青年创业谨防五大误区

这些年来，我和许多企业家都有交流，并总结出了我认为的创业五大误区。

错!大多数企业家(包括我在内)对各种创意都充满热情。但是好创意有成百上千种，真正重要的是如何利用这些创意。事实上，大多数商业成功案例并不在于优秀的创意而在于一个好公司应该做到的:他们用真正对别人有所帮助的方式解决问题，而且他们的管理团队为实现主要目标实行好的计划例如，脸谱不是第一个社交网络，就创意而言，并不比之前的社交网络好。推特并不是第一个’推特’，谷歌不是网络上的第一个搜索引擎，iPad并不是第一个平板电脑（更不用提iPhone了，它也不是第一个触觉智能手机），等等。

所以不要认为有好的创意就能成功，也不要因为创意太过普通或者没有想法而害怕创业（如果你想创业的话）。倒不如多想想如何将创意变为有用的产品以及如何根据顾客需要进行产品推介。

如果你还是觉得好创意是成功之道，那就来看看如今的新型部门：电子商务。电子商务背后的理念及其简单，根本没有任何创意：把商品放在网上并卖出去。你可以想想如何卖出产品去，以及如何对市场进行布局。但结果和其他的网上交易是没有区别的。这并不是件坏事，它意味着你掌控着整个业务，你需要比竞争者更加注重创意的执行。

这是创业的最大荒谬之一。我曾在大公司，大学，研究机构，小公司等等供职过。但是当我自己创业之后我从没有这么多老板。

开始创建自己公司之际，你的第一个“老板”就是顾客，你需要满足他们的期望，需要他们的钱来运作公司。你应该按照顾客的需要而不是自己的想法来制造产品。对公司来说关键在于重要的使用者、顾客，所以如果不考虑你的老板——顾客，从很大程度上来说会失败。

你的员工也会成为你的老板，因为你需要一个强大的团队，如果你已经组建好了团队之后，很难找到团队的替代者。你还可以继续添加“老板”：你的投资人，核心合作者，主要供货商，等等。你要承受来自很多人的压力，也许你希望有一个可以让你专注你的任务和工作目标的老板。

真的吗？也许你能成为“自己的老板”，可以管理别人，但也许你并不喜欢管理。但是如今我不得不要管理团队，不得不与客户以及潜在的客户交流，有时不得不要传达坏消息甚至开除别人。反而我很高兴能成为一个程序员，我真的怀念那段时光，花费几天的时间用来编码修改。

这并不是我刚开公司时所想的那样，但是我并没有抱怨。事实上我很高兴能学会如何管理新事物，掌握新技能，我喜欢去了解我们的顾客需要什么，我学到了很多东西，如果让我再重新创业的话，我会用不同的方式处理很多问题，过去曾做过的一些事情可能就不会做了，也不会为过去一些无关紧要的事而担心了。所以我为今天的所作所为而高兴，但是我也知道我不是普通人了，我已经成为一个能完成任务的‘全堆栈工人’（主要是开发和市场营销），我也喜欢学习新东西，面对挑战。很多人宁愿选择呆在他们舒适的地方继续做他们擅长的事情。

所以如果你开始创业并觉得以后可以随心所欲的话，你最好还是去找个可以随心所欲的工作为好，或者，如果你准备好创业了并变成了CWO（首席全能官），意思是初期你要从事对公司来说重要、但没有雇员有资格做的各类工作。随着公司的发展，你需要去管理别人，不再编码或者做设计应用以及其他你喜欢的事情。

我还是头次听说有人因为工作时间太长而要自己创业，这听起来真可笑。我时常找更多的时间来做运动，休息片刻，但是企业家的现实是你要经常忙于公司事物，所以和普通雇员相比，你更难有时间做自己的事情。

事实上，我认为当你创业之后，即使你有时间做自己的事情，想必也是错的（或者你的工作十分可怕）因为我很难想象，如果你真的很看重这份工作的话怎么会投入的时间少呢？

事实上如果你计算一下的话，买彩票中奖的概率比创业发大财的概率要大。每周都会有世界各地的人通过赌博获得上百万的收入，但是每年却只有很少企业家通过变卖公司获得几百万收入。

事实上，创业伊始，你需要把你的钱进行投资。也许前几个月没工资，也许你会说服你的家人投资给你。如果公司倒闭（这很有可能），你会损失一大笔钱（你和家人的投资），你将失去在其他公司赚更多钱的机会。所以在公司建立的时候，你想通过变卖公司赚钱这很正常，但你必须考虑是否愿意经营一个不会让你发财、却足以支付日常开销的公司。

【英文版如下】

Most entrepreneurs talk about how great is to start your own business, and that’s why so many people decides to start a business and then they find it is not what they thought starting a business should be. I’ve started 3 business and invested in another 7 startups, and I love to start new ventures, but the reality is that starting your own business is harder than the average people think it is. 

Through the years, I’ve talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, and I’d like to write what I think are the top 5 myths about starting a business: 

Wrong! Most entrepreneurs (including myself) are passionate people that when starting a business are devoted to their idea. But there exist thousands of good ideas, and what makes the difference is the execution of the project based on that idea. In fact, most successful business are not based on a great idea, but covers what a good company should cover: they solve a problem, in a way that really helps people, and their management team has executed a good plan to achieve their main goals. For instance, Facebook was not the first Social Network, and as an idea, it was not better than any previous social network. And Twitter wasn’t the first “Twitter”, Google wasn’t the first search engine for the web, the iPad wasn’t the first tablet (not to mention that the iPhone wasn’t the first tactile smartphone), etc. 

So don’t you think that a good idea will make you rich, but also don’t be afraid to start a business (if you wan’t to start that business) if you have a mediocre idea or an idea that initially isn’t something very innovative. It’s better to focus on how to turn that idea into an usable product, and how to market that product in order to get the consumer’s attention. 

And if you’re still considering that a good idea is key to success, you should watch to some of the strongest sectors nowadays: eCommerce. The idea behind an eCommerce is pretty simple and is not innovative at all: put a products catalog online and try to sell those products. You can innovate on how to show those products, in how to market your users, etc. But in the end, you will be starting a business very similar to thousands of other online business. And that’s not bad, in fact if there exist similar business already in the market, it means that you are covering an actual business, and you need to focus on executing the idea better than the competitors. 

This is one of the biggest fallacies of building a business. I’ve worked for big companies, in a University, in Institutes, for small companies… but I have never had so many bosses as when I have started my own business: 

When you start your own company, your first “bosses” are your customers, as you need to cover their expectations and you need their money to run your business. You shouldn’t develop your product as you think it should be, but as your customers say it should be. A key to any company is to be user/customer centric, so if you don’t consider that your customers are, in some way, your bosses, you’d probably fail. 

And your employees would also become your bosses, as you need an awesome team and if you have completed an awesome team, it’s hard to find a good replacement to anyone of your team. And you can continue adding ‘bosses’: your investors, core partners, key providers, etc. You will receive pressures from a lot of people, and probably you’ll miss to have a boss that let you focus on your tasks and main goals. 

Really? As you may become ‘your own boss’, you will start managing people, and maybe management is not what you want to do. I’ve always been happy as a developer, and I really miss the time when I could spend several days coding awesome features or improving processes. But nowadays I have to manage teams, I have to talk to customers and potential customers and sometimes I have to give bad news, or even to fire people. 

It’s not what I thought it was when I started my own company, but I don’t complain about it. In fact I’m really happy to learn to manage all these new thing I have to manage, I develop new skills, I love to try to understand what our customers want and need, and I’ve learn a lot about a lot of things, which makes me think that if I had to start my business again, I’d do a lot of things in a different ways, and also wouldn’t do a lot of things that I did in the past or wouldn’t worry about things that I can see now were not relevant in some moments. So I’m happy to be doing what I do now, but I also know that I’m not the average people, I’ve always been a ‘full-stack worker’ in whatever task I’ve done (development and marketing, mainly), and I like to learn new things and get in front of new challenges. And a lot of people prefer to stay in the comfort zone, and continue doing what they do best. 

So if you start a business thinking that you’ll be doing what you like most, think about it, and question if it’s better for you to find a job where you can continue doing whatever you want to do, or if you are ready to start a business and become a CWO (Chief Whatever Officer), which means that in the beginnings you’ll be doing whatever is important to your company and you have no employee qualified to do, and when the company grows, you’ll bemanaging people and loosing to code awesome features or make beautiful designs for your app or whatever you love to do. 

The first time I heard a person that he hated his job because he worked so many hours and he wanted to start a company in order to have enough time for himself, I couldn’t avoid to laugh. I’m always looking to have more time for doing sports, and for relaxing a little bit, but the reality of an entrepreneur is that you are always looking ways to improve or to optimize critical processes for your company, so it’s harder for you to have time for yourself, compared to being an employee. 

In fact, I think that if you start a business and you really start to have more time for yourself, something is wrong (or you had a really horrible job) because it’s hard for me to understand that if you’re more committed to your work, you can dedicate fewer hours to it. 

In fact if you calculate the odds, I think it’s even easier to become rich with the lottery than starting a business. Every week, a lot of people from around the globe win million dollars gambling, but only a few entrepreneurs per year makes several million dollars selling their companies. 

In fact, to start your own business, you’ll need to invest your money. Probably, you won’t have a salary during the first months, and maybe you’ll convince your family to invest in your company. If your company fails (and that’s most probable), you’ll loose a lot of money (what you and your family invested), and you’ll be loosing the opportunity to earn more money in any other company. So when you start a company, it’s normal that you want to make money selling the company, but you also have to think if you want to be managing a company that won’t make you rich (but maybe can pay the bills).

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