How to Use Entrepreneurship to Gain Agency and Control in Your Life

Entrepreneurship is an essential subject and set of skills to develop, own, and implement. Besides helping individuals gain agency and control in their lives, the products and services created that help customers can significantly impact society.

The process of creating successful startup companies has transformed over the past few decades. The reality of what works and what is just an exercise has become more apparent.

We used to treat startups as nascent versions of existing companies and entrepreneurs as mini versions of CEOs.

The exercise always began with lots of top-down research into markets and elaborate detailing of products and services. Entrepreneurs codified all this work into the Business Plan, and it was the sacred document that encased how they were going to execute. Plan the work and work the plan.

Its credibility was directly related to its heft: the more extensive and more detailed the document, the more credible the plan. Entrepreneurs would do all of this work at a desk or in a conference room. It would be an insular process uncontaminated by the messiness of the outside world. Amazingly the plan would usually not include interactions with potential customers. They were assumed to embrace the brilliance of the founders passively.

Customers weren’t the focus of the plan. The audience was investors. Few ever read these plans, and they crumbled in the face of the first customer interactions.

As a famous boxer said: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Inthe past ten years or so, thanks to the efforts of Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Alexander Osterwalder, Tim Brown, and others, an entirely new way of thinking about and planning startups has emerged. It has been a paradigm shift in reducing risk and navigating a viable path toward making something customers want.

This new process focuses on developing product/market fit and finding a sustainable business model through customer discovery and validation.

The new methods use the scientific method and testing guesses about aspects of the business model to see if they are valid in customers’ eyes. Because in the beginning, all you have are guesses, and admitting that and dealing with it systematically is the big discovery. We make our guesses, test them against customers, and course-correct based on the feedback we receive.

It seems simple and obvious now. All significant breakthroughs seem obvious after the fact.

I am going to write some articles that explore the different approaches to this new thinking and how they work together. I intend to jump-start your understanding and awareness of these different strains and tools and point you toward further study. This series of posts can also act as a way to step back and take stock of the fundamentals, as we all can sometimes get caught up in arcane details and eddies. It can help you get back into the mainstream and flow if you feel stuck.

There are no groundbreaking new ideas in this series. It is a summary of the work of others filtered through the lens of my experience. I am standing on the shoulders of giants. I want to bring together several strands to quickly and effectively grasp the different threads that make up the new paradigm of entrepreneurship.

I want to share this work because it has been so helpful to me. It has been a revelation on my entrepreneurial journey. It also represents the key points that make the light bulbs go off in my students when I teach this subject. Think of it as a ladder up to your place on those giant’s shoulders.

On a Meta level, this series of posts is also a product employing the techniques it espouses. I am on a mission to figure out what information is the most important and only deliver that bang-for-the-buck knowledge. I want to provide the 20% that gives you 80% of your results. I intend to keep it short and sweet.

As Mark Twain explained the economics of useful information: “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but of what is left out of it.”

Entrepreneurship is an essential subject and set of skills to develop, own, and implement. Besides helping individuals gain agency and control in their lives, the products and services created that help customers can significantly impact society. Much of our best hope for the future lies in creative solutions to our most pressing problems. Entrepreneurs and their startups create that future. We are all counting on you!

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