why the ‘fail fast’ mantra needs to fail”.
Ask the question: Am I a visionary or opportunist?
You have to dig deep into you soul to find out who you are and go for the entrepreneurial path that suites you the best.
Entrepreneurship aside, I have long remembered what one of my math professors told me: “you are opportunist, I am confident you can find a solution”. She was talking about the dilemma I was in back in 1999 when I got admitted into Stanford without any financial aid or scholarship, and she thought it would work out for me just fine. Easier said than done. I had never been a hard working good student and having Stanford accept me was a huge honor, I had no hope whatsoever to get any kind of scholarship. After working for the entire summer 1999 in restaurants and summer camp, I still did not have enough money to cover the book cost let alone the tuition and living expanse. Almost forced against wall, I approached 200+ professors at Stanford, only 4 replied back and I secured 2 interviews with them and got one job as research assistantship which covers all expanses. The rest became history.
Now that I pretty much figured out I am the opportunist type, Now what?
Evaluate and find the projects that speak to my “Opportunist” nature.
I had a LOT of mathematical training, I admired “visionary” and wanted to become one. I did not want to waste my “knowledge” learned from stochastic, probability, network analysis, optimization algorithms, decision sciences etc. Among the projects I was evaluating, I tended to lean towards the one that could “change the world” using these advanced methodology, connecting academia with reality. Little did I know, the gap between the two is beyond my capability, my “schooled knowledge” had become “sunken cost” that should not have been taken into consideration when I decided what to tackle. Instead, I should focus on the ones that people really want, maybe reproduce proven concept in different fields, because that suites me being an opportunist, that suits me being a non-technologist, non-scholar.
How to start your entrepreneurial endeavor: Be authentic, Be you.
Starting up requires a lot of preparation work: defining project, scoping project, finding partner (or not) etc. I find there is no one answer from others that is perfect for me. I find it’s absolutely possible to startup with only one founder through hiring programmers, given idea is not the only thing you can give your potential hire. To me, I don’t enjoy coding, but I am perfectly capable to define project scope, product spec, database modeling, logic flow chart. Unless you are super lucky to find one superb hire who does everything for you including archetype, you will need to translate your idea into something feasible. To be authentic, it’s critical that you truly are solving a problem in real world that people want AND you deeply understand.
