Social Innovation: A Reflection

As this is my last blog post, I thought it would be fruitful to provide some summary remarks about my semester developing a business.  Kerouac famously utilized stream-of-consciousness in his writing, and I’m afraid the many lessons, fears and triumphs of my business will manifest in that way as well.

I am blessed to have been offered the chance to start a business.  When you try and quantify the many factors that make a chance like this possible, you start to think you were fated to do so: financial support from my family, a trusting fiancé, enough space in my academic schedule, the learned courage it takes to challenge assumptions, the humility to repeatedly hear how dumb your idea is, the gall to press on anyways.  A great many people learn about entrepreneurship, but few are empowered to pursue it.  I count myself among the fortunate.

It sucks to be broke.  I wish I had the resources to swing open the front doors to my business tomorrow, but my financial reality makes this a part-time gig.  Much like a musician who works by day and lives her dream on a beat-up, barroom stage at night, I’ll make time on the side to share my performance with the world.  

While being broke sucks, it is far worse to be creatively bankrupt.  The people who trouble me are not the ones who take issue with my ideas, but those who never thought ideas had value in the first place.  That I as a thinker, a dreamer was inferior to the nine-to-five doer and provider never quite registered with me.  Perhaps those people were not blessed with the chances I had.  Perhaps ideas never did them much good.  In my world, at least, there is no greater currency.

I would flounder without good people around me.  

I’m not yet sure if starting a business is more about competition or cooperation.  It is easy to say both, but the nervousness I constantly feel about the next best alternative to my business muddies the conversation a bit.  

They say that working for yourself is a great thing, but I’m not sure if they accounted for living with yourself in that scenario.  As a man who loves his soon-to-be wife and wants to create some semblance of stability after school, I struggle to call this pursuit as anything but selfish in the short run.  “It will be popular”…”Businesses will love it”…”I’ll have a bunch of new clients this week”…do these statements help or hurt the budding entrepreneur, his family?

I would flounder without good people around me.  

Social media is the best tool and biggest threat to your business.

They say that working for yourself is a great thing, but I’m not sure if they accounted for living with yourself in that scenario.  As a man who loves his soon-to-be wife and wants to create some semblance of stability after school, I struggle to call this pursuit as anything but selfish in the short run.  “It will be popular”…”Businesses will love it”…”I’ll have a bunch of new clients this week”…do these statements help or hurt the budding entrepreneur, his family?

Partners earn their equity not with work or money necessarily, but with counsel that only a close friend can provide.  They are the person who tells you how you flunked a meeting or how you saved the business, all in the same day – with the promise of a beer together either way.  

All in all, this has been less about experience and more about learning than anything I’ve ever done before.  I’m frightened daily by what could happen, and exhilarated just the same.

Maybe that means I’m doing it right?

What have you learned from your time learning about Social Innovation?