Why Entrepreneurship has become a style statement but it shouldn’t be…

The word Entrepreneurship has changed its meaning in the recent times. From few entrepreneurs in traditional business to many of them in new age business. I think entrepreneurship is in vogue  because of a few factors:

1. It’s been glamorized.
   IPL glamorize cricket and similarly movies, media coverage and platforms to massage one’s ego glamorized the field of entrepreneurship. The rise in the number of young billionaires starting from Mark Zuckerberg to Bansal and Goyal’s changing the way industry works sound pretty awesome, isn’t it?
2. Entry barriers have greatly reduced
   Easy access to capital from VC’s and Angels, start-up and networking events, the rise of the smartphone population and increase in the user appetite for experimentation and ease has greatly reduced the entry problems in the business world.

There are books, articles, blogs written on what are the steps to become next Elon Musk. Also, the rise in a number of incubators and co-working spaces which give a cost-effective way to start and hence further reduce the entry barrier.

Today to prototype and test an idea it is very easy. Platforms like WordPress, Magento gives you all the basic work done. You just need to carry out the idea and move on.

The risk used to be a big reason to stop people from entering this field has been mitigated with many people sharing the load together.

3. There are a great number of success stories (Selection Bias)
   Facebook, Instagram, Groupon, Ola, Flipkart etc now dominate our day-to-day life and their success is enough to push people towards this field. They’re a plethora of stories we can tell that glamorizes entrepreneurship and inspire ourselves and others that entrepreneurship ‘doesn’t look that hard.’ The stories we’re exposed to seem to make the recipe for success seem effortless.But no one tells us the other side of the story.
   Just add Uber in your idea as Uber of X, with a bit of funding and incubator and here you are on a journey to become next Steve Jobs.

Unfortunately, entrepreneurship has been commoditized which was once a rare possession one could boast of. Wannabe entrepreneurs think they just need an app and a website get a funding and then sell themselves off. If we are starting with this mindset are we building a long-term business?

People seem to miss the true meaning of entrepreneurship. It has to be more challenging, taking risks, solving a true problem and build a sustainable business. Yet today anyone will learn coding start something, we have turned it into a commonplace and not something original and creative.

We hear only good things about start-ups and we forget to understand that it’s a choice bias as only 1 in thousand start-ups is successful. The other 999 do not see the light as they don’t make the stories which sell.start-ups and we forget to understand that it’s a choice bias as only 1 in thousand start-ups is successful. The other 999 do not see the light as they don’t make the stories which sell.

As a result, people have a rosy picture that everyone becoming an entrepreneur are succeeding and getting millions . This leads people to assume that start-ups are easier than they are and that if you just worked hard, you could become rich and famous. It’s kind of like why people want to become successful movie stars. But trust me, it’s not.