StartAp or Bounty Hunter
“Each person’s career is essentially not much different from a startup - the authors of the book, Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and Ben Kasnoch, are sure of this.” Annotation to the book “Life as a Startup: Build a Career According to Silicon Valley Laws”
Instead of the foreword
In the process of final adjustments to this article, a friend contacted me and said that he liked my previous article, “Blue Mazda or how to attract opportunities,” and that it’s really easier to remember this effect, but he does not agree with the name of this effect (thanks to the article the user received the alcanoid effect as “Baader-Meinhof effect”) and recommended reading the book “Life as a Startup: Build a Career according to the Laws of Silicon Valley” by Reid Hoffman and Ben Kasnoch. In this book, this effect is called Serendipnost.but the essence of this does not change. But to my regret, and perhaps fortunately, in the same book the principle that I wanted to set out in this article is taken as a basis. Compare Startup with job search. After a little reflection, I left the text as it was before I became acquainted with the book, especially since it has not been read yet and the final conclusions have not been made.
We continue life stories from the series " How I do my startup or, if you wish, you can step on my rake ."
This time I want to show how I got rid of fear at the stage of searching for investment funds for the development of a startup. (Looking ahead, I’ll say right away that I refused investors and the development of the project fell completely on my shoulders, but at some point the “Idea” came about how to lighten this burden, but more on that later.)
For myself, I came up with some kind of comparative characteristic (now it’s fashionable to compare everything), which acts like a ploy at the subconscious level.
In case you, as for me at one time, are scared and frightened by the very idea of communicating with investors, I recommend this comparative characteristic. We train on cats, as they say.
We will compare the search for investors with job search.
Key indicators are presented in the table below. Thus, drawing parallels, here I draw the following main conclusions:
| Startup | findings | |
|---|---|---|
| Investor | Employer | Startup - work for yourself / Work for uncle |
| Investments | Salary | The same uncles / aunts who accept you for work or provide funds for development. That is, the receipt of funds that need to be worked out |
| Prize | According to the results of successful work (implemented projects, tasks, etc.), you can get a bonus, that is, an additional profit to the salary. Also, if you successfully implement your idea, you can count on extra profit | |
| Idea | You yourself (your skills) | Here either you develop yourself and your idea, or you and your skills are used for the benefit of any company |
| Presentation of ideas / Business plan | Summary | This is practically the same thing. The product / idea is shown in the presentation, while in the resume it is necessary to present oneself, and for some it is much more difficult to praise oneself. |
| Selling ideas / Investor search | Interview trip | During the interview, you have to tell yourself, present yourself, the main bias of which is your qualities, skills and experience, as a specialist in a certain field. The same thing with the idea of the investor, you also talk about the advantages and principles of your idea / product. Awareness of this state of affairs makes the presentation process simpler, gives an understanding of what to say and show, and what is better to remove and show after the trial period. |
| Accelerator | Labor exchange, job fair | A place where you will be noticed, accepted, warmed up and taught how to work / develop a startup properly |
| Incubator | Advanced training courses, MBA | A place where you can apply your skills or learn new |
For an investor, a startup, as well as for an employer, a hired employee is always a pig in a poke. After all, you can invest money, and in the bottom line you can’t get what you want, because the functions and skills stated in the resume and at the interview were greatly exaggerated, and sometimes even implausible. And so it turns out that the employee, in accordance with the resume, is a professional, and in fact an excellent destroyer of corporate coffee and cookies.
There is always a lack of understanding of what questions the investor will ask, what is correctly reflected in the presentation, how much to ask for exactly enough.
After several trips to investors, as in the case of interviews, confidence and understanding comes as some projects receive investments, while others do not. But we already discussed this issue in an article about"The devil in the details or how to go to the investor . "
In conclusion, we can note the following: it is always easier to draw analogies, decompose them into simple components, and analyze in detail for themselves one or another upcoming event. After all, fears arise before the unknown and incomprehensible, and when you constructively work out the issues, then there will be no fears left. And this applies to the search for investors, and job search.