How Important Is Your Experience?
Does you experience really matter when you're building a startup? After all, Mark Zuckerberg had no experience, and look at Facebook. So, you should be able to start a company without any experience and replicate Zuckerberg's success, right?
Well, the reality is it might not be that simple. I'll explain why in this short video. I hope you enjoy it.
Read The Video Transcript Below:
My dad was also an entrepreneur, and one of the big mistakes my dad made in his entrepreneurial career was, somehow or other, he got involved in this, what I'm going to call, the specialty car business. And the business was,, this is gosh, a long time ago, but if you can imagine taking, you know, building these old classic cars, you know, having them, having a chassis of these old classic cars built around a VW chassis and VW engine.
So the cars looked lovely, but they were powered by VWs, and my dad had no experience in this business whatsoever. And what do you think happened? My dad failed completely, and I think there's a lesson there.
When you think about anything in life, the less moving parts, the better. And if you're starting a company where you're starting a business, you already have one moving part because you're starting something new. Now, ideally you go into a business where you already have knowledge and understanding because that removes the moving part.
That's the basic rule. If there's multiple moving parts, each moving part exponentially increases the risk because now suddenly you're going into a business that you have no knowledge about, no understanding about. What's likely to happen?
You know what's likely to happen. You're likely to fail because of it. The only exception to this is an emerging market. That's probably the only exception that I can think of is that emerging market where you and everybody else is at the same playing field.
That's why you see people like a Mark Zuckerberg when in an emerging market like Facebook, because experience wasn't required. You can be young and ambitious and not know anything and still build a really successful business. Whereas the more established the industry is the more likely that your experience is going to matter. And you're going to need that experience because if you don't have it, you're likely to fail and it's likely not going to work too well for you. So just kind of remember that basic rule reduced the number of moving parts and try and have experience with what you're doing, unless it's an emerging business like social media was for Facebook. I'm Brett at brettjfox.com. Have a great, great day.