2010

Jaime Jiménez Bolonio

29th April 2010

[ENTREPRENEUR VS HERO:
DOES & DONT’S]
Reflections about the process of innovation, creation and entrepreneurship, from the texts: “A
garage and an idea”, “Finding your innovation sweet spot” and “How to be creative”.
ICT Venture Creation. Jaime Jiménez Bolonio

First of all I would like to comment about my newly found personal hero, Ted Valentin. Ted is
an Internet entrepreneur that I met at the last SSES Start-up Day. His office used to be a cafe
where he spent most of the day; his only tool was a laptop but he had lots of free time and will
to carry on his ideas. He started doing websites in 1996, right after economy school, although
he had not much knowledge of web site design: moreover, there were not too many designers
back then and Google did not exist. He spent uncountable hours in the same cafe (now an
apartment block) doing hundreds of websites for the fun of it - some more successful than
others. Eventually he started adding advertisements and found out that he could earn some
money. His expenses were few, just server maintenance and coffee, no family, nothing to lose.
Ted Valentin is an example of micro-entrepreneur: he managed everything by himself and later
on he sold his websites for millions.

I wanted to comment about him because I think that he is one of the examples of how NOT to
be an entrepreneur, at least, not how to start. He had no source of income, no networking (in
the sense that he did not have a team) and no clear purpose. If it had not been the .com
bubble, if he had not succeeded with the advertisements, if he had not been single, he would
have probably end up doing something different, or may be the same thing but during his
spare time. And yet, his real power came from this, the fact that he had absolutely nothing to
lose. Later on, when other companies where competing with him, he still had the advantage of
expending much less than his competitors, while he needed just a couple of thousands to
make some website, other companies were spending hundreds of thousands.

What is then the right way to be an entrepreneur, if there is any? In the text of “A garage and
an idea” there are many hints. The text debunks the belief society has that successful
entrepreneurs started in a garage/dormitory/kitchen similar to Ted Valentin’s start in a Cafe. It
is certainly an enlightening view, the dream chaser rejecting the status quo, absolute freedom
to work for himself, but I believe this is seldom the case. Indeed the text itself supports my
point: “Garage Entrepreneurship may lead to misinterpretation on how to create a business,
too much individualism.”

The garage seems more like a circumstantial arrangement rather than anything else.
Innovators usually have prior knowledge of the industry, for instance in the example of
Hewlett-Packard, the two worked beforehand at Charlie Litton’s Litton Engineering
Laboratories in Redwood City, California. As they say “having Charlie Litton and his equipment
there made an important difference during a period when time and money were very tight”.
And also the same applies to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak “prior organizations in providing
Jobs and Wozniak with confidence, exposure to fine-grained information, knowledge of the
business, and access to key social ties”. Other example, not mentioned in the text, are the
Google creators Sergei Brin and Larry Page, they started with the Google search engine at the
University, during Page's ph.D and then they found it could be marketable.

The most important lessons to learn from garage bootstrapping are experience and
networking. The first because you have to start somewhere, if not your home then the
university or a cafe, the important thing is that this experiences will help you grow. The latter
because in many cases, the people you start working with are the ones you will continue
working in other start-ups “social ties aid entrepreneurs to form a management team”.

Another difference I see between Valentin and other entrepreneurs of the text is that my hero
had no backup plan. The others knew the industry well, they could work in many companies
and they could have other sources of income if their start-up did not work. They were not
taking such a serious risk after all. Many of them were already in some company, and within a

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ICT Venture Creation. Jaime Jiménez Bolonio

company, especially if you are in a research or customer/supplier related positions you are
prone to create something innovative.

This company view links to the second text “Finding your innovation sweet spot”. It tries to
explain a mechanical way to generate innovative ideas. It is interesting that it focus mainly on
companies as the motor for innovations, while the previous focus on individuals or smaller
groups outside companies.

The idea of a “systematic inventive thinking” informs on how to improve some of the qualities
of a finished product rather than explaining how a new idea is generated. The initial approach
exposed in the text seems simplistic, since its five main “innovative” ways to generate ideas
cannot really be applied in all contexts: subtraction, multiplication, division, task unification
and attribute dependency change, they just show single examples, cherry picked from
thousands of others to which this pattern does not apply (website search engines, Internet,
laser technology, mathematics, nuclear physics ...). The method only works a posteriori by
analyzing existing ideas, it may even work to introduce new arrangements in existing products,
but I would hardly say that it helps to create true innovation.

I like the theory about “functional fixedness”; it is true that developers have certain
assumptions regarding the fixedness of products. It is interesting to see a different approach
towards entrepreneurship than the classical problem -> solution -> business plan. Especially
since our business idea arose in a similar way, without addressing a particular problem at first.
The concept of object -> qualities -> qualities modification -> innovation is again simplistic, but
at the very least, it can help to conceptualize a product to its basic characteristics, and then
“evolve” the product into new forms.

Still the text helps me with another of the key factors to be an entrepreneur. There is no
method to create something innovative, creative can see the right set of qualities on the first
place without having to rearrange and try out thousands of times. It is more about intuition
than anything else. Of course, once you are on the right track thanks to intuition, you can use
the technique explained in the text in order to refine the final product.

I support the perspective of Hugh MacLeod in “How to be creative”; conformism kills

creativity. Although you have to follow your idea wherever it takes, a true entrepreneur should
also know when to give up an idea and pursue something else. Asking other people for their
opinion is not something useless, on the contrary, it can help us to measure the feasibility and
reality of the idea, but it is true that “you don't know if your idea is any good the moment it's
created" and "neither does anyone else”. There are just too many variables to be considered in
order to confidently say that an idea is good, and even if it is, that is not a guarantee for
success.

I have also to agree on the statement: “90% of what separates successful people and failed
people are time, effort, and stamina”. May be even more than 90% as we can see from the
previous examples, hard work is a key quality of an entrepreneur. Somebody said that
“creativity is 1% inspiration and 99% transpiration” of course, one without the other are
useless, but more people have failed for not trying enough than for no having a good idea.

Mac Leod is certainly passionate regarding his treatment of companies and corporations, but
somehow he is wrong when he says that “creativity has been sacrificed in favor of forwarding
the interests of the “Team Player””. At least when it comes to the IT sector, nowadays most IT
companies have a whole research area or group, closely in contact with Universities and
constantly exploring new fields of interests, even if they are not directly profitable for the

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ICT Venture Creation. Jaime Jiménez Bolonio

company. His perspective is individualistic which is fine in his line of work, but in reality most
entrepreneurial activities would not fly if someone was to tackle them single handed.

I certainly see he has a point when he comments “... doing something seriously creative is one
of the most amazing experiences one can have...even if you don't end up pulling it off, you'll
learn many incredible, magical, valuable things” like the authors of the previous texts wrote
too, we might fail to create something new and innovative, but just trying will give us a lot of
experience, and will ease the path if we want to try again. Once more, experience gives the
edge to the entrepreneur.

I cannot help but to see several similarities between Mac Leod and Valentin; they rely on
individual achievements and they have nothing to lose. They both started working in their
hobbies as soon as they finished university, one drawing in the back of business cards in bars,
the other doing web sites for fun in a cafe. Eventually they both found out that what they were
doing was worth something but they would probably have gone on at it until they run out of
money and had to do something else. In my view, they took too much risk, they were basically
drifting around with no particular purpose and they were just lucky to find a successful way
out.

It is admirable the way they dedicated their efforts on something that was of no immediate
value, not even remote value, but that is not an example of what entrepreneurship is. For each
success story there are hundreds of others who are not and if we cannot find a faithful path
that many of them followed then there is no point of studying how to be an entrepreneur on
the first place, since it is a matter of sheer luck. Which is the path that most entrepreneurs
have followed then?

As we saw before most of them are very creative, they can see the connections in a natural
and not learned way, they are visionaries. They have a higher education degree that
introduces them into their particular field of knowledge, letting them continue the innovative
process initiated by others. They are very good networkers, they manage to meet relevant
players in the industry and learn from them, sometimes joining their team. The work hard and
continuously, they do not rest much and they do not waste time, they focus on their idea and
make it a reality. They have back up alternatives, they do not rely solely on a single income
source, most of them work part time on other jobs and have salaries will help them to start
over again if they do not succeed. They know their limits and they pursue their dreams as far
as they can, but they know when to give up and continue on something else, learning from the
failures and gaining experience every time.