Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurial Journey
Tuan Nguyen, PhD
Entrepreneurial Journey

An entrepreneurial journey may seem like going on a river-rafting adventure that combines
beautiful scenery with some exciting, but perhaps frightening, challenges.
Entrepreneurial Journey

❑ Entrepreneurial Mindset = Skillset + Mindset.

➢ Skillset – the set of tools you acquire from your training to solve
problems. A good scientist or engineer can solve lots of them.
➢ Mindset - the attitude and disposition towards problems

❑ Even though both started at the same place with similar goals, your results
differed because you followed different entrepreneurial pathways.
❑ The decisions of the entrepreneur or the entrepreneurial team are the heart
and success of the venture.
Entrepreneurial Journey

• Self-Employment as an Entrepreneurial Journey: an independent

contractor:
• a person who provides work similar to an employee without being
part of the payroll for the contracting business, and who is
responsible for paying their own taxes and providing their own
benefits.
• advantages for the employer include a decrease in cost of benefits
and loyalties to specific employees. Advantages for the hired
worker or independent contractor (sometimes called a freelancer)
include no long-term commitment and flexibility in accepting
contracts.
Entrepreneurial Process

• a.
Entrepreneurial Process

• Stage 1: Startup:
• the crucial activity is defining the opportunity to develop your
concept into a realizable business venture with a strong potential
for success.
• developing the idea more thoroughly to determine whether it fits
your current and future circumstances and goals.
• Stage 2: Development
• to develop a structure to determine what type of venture will work
best for the idea.
• select a business model
• pull together a team
Entrepreneurial Process

• Stage 3: Resourcing
• evaluate the necessary resources to support your new venture.
• Gathering pertinent resources, such human and financial capital,
investors, facilities, equipment, and transportation
• Establishing connections, networks, and logistics
• Stage 4: Market Entry
• often undertaken in a soft launch, or soft open, within a limited
market to minimize exposure to unforeseen challenges.
• an excellent time to scrutinize all aspects of your business for
solutions to unexpected problems and improvements in
efficiencies, and to track customer reactions to your venture.
• One of your most important responsibilities at this point is
managing your cash flow
Entrepreneurial Process

• Stage 5: Growth
• making decisions that support the future growth of your venture.
• organizational structure needs an update.
• Stage 6: Maturity
• your venture has moved into the maintenance phase of the
business life cycle.
• monitor how a venture is growing and developing according to the
business plan, and its projections and expectations.
• making improvements to the product or service, finding new target
markets, adopting new technologies, or bundling features or
offerings to add value to the product.
Entrepreneurial Process

• Stage 7: Harvest
• harvesting or collecting the most return on your investment while
planning how to retire or make a transition away from this venture.
• Many entrepreneurs enjoy the excitement of starting and building a
venture but are less interested in the routine aspects of managing a
company.
• Stage 8: Exit
• venture either has fulfilled its purpose as a harvested success that is
passed along to the next generation of business owners or has not
met your needs and goals.
• Stage 9: Rebirth
• creating a new venture supersedes the financial gain from
harvesting a successful venture.
• an experienced entrepreneur, you can create a
new type of venture or develop a new spin-off of
your original venture idea.
Opportunities and Options

• On the Job. Some workplaces offer intrapreneurial opportunities, or

ventures created within the company, for entrepreneurial-minded
individuals
• Family Obligations. You might work in a family-owned business or take over
after family members retire or transfer ownership to other family
members.
• Franchises. You might purchase an existing franchise, a license granted to
an entrepreneur to operate under the franchise’s name.
• Web-Based Venture. You might launch a product venture through Etsy,
Shopify, or another e-commerce web site.
• Work for Hire, or Independent Contractor. You might launch a consulting
business or work as an independent contractor to gain clients, experience,
and income on a flexible schedule.
• Unemployment. Being underemployed or unemployed might make
entrepreneurship a pathway to economic freedom.
Opportunities and Options

• Purchase: purchase an existing business from a retiree, your current

company, or a family that owns a business. As a business owner’s life
situations change, due to aging or new interests, the business becomes
available for new ownership. Working for a company can offer the option
of buying out the current owner to become the new owner. Purchasing an
existing company provides historical financial data and decisions that
support future successes. If you are employed by the company, you have
the opportunity of learning details about how the business is managed, an
advantage that could support your success in purchasing and managing the
company.
• Frustration. You might encounter a currently existing product or situation
that needs improvement or a solution, and decide to tackle the situation
yourself.
• Serendipity (i.e. by chance). This is a situation in which various pieces come
together to support the creation of a new company or product.
Finding Your Entrepreneurial Path

▪ The process and pathways to entrepreneurship can be overwhelming.

▪ Many choices and decisions involved
▪ Entrepreneurial choices can seem intimidating,
▪ The route you follow may sometimes produce some anxiety.
▪ Before you get consumed with the technical aspects of launching a venture,
it is important to start with the most important foundation: finding your
personal path to entrepreneurship.
Finding Your Entrepreneurial Path

▪ Your Personal Path through Self-Reflection: complete some self-reflection to

figure out how, why, and when entrepreneurship may be the right professional
path for you.
▪ Your Personal Path through Research and Experiments:
▪ conduct research and try out roles related to your desired venture.
▪ Researching the potential industry or entrepreneurial options available
to you will provide some level of comfort and validate your decisions
about what you might do next.
▪ secure some experience by serving as an apprentice, intern, or lab
assistant, or as an independent contractor or freelancer, an individual
who contracts to offer professional services or tasks for a negotiated fee.
▪ Your Personal Path through a Soft Launch: to jump in with both feet and
experience the process by launching a venture
▪ entrepreneurship is an experiential discipline that can be understood
fully only through hands-on experiences.
▪ launching a venture for a limited time frame or audience to gain
experience, insights, and feedback about the target market or consumer
which providing valuable feedback on how to meet the consumer’s
needs or improve on your product to ensure success.

Check if you are ready to be an entrepreneur

How to discover amazing startup ideas?

• Spotting a problem: one of the best places to start:

• Frustration
• Annoyance
• Time wasters

• Questions:
• Does a solution exist?
• How effective is the solution?
• How can I solve it? Or Make a better solution?
• Can I use technology to improve it?
• How can I build a business around the solution?

Homework: Discuss with your group to create a list of five or more of your own startup ideas
How to discover amazing startup ideas?

• Spotting a problem:
• “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59
minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it” –
Albert Einstein
• Starting asking questions
• Find mentors
• Develop a Problem-Solution perspective
• Gain expertise in your areas of interest
• Observe social dialogue
• Keep an eye on future trends
• Detect inefficiencies
• Skip the middlemen
• Copy competition & Improve
• Let your passion lead you
Starting asking questions

• “People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it” –
Simon sinek

WHY
Your purpose, cause or belief

“A business
that makes
nothing but
Why HOW
money is a
poor Your strengths, values,
business” – and guiding principles
How
Henry Ford

What WHAT
Products sold, services offered,
Starting with the Why Or your role at work
Find mentors

• Learn from people who’ve been there done that

• Seek out mentors as hard as seek out co-founders
• Most successful tech titans and founders have had mentors
• For example: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was mentored by Steve Jobs and Steve
Jobs was mentored by Mike Markula, an early investor and executive at Apple
• Eric Schimidt mentored Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google
• Gain experience not shared in books
• You’re more likely to succeed with a mentor
• 80% of CEOs said they received some form of mentorship
• 93% of startup admit that mentorship is instrumental to success
• Networking opportunities
• A mentor gives you reassurance
• A mentor will help you stay in business longer
• 30% of new businesses may not survive the past 24 months
• 50% not 5 years but 70% with mentored survive longer 5 years
• A mentor will help you develop stronger EQ
• Encouragement
Develop a Problem-Solution perspective

• Don’t deal with it…solve it

• Seeing the big picture in business
• Looking beyond the immediate problems and setting the conditions for
greater achievement
• After having a strategy in mind, narrow your focus and determine what
steps are possible in the immediate future
Gain expertise in your areas of interest

• Success coming from deep rooted expertise in the area

• For example: gmail started off as an email search engine and ended up
working better than others
• “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one” – Bill Gates
Observe social dialogue

• Social media is a tremendous source of knowledge relating to people

perceptions & interactions
• Being vigilant about your social peers and surrounding in real life
• For example: Airbnb founded in 2008 with roomates. No knowledge about
Real Estate Rental.
• They were unable to pay rent at some point and time → being
broke always helps. It stimulates creativity.
• They started renting mattresses during a big design convention
where there was a shortage of hotel rooms
• Created a website and listed their mattresses for rent
• Three people showed up and paid eighty dollars a night → airbnd
born
• Ideas are over-rated because no idea ever executed itself
• The key to your startup success and every other kind of success imaginable
is the speed of your execution
Keep an eye on future trends

• Anticipate change
• See it coming
• Don’t start in a dying industry. Start with upcoming industries and trends
and business globally
• For example: reducing the fossil fuel, and carbon emissions to slow global
warming is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Tesla is riding and
capitalising this wave with great success.
• Check out Gartner’s Hype Cycle Emerging Technologies graph, get heads up
of the technologies like Drone’s, VR/AR, AI
Detect inefficiencies

• There’s always room for improvement

• For example: renting DVD affected by Netlix, taxi business vs Uber,
checking location of posted items
• Improve and Simplify
Skip the middlemen

• Identify room for getting customers closer to the source

• Look for industries with multiple middlemen
• Technology can be used to create and nurture communities
• For example: travelling business: trips can be booked online via website
instead of travel agents.
• Find best deals among many online players such as trivago, food
deliveries
• E-banking: google pay, amazon, Samsung, paypal
Copy competition & Improve

• Copying what’s working and improving the business model to make it

better is a norm in business
• For example: Uber eat
Let your passion lead you

• If you’re passionate about something, follow clues of those who have

turned their passion into their profession or business
• Love what you do and do what you love
• Ideas are never born perfect: the more you work towards testing and
validating your idea in the real world, the more viable your idea becomes
Assessing your ideas

• 70% of all startup fail

• No market need
• Customers don’t care about your discovery, or your innovative ideas.
They only care about themselves. They want to know and experience
the feeling once the problem vanishes from their lives
• Much effort, time, money that’s wasted into creating products that
no one wants
• No startup idea should be launched without real world validation
➢ Assess problem
➢ Assess solution
➢ Assess customers
Problem Assessment

▪ What do customers really want?

▪ Three questions to understand the scale and stickiness of the problem you’re looking to
solve. The bigger problem and more painful it is, the greater the payback and potential
rewards:
▪ Frequency of the problem
▪ Once a month isn’t enough
▪ Problem that triggers usage at least once a day
▪ Common, i.e. how many people are impacted by it?
▪ PatientCommunicator: a patient management system, for doctors to help the
ir clinics run more efficiently → doctors couldn't care less for the solution an
d smooth running of office using a management software → fail
▪ ZocDoc, 300 dollars per month to get listed, enables patients to find doctors i
n their neighbourhood and book an appointment through the ZocDoc → succ
ess, 6millions doctors signed up in US
▪ Doctors want more patients than runs an efficient office
▪ Focus on understanding what your target market cares about
▪ The focus on how you can help build existing systems, how you can add value
▪ Is the problem worth solving?: big enough to solve
Solution Assessment

▪ Unique:
▪ This is important for the marketplace as the uniqueness of your solution
would enable you to position yourself in the market accordingly.
▪ Uniqueness helps you differentiate from the world of competition.
▪ Protectable:
▪ once the idea was proven successful, it resulted in hundreds of copycats
all around the world.
▪ Look at a patent.
▪ trademark or copyrights.
▪ But they take a long time and can be extremely expensive.
▪ The typical resources, a patent or trademark demands is not worth the
weight and is not within the scope of startups either, neither in terms of
time nor in terms of the resources
▪ ideally focus on having some secret in the form of unique data access
that provides them an advantage or a system that gives the better
customer engagement or a strong network to drive recurring business
▪ Sustainable
Customer Assessment

▪ Who will gain the most from your business?

▪ Every startup must start with an assumption of who its core customers could
be.
▪ The clearer the customer profile, the better your startups chances of
acquiring paying clients.
▪ Targeting mass market B2C or work with existing businesses, companies,
B2B?
Exercises

1. What are three areas that interest you? These could be hobbies, work
activities, or entertainment activities. How would someone else describe
your skills and interests, or what you are known for? Answering these
questions provides insights into your strengths and interests. Next, what is
one area that you are passionate about? What strengths could you bring to
this passion to build your own business?
2. Keep an open mind in looking for an opportunity that fits your strengths
and interests. If you decide to explore entrepreneurship, what would be
your first step? What are your initial thoughts about being an
entrepreneur? What would you review or search to find more information
on your idea or area of interest? With whom would you first question or
discuss this idea? Why?
THANK YOU