Re: cruit
If I were to offer guidance to anyone considering embarking on a start-up at its and possibly their outset, I would recommend advice I read at the same stage in my life and promptly ignored: “My advice is to take no advice.” But if you plan on making a dent in the universe, as Steve Jobs suggested, then I would consider that the sooner you start the better.
For two simple reasons. First, as life proceeds it accumulates obstacles, albeit decidedly attractive obstacles like houses with picket-fences in the suburbs, marriage, kids and the prospects of promotion within the field of your choice. Second, the brain becomes more hard-wired with each passing year into you mode of living. The people I have known most able to take risks are those who’ve had most jobs, because the fear of losing any one job never becomes ingrained.
It is also a truism that the sooner you start to try something, the easier it is to adapt it to your nature. With the effective deregulation of the global airline industry, fake CVs would become something of an industry in itself and co-pilots would on occasion take a job as a captain with no prior experience. Unless they were very good, it would become obvious in practise that they weren’t who they said (or thought) they were.
In other words you accumulate experience by not fearing to try something sooner, rather than later. The comedic phenomenon that is Billy Connolly worked as a young man in the Glasgow shipyards. He became, as you probably would, convinced that he stood a chance doing the rounds of the clubs playing his banjo and telling gags. Accordingly he set out a plan to do so, involving the months during which he would save up and the ideal point on the way when it would, he considered, be the ideal time to jump ship.
He credits his entire career since to an older guy who told him that he’d heard that so often from men he’d worked with enroute to retirement. If you were serious about it, he told Connolly, you’d set off tomorrow… and he did.
Not that you especially have to be young. Enzo Ferrari was 40-odd before starting his eponymous motor company, and history records very many instances of people able to re-orient their careers at whichever age. But in the way you’re unlikely to break Olympic records as time wears on, you’ll be less likely to do so with each passing year.
The (deceased) Paul Arden was the creative director at Margaret Thatcher’s favourite ad agency. He commissioned at one point photographs of a delicately posed rose, and in the end selected one in a simple vase that was dried out and drooping ~ because of the many submitted, no-one else had thought to consider anything but the freshest possible flower. And advertisers like that sort of thinking.
Thus at whichever stage, there’s room to pivot and to pursue the road less travelled.
With that, it is necessary to persevere, but also in a direction that you constantly review to ensure that it’s not a dead-end. And it pays to stay open-minded with ideas and to keep them on the back-burner. Many ideas do not come to fruition until man years after they were expected to, due a variety of reasons but most frequently to serendipity. The product I am looking at was conceived decades ago, but the tech and the world are now in synchronicity with it.. or at least I hope.
People want you to hang in there, and not throw in the towel. And as Goethe wrote, once you set upon a goal the whole Universe conspires to assist you. Personally I think he was a little over-excited at the time, and prefer Linus Torvalds “What’s life without a project?”
Persistence though, is key, and it is no mistake that Margaret Thatcher’s favourite quotes had all to do with the necessity of it. The closest approximation that I can bring to making any idea or invention a reality, is that it is not far removed from bringing up a child and requires the same patience and provision. The most successful industrialist in the UK is James Dyson, and whilst he was developing a market for his eponymous vacuum-cleaner his son grew from toddler to late teenager.
There are actually better ways to make money and sooner, than joining a start-up, but only in the way that there are better things to do than climb Everest or to try landing a spacecraft on the moon. Entrepreneurs are invariably not in it not for the money, though human ego being what it is we’d all still prefer rather more than we’ve got. What you will need is sufficient to endure the journey, in the hope that the destination features it as a cherry on the icing if nothing else. I lived next door to the guy who headed Ford Europe when they introduced the Anglia, though he took more satisfaction in having seen farming machinery that he’d invented being used in a field in Cyprus.
In having prototyped electrical flying machines for the best part of seven years (and maybe it’s the itch), I have come to the conclusion that as ever in aviation the best way to make a small fortune is to start ~ as Joby wisely did ~ with a large one. In contrast, one of the founders of Vine recently described on the radio in the UK how they were able to bring the product to market in three months. Three. And it was they who pioneered the short-form video, of course.
So you’ve likely got longer to make this happen than I have, frankly. What developing this idea does for me is that it lets me work wherever in the world, provides more bang for my buck and is a potential means of steering my son away from gaming 24/7. Reasonable? Above all I want it to be entertaining too. For as the great Torvalds has pointed out, all great products end up there eventually anyway.
So don’t be scared to give it a try. I cannot code because it never really floated my boat and the closest I would get ~ with an optical pen I designed for signature verification ~ was using BASIC to get it to figure out the written numbers 0 through 9. Eat your hearts out, Deep Mind!
In order the to replace the opening PIN code screen on most every smartphone around the world, ideally we’d want someone equally smart. It doesn’t matter if you’ve a twist of arrogance, so long as most people don’t consider you an asshole. And qualifications come with a pinch of salt. Among my first summer jobs was filling gas at ICI stations in the UK. The head of Imperial Chemical Industries, as it was at the time, pointed out that of his top sixteen patent holders not a single one had a university education.
And I myself was downgraded for suggesting in a finals paper that East and West Germany might one day be reunited. “Never going to happen, is it?” I was chastised at my ‘viva voce’.
I wrote them after the event… never be afraid to ask your Alma Mater to kiss ass.
