There is no clear goal, there is no goal
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “Geek Pengyou said” (ID : geekpys) , author: Peng.
For start-ups, “starting up” is not just an action, but a set of logical thinking. On this point, amateurs and professionals often judge.
Unconsciously, the founder’s workshop of “Future Frontier” led by Zhou Hang, an investment partner of Shunwei Capital and I, has already run three phases.
Wei Ming, the former joint president of Youku Tudou, has joined the rank of “class teacher” since the second phase. I was fortunate to be with these two and I felt I learned a lot.
Wei Ming is full of goodwill towards entrepreneurs, and also has very rich practical experience. Entrepreneurs are often closest to him. He will also enthusiastically help the entrepreneurs who are hatched, they are particularly good thinking partners.
As a professional investor, Zhou Hang’s main characteristics are thoroughness, truthfulness, and the use of sharp language to smash the entrepreneur’s “inertia of thinking.” Sometimes the sharpness makes me sweat.
When we had a few rewinds some time ago, Zhou Hang said, “I think many entrepreneurs behave very” amateur “in understanding the” entrepreneurship “and specific actions. They are professional. “
As soon as Zhou Hang said it, I was sweating again … A question immediately appeared in my mind: What exactly does the “amateur” of an entrepreneur mean? What is the gap between “amateur entrepreneurs” and “professional entrepreneurs”?
Last week we just completed the “Startup Module” in the third phase of incubation. This module mainly helps entrepreneurs to figure out how to “startup” and cut the sharp “first knife” more effectively. In the process, I kind of understood why some entrepreneurs will soon be labeled as amateurs by investors, while others will win the judgment of “professional” or even “must be a big deal”.
“Blindly optimistic” is an unconscious laziness
The founder workshop has an incubation process of 8 modules. “Startup” is only the first module, but in a few issues I found that the “amateur” and “professional” of entrepreneurs can be quickly reflected in this module.
The most common performance of amateur entrepreneurs is “blind optimism.”
When analyzing the prospects and goals of their projects, many students will take a bunch of third-party data to prove how big this market is and how much room for growth in the coming years. On this basis, they will eat a few percent Market, and ultimately how much profit. These logics and trends sound very exciting, and it is estimated that more students will also take it seriously.
But why did you come to eat what percentage of the market? What is the logic of a breakthrough from scratch? How will this change happen? What was the environment like when it happened? Has it been verified? Even why others ca n’t do it, ca n’t do it, or ca n’t do the thing you created?
Once you dig into the problem in depth, you will find that the logic of “optimism” for amateur players is often “thin as a piece of paper.” Most of these logic-closed questions cannot be answered.
But professional entrepreneurs will have in-depth thinking about these issues. Although some questions have not been clearly thought out and may not have answers, he knows that they still need to be explored and thought out, so clear risks have become his focus. The motivation to solve these problems.
Too rough and optimistic judgment will make people think to slack off. At this time, in the face of the entrepreneurial truth of “Nine Dead and One Life”, it is bound to be extremely fragile.
Another kind of “optimism” is the habit of grand narrative. When many entrepreneurs analyze their projects, they will say what kind of process we are in and what favorable policies the government has issued. Seizing this opportunity, I can do what I want.
In the early stage of entrepreneurship, this kind of grand narrative is actually a typical “not thinking about it”. Because for an entrepreneurial team at the start-up stage, the so-called dividends of the times and macro-policy have nothing to do with you. For example, the government is now proposing the strategic direction of “new infrastructure”. It is likely that those who have already gotten out of this ability, not you, will really catch up with the “shunfeng” of the times.
This kind of thinking of “turning off the gear as soon as it is put into gear” is very easy to be seen by investors who talk about hundreds of projects a year. This kind of unconscious laziness in thinking is a kind of “amateur” in the field of entrepreneurship.
If you do n’t see “space” in time, you can see nothing
“Don’t care about history”, especially “failure history”, is also a common problem among amateur entrepreneurs.
Most of the time, everyone can follow the legend of excellent companies, but for those companies that failed, and the reasons for the failure, it is not so true. Some entrepreneurs don’t even know which “falling people” were in their entrepreneurial field, why is it “falling down”?
Actually, success is accidental, and failure is the only way to see it. Research on the losers in the early stages of entrepreneurship is much more useful than looking at the stories of the winners.
Zhou Hang mentioned a very classic statement in the founder’s workshop-you have to stand on the bones of the loser to find the ladder of forward. This sentence sounds bloody, but the business world is like this. Stacked entrepreneurs fall down, and the people behind stand up on the bones of their predecessors. If you don’t care about history and make the same mistakes as them, you are not responsible for yourself.
Of course, the core of entrepreneurship is to seeThe future, but how to look at the future, also reflects “amateur” and “professional”.
This future does not mean standing in and guessing the future today, but really “stand in the future and see the present.” Because the former will definitely bring “I want to do this, I guess it will be like this in the future” idealism; while the latter is to think about more certain trends in the future, and then look at how to choose in this process.
I was very impressed with the entrepreneurial project in the second phase of the activity. At the beginning, this project was intended to provide services for the couples ’wives in the residential area. Will the store format still exist? Will it grow more and more? If this is a format that will not prosper or even be eliminated, what is the point of doing this? It was precisely such a simple question that made entrepreneurs rethink their business direction and saved an “entrepreneurial life.”
Song Chenfeng, the founder of Xiaoyu ’s home, once came to the founder ’s workshop to share. He said a disturbing sentence: “Many times, the end of your business is already doomed today.”
What he means is that if what you do is not in a future trend or process, it means that you cannot catch up with the wave of the times or it is difficult to resonate with the times. The most important thing is what you can solve today. The problem may not be a problem once the year has passed, or if a technical upgrade is encountered.
Without a clear goal, there is no goal
Entrepreneurs often misunderstand investors and feel that they like to listen to attractive prospects, ambitious goals, and ambitious entrepreneurs, so many entrepreneurs will “invest in what they want” when facing investors , Only talk about long-term goals, and ignore the small and medium-term goals.
For entrepreneurs, you can use these big goals to “flick” investors, and don’t deny that some investors are really this style, but don’t “flick” yourself in the process, this is the The most terrible.
The working relationship has given me the opportunity to contact many top investors. I found that they pay special attention to the dismantling and refinement of the goals, and rely on this to form the final judgment of a project and team.
One of my entrepreneurial friends used to go to Russia ’s investment tycoon Yuri Milner to talk about investment. I asked him what he felt most, “Fine, I asked very finely, and the calculation was very fast. He said this, “He understands the big logic in seconds. Most of the time he is trying to understand whether your next goal is reasonable and whether there is a way to achieve it.”
A frequent problem for amateur entrepreneurs is that their goals are ambiguous. This goal ambiguity comes largely from the unclear definition of the boundary. For example, there is no staged disassembly of the goal, which takes a long time to achieve the goal, and there is no opportunity for verification and correction in the middle.
For another example, the time boundary is not clear-“I think I have the opportunity to become China’s xxx”, but the entrepreneur has not defined for himself how long it will take to achieve. The problem that this brings is that “the goal cannot determine the path”. The goal is just a beautiful imagination, but it does not form a sense of urgency, nor can it be because of the urgency to think deeply about the truly effective path to achieve.
When an entrepreneur turns on the “launch” action, what do you think about the goal of this action, is it a test? Or take a certain position. If it ’s a test, how much time do you reserve for yourself? If you win a certain position, how long will it take you to win, what is the second step after winning, and how is it related to your long-term goals? These are all questions that need to be clearly thought out during the “start-up” stage, and are often blind spots for amateur players who are exposed when asked by investors.
Entrepreneurship is not just about enthusiasm. It has scientific laws and basic methodologies. In this area, amateurs often indicate that entrepreneurs have problems with thinking skills or that they have not regarded entrepreneurship as a “fate”. People, how can you give money to you with confidence?
Keep the depth of thinking, I wish every entrepreneur to go further and further on the “professional” road.