This is my advice to start-up founders. The essence of that is a mixture of risk aggressiveness, a passion (for sales), and resilience that makes a successful entrepreneur. Unless you have built firms and developed them into some kind of exits, you might not agree or add many other abilities, such as an elite university pedigree, certain special expertise, etc. Sure, that can help but it’s not sufficient.

Just get started! Just do it!

You can’t afford to use subjunctives and cite any potentially negative external conditions preventing you from becoming a successful entrepreneur. You can and maybe you should participate in mentoring programs that help you to learn about startup essentials. After all, I have been a mentor at the Founder Institute for years. Although I love working with curious, eager startup folks, investing their evening hours and weekends to escape from their nine-to-five jobs,  too often my fellow co-mentors and I realize that startuppers expect getting answers to their questions from the outside; i.e. from us mentors, start-up-related books or university lectures. As if studying a manual before starting the engine, many aspiring entrepreneurs try to learn as much as they can before the jump the ship and actually start doing something.

I don’t want to compare myself with him by any means, but there is this legend of Buddha giving a silent sermon, just holding a flower. Finally, one monk in the audience broke out in laughter. He had got the message.
Same here: you’re in business when you’re in business. It’s not about learning or copying („from the best“) but it’s all about doing things. And doing things again, after that wasn’t enough. Doing things in an entrepreneurial way means,

1. stop talking about them but start doing them,
2. doing things you have never done before and that seems to be quite risky,
3. doing things because you really want to do them (more than anything else), and
4. doing things again and again, if necessary.

If I want to drink something, I do it.
If I want to sell my company, I do it.

Stewart Resnick, the biggest farmer in the world, does not have an answer when asked how he could become a billionaire without even a high school diploma. What he remembers, however, is the request of his very first boss, when asking him to start cleaning up a stock room: “Just get started!” And that’s what Stewart did then and never has stopped doing since.

And you can, too! Just get started! Just Do It! Just imagine yourself being the “I” in the sentences above.

PS: If you want to launch a fully-functional humanitarian Blockchain project in Jordan in less than 5 months, just do it!

The post No Waiting, No Excuses — Just get started! Just Do It! appeared first on MICHAEL REUTER.

Having been an entrepreneur for over 20 years, I did not have to think twice to agree becoming a mentor of Founder Institute’s Munich chapter in 2013. When FI director Jan Kennedy discussed the first semester with me, I had a flashback to the times of my first startup: a travel agency which morphed into one of Germany’s first online travel agencies ever in 1995.

In those days, my co-founder and I did not have any clue of “How To Found A Startup?” — nobody was even talking about “startups” or “entrepreneurship” — we just became self-employed instead of starting in management jobs at Henkel (in my case) or Deutsche Bank (in my co-founder’s case). We started with no money (speak: bootstrapping) and changed our way to do business several times (speak: pivoting). A business plan? No way! We did not need one! Our business was growing slowly, but steadily. We hired our first employees and started a second company for packaged incentive trips.

In 1998 everything changed really quickly: we were awared “Best Online Travel Agency” and a few months later we sold a minority share of our company to Telegate AG, Munich. In order to get this deal done, we finally had to write a business plan — our first one. But we did not have to pitch to an investor, yet.

Typical investor pitches were involved in my second startup, the social news aggregator YIGG. That was 2005 — and then we used terms like VC, startup, pitch deck or liquidity preference as if we had grown up with them. We had our experiences with international VC companies and term sheets built by top US law firms, before. This was a complete new world for us — very different from the 1990s — and pretty demanding, since we had to build our business and to negotiate this finance stuff with the big guys.

And yet, we were just focusing on building our own business, but we had not to pursue other jobs to keep the money rolling in. And exactly this is what most Founder Institute entrepreneurs are doing: they build their companies while staying in their day jobs. We all know people lamenting about high workloads in their jobs — a typical FI entrepreneur invests 25–30 hours a week on top of his normal workload. Got it? This is a hell lot of work! This workload alone has minimized the largest first semester ever of Founder Institute from 37 accepted teams to 25 teams right after the very first week.

Photo: FI Review Meeting, Munich, December 2013 (Michael Reuter)

When my mentor colleagues Sevket, Norbert, Lorenz, Stephan and I met for the first FI review session in December, we were sold on the progress of all teams compared with their first presentations in early November. All of them had developed their basic ideas into sharp keynote slides, presented in a determined, dynamic style. Most of them have persuaded us as future entrepreneurs and many of their ideas could evolve into real startups.

Sure, we mentors all had something to criticize, we all habe our doubts on many of those ideas. But — as Ben Horowitz says in his brilliant piece “Can-do vs. Can’t-do Culture”:

The people who focus on what’s wrong with an idea or a company will be the ones too fearful to try something that other people find stupid. They will be too jealous to learn from the great innovators. They will be too pigheaded to discover the brilliant young engineer who changes the world before she does. They will be too cynical to inspire anybody to do anything great. They will be the ones who history ridicules.

Given the task of building a start-up while pursuing a 40-hour- job, I really like what the FI entrepreneurs accomplish (it helps that Munich’s FI chapter is perfectly organized by Jan Kennedy and Jan Küster). I think it’s one of the greatest challenges of today’s working environment to create and build startups. I love being a member of the mentor team at FI Munich and I invite all would-be-entrepreneurs to jump on the bandwagon and join FI — we want to create 1 million jobs, after all!

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