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Originally Posted by KevV
I'll go for the long version
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Ok, I'll do the long version, but keep in mind that it's only an impossibly concise summary of a much larger body of knowledge. Since I'm not familiar with how you learn - I'll slowly chew through concepts - please do not mistake this for me being patronising.
To answer your question on "how to begin?", I will introduce you to
entrepreneurship as a trade and cover the
four entrepreneurial roles. If you can understand these four things - you'll know exactly how to begin - and where to go from there.
1) Entrepreneurship is a trade: Similarly to roofing, medicine, network administration and hot dog vending - entrepreneurship is a very specific occupation with its own skills, best practices and rules of thumb. Entrepreneurs who are good at this trade - achieve good results - those who fail at this trade, achieve bad results.
So to truly understand the answer to your question - you must see the context where entrepreneurship is specific trade, that takes many years to learn (like dentistry), it's not for everybody - and its hard. Most importantly, you must see that the trade of entrepreneurship is dependant on entrepreneurs knowing how to do fours things: be an investor, be a founder, be a CEO, and be a company director. These are the
four entrepreneurial roles.
a) Role as an investor: To
begin, you must have the skills to pick venture
worth beginning. If you do this job well - people will follow you and you'll have no problems getting things off the ground. If you don't, no one will help you (and by help, I don't necessarily mean hand outs) and your ventures will not get off the ground.
How to pick ideas, and quantifying them into investment opportunities, which other people recognise as
good investment opportunities is a complicated skill which I invite you to learn.
Direct answer to your question: To begin your venture you must find an attractive opportunity which is more attractive than other opportunities based on a common checklist which everybody uses to determine whether a business idea is a good or a bad business idea.
b) Role as founder: Having applied things like an
investment thesis and
due diligence to find good opportunities, to get your business kick stated you must do your job as a founder.
Doing your job as a founder requires you to complete a particular equation. I won't go into the details of it (unless you require me to), but essentially your role as a founder requires you to
leverage market intelligence to aggregate resources currently outside of your control.
The easy way to remember this function is to think of it like an episode of law an order. You are the lawyer and you must put together a brief of evidence which will convince the jury (customers, employees, financiers etc), that what you are offering is a good idea/product/job.
Direct answer to your question: Having identified a good investment opportunity, to
begin you must do your job as a founder to complete the Silver equation. The equation, amongst other things, will require you to leverage information to make people do things they had no prior intention of doing.
I'll leave it here because you don't need to know about the third and forth entrepreneurial roles (just yet). I do, however, encourage you to ask questions about how to do your job well as an investor and company founder.
