Only an entrepreneur can understand entrepreneurship. Books, videos, and theories by those who survive on monthly salaries can not help in making a productive entrepreneur. An entrepreneurial startup is always about the cash flow risk of not making the next month’s payroll. Having negotiated and having lived through this risk-prone existence is the essence of entrepreneurial spirit.
Bykea is a classical example. They took a few concepts from startup culture and then used local Pindi style gimmicks and crashed big giants like Careem /Uber in motor
byke category. But Airlift failed
The problem comes when you burn investors’ money to hire MBAs from elite universities and pay them high salaries to behave like entrepreneurs.
They come up with ideas above the clouds and below the earth and burn up investors’ money in irrelevant theories.
Complete innovation never gives quick profits.
20% innovation of an existing 80% conventional sales gives proper results. It is tedious, continuous, painstaking tweaking of the processes that provide the value addition advantage.
Proper successful entrepreneurs don’t have time, nor do they share their business secrets, so whatever the business schools are teaching through salaried entrepreneurship teachers is mostly useless. Teachers teaching businesses who have never done business themselves, who have not tried new business ventures and failed, who do not have at least some success are responsible for the whole ecosystem failing and the same loop getting repeated again and again .
Adding to the woes of non-practitioner entrepreneurship teachers are the retired multinational senior executives starting their incubators. Having spent their whole life in hugely stable multinationals with specialized hierarchies of hundreds of high salaried professionals, these ex-mega multinational executives can give no guidance to a budding entrepreneur of a small startup who has only a couple of people to perform all the functions in uncharted waters.
Students in BBA, and MBA learn theories of US market of the 80s . Some business management books are the same which older generation read when they did their degrees in the 1970s. These often deal with problems and issues of large multinationals with stable organizational charts of specialized hierarchies. These books often do not have time for a few-person startups trying to eke out space in rickety, fast-changing, technology-driven markets.
It is so hard for the industry to waste money on fresh graduates to make them unlearn stuff their teachers have told them of structures which existed 50-100 years ago.
Another very important factor and dark side of entrepreneurship is that serial entrepreneurs build startups to sell them. They don’t care that if I am going to shut down this business, I’ll get a safe exit but what about the hundreds of people getting unemployed? What about their salaries? And the market rates I have disturbed by paying higher inorganic salaries by burning investors’ money.
Hiring a workforce exclusively from only the elite business school was the biggest blunder made by Airlift. The majority of the Airlift team was composed of graduates of the most famous renowned business school in Lahore and of Karachi, who wasted millions of dollars of investors’ capital ( the largest ever secured by any Pakistani startup) by coming up with impractical and irrelevant ideas and strategies which they had to learn in the elite environment of their business school. Its a big question mark on such elite universities. [This paragraph is copied from a comment on FB post by Asad Mir]
Some business schools started entrepreneurship degree programs under the leadership of teachers that had the experience of several entrepreneurial ventures. But soon the bureaucracy took over the programs and handed them over to those with no entrepreneurial risk-taking experience, replacing the entrepreneurial spirit of practical trial and error experimentation and project orientation with bookish pedantic, exam-based, lecture hall settings, with content focused on multinational behemoth companies. The programs changed back from their “creative chaos” to typical conventional books, lectures, and exams. Dead-end entrepreneurship.
Copied from Wall of Ahmed Ahmad Masroor. I then did the editing and added contextual information and some additions from my experience and the comments.
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