“The biggest risk is not taking any risk…In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”There are tons of similar variations of the quote above. I found this one especially poignant because it was said by Mark Zuckerberg...a hero to a lot of startup junkies and the creator of the most successful side project that turned into the behemoth we now know as Facebook.
| Not sure if this guy made it. |
The idea of taking risks is a concept that was pretty foreign to me growing up. My parents immigrated to the country and strictly focused on making me and my brothers educated and successful. In their eyes, education led to success. More appropriately, education in math and science led to success. Even more appropriately, going to medical school led to success.
In hindsight, it makes perfect sense. Medicine is probably the most stable job in the world. No matter what happens and no matter where you go, there will always be a need for doctors. There is very little risk involved once you become a doctor (i'm talking about career risk). Once you get into medical school, your path is relatively set. My brothers headed this lesson and are now both successful physicians. I on the other hand, decided to venture forth into the business world.
What started out as a stable progression from investment banking to private equity, ended up with me parting ways with finance to start my own endeavor. My father was furious. I was giving everything up to pursue some random pie in the sky dream. 95% of startups fail. There was no way I was going to succeed and even if I did succeed, it wasn't worth the pain - or so everyone told me.
Well, after a year into my startup experience and now starting business school, I can fully say that I learned more doing my little startup than I ever did in two years of investment banking (I will write another post about how useless i-banking is). More importantly, I developed a passion for what I was doing...something that was sorely missing from my gigs in finance. I found myself actually interested in technology and marketing and sales and everything else. It truly was a great experience and is positively helping shape my career decisions.
Now, i'm not saying that I am going to be doing startups all my life (I might just go corporate right after b-school). I'm not even saying my first startup experience was a success (So far it isn't). I'm just saying that it would have been stupid of me to not take the risk. With the world changing so rapidly, I don't think it is wise to sit on the sidelines and let others lead the way. It's relatively easy to implement new technological solutions. Just hop on eLance or other outsourcing services, or better yet, reach out to students at the nearest engineering school. With a lot of effort and a little luck, you can build something great. It's definitely worth taking a shot at.
Or...I could just be an idiot who likes jumping off cliffs every once and a while. Actually, I'm pretty sure that's true.
