Unfortunately, entrepreneurs get bad advice all the time. There are many misperceptions around success and the journey of building a company, such as ‘entrepreneurs take big bold risks’ (they, in fact, take very calculated risks) or ‘failure is good’ (there’s nothing good about failure, but sure you can learn something from any experience). I can’t address all of them here but the one I’d like to focus on is ‘never give up’ (we’ve all heard it before).

True, in theory, if you never give up, you technically can’t fail. But you can end up spending a lifetime pursuing the wrong dream or being blinded from the stark reality of what it is you are doing.

Source: gratisography.com

Entrepreneurs – or worse yet, people giving advice to entrepreneurs, like investors – often like to present themselves as heroes or villains. The ‘macho’ daring people who had the guts to do what others couldn’t. Hence, they like to keep hammering this ‘we never give up’ mantra while drinking their  own cool-aid. It boosts their ego.

The reality is that knowing when to quit is super important and quitting sometimes just makes absolute sense. ‘Quit while you’re still ahead’ is much better advice, in my opinion. And here’s why: everyone is capable of having bad ideas. Even the best entrepreneurs, like Richard Branson, did and still do. Virgin Cola was not a success, so he shut it down as one should. Would it be smarter to spend the rest of his life and valuable dollars trying to beat Coca-Cola just so that he could save his own ego?

Equally, even the best ideas may simply be attempted at the wrong time, or with the wrong group of people. There are so many ingredients that are needed to make a start-up work that no one (however smart) can predict or be in control of them all.

So the question then is when does one throw in the towel? For me, the acid test is these two questions:

1. Do your micro-fundamentals stack up?
2. Are the macro-fundamentals there?

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I recently wrote this article for Forbes as i feel that the nature, context and value that entrepreneurship brings to the world is evolving fast, and hence is its definition.  Read the full piece here: Rethinking the definition of ‘Entrepreneur’ 

Entrepreneurs are integral to the success of the U.S. economy. According to figures from Forbes, over 50% of the working population is at a small business, equating to over 120 million people. That’s a lot of competition.

Calling yourself an entrepreneur is to define yourself as many things: You are declaring yourself an innovator and a risk taker, and may find yourself pigeonholed with assumptions and stereotypes. However, an entrepreneur cannot be defined by a group of characteristics.

As the traditional route of finding employment has become increasingly challenging, the aspiration to become an entrepreneur has risen, making the original definition of entrepreneur problematic. Forty-three percent of Americans believe there are good opportunities for entrepreneurship, up by more than 20% since 2011. These days, you can be an entrepreneur if you’re a mother making wedding cakes during the school day, or a young horseback rider setting up a business introducing buyers to sellers of the finest dressage horses. You don’t need a flashy office or lots of space; 69% of new businesses in the U.S. start at home, and 59% of established businesses are home-based. So then the term entrepreneur — what does it actually mean?

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I was recently asked by someone why I do (or carry on doing) what I do. It’s such a simple question yet it startled me. It’s easy enough to jump in to a knee-jerk textbook answer. But its really hard to articulate why it really is that you do what you do (short of things like necessity, habit, or lack of choice. The ‘why not’ is not a valid answer.continue reading »

2013 was without a shadow of doubt the most intense, eventful and transformational year for my company PeoplePerHour since it’s founding in 2008. And so as the year comes to an end I reflected as I usually do on what the key learning from the year have been for me. continue reading »

Businesses exist to solve problems. This weekend I was at SWSXi where I had luck to meet and watch some of the top entrepreneurs in the world talk about the problems they solved, those that they didn’t get round to solving and are fixated on next. And all the while I kept thinking: how does this apply to our business at PeoplePerHour? And more importantly how does that form a coherent step by step strategy to win? And how are we executing towards it?

Below I summarize my thoughts drawing on some of the insight I gathered at SWSXi and applying our experience at PPH to date.

I believe this applies to any marketplace business. The problems we exist to solve are these 3 and in this sequence.

1. Distribution

Marketplaces exist first and foremost to aggregate and distribute content that’s ready for collaborative consumption (whether that’s a display of your spare room on Airbnb, your grandmas hand knitted sweater on Etsy, your unused car on Zipcar, your spare cash on Zopa or your skills and spare time on PeoplePerHour)continue reading »