Thank you for the invitation by Cocoon Foundation. I shared about my own intrapreneuship experience and also my 4 guiding principles throughout my life in startups.
1. You need to be itchy and discontent to notice problems around you and have the passion to find solutions to the problems, and to have the endurance to roll up your sleeves and experiment and execute all your crazy ideas.
2. Stop talking, keep trying, doing, fine tuning and chasing for the results and keep repeating again. Startup life means getting a lot of shit in your face, unpredictable and unforeseeable shit, and don’t expect to get recognition, coz you don’t have a “boss” figure and no one cares to do your evaluation. Your biggest compliment comes when users register, users use your service and stick around. These will only happen when you get shit done.
3. Startup life knows no compassion. It’s not for people who constantly seek for job security. No preset answers, no one tells you if you’ve got it or if you’ve missed it. Just like miners at gold rush, you never know whether you should keep going or you should pivot. The only force that keeps you moving is the anticipation of the immense satisfaction when you’ve nailed it. And also, your common sense (don’t underestimate the power of common sense as common sense is not common. By having it, you’ve already beatten a lot of your competitors.)
4. Know that everyone has strengths and weaknesses. You need a co-founder. If your startup is founded by a product genius and a hassling salesman, your team is golden and it already multiplied your business valuation by 10 times. Go out, talk to people or be humbled, find your perfect other half to carry on your entrepreneurial journey, because being a founder and running your business is an unbearably lonely journey.
Finally, my advice to all the 300 sth students is that not everyone is founder material, I know for a fact that I’m not but I have no shame about it. I am just a team player, an entrepreneurial one who happens to love building things that people want and building businesses from scratch.
No matter what their career choice will be in the future, I hope the students can take home the following:
A good employee vs an employee with an entrepreneurial mindset –
- A good employee works very hard without asking why.
- An entrepreneurial employee works hard towards solving problems for the company and finding new problem to solve to create business opportunities.
