Did entrepreneurs have an easier time starting up a decade or so ago?
It’s a sentiment I’ve heard echoed many times by today’s entrepreneurs, and one that is rather puzzling, given the technological advantages that modern business startups have.
Yet it seem it is the rapid pace technological evolution that has left many feeling that life in the startup world was somehow easier in years gone by.
Fifty nine percent of startup owners recently polled by
To be fair, modern day entrepreneurs are also contending with huge cultural shifts that no one envisaged a decade ago, more costly business regulation, and maybe even the modern mindset of entrepreneurship. Back in the day, didn’t startups seem to be more the result of liberal freeform thinking than the formal structured constraints that shape modern business plans?
One way to find out, was to ask a few seasoned entrepreneurs how they viewed starting up in business then and now.
Virgin founder Richard Branson started his first business, the youth-culture magazine Student in 1966, and his second, a mail-order record company called Virgin, in 1969, long before the advent of the mobile phone, social media, and crowd funding. Since then his Virgin brand has spawned hundreds of businesses, including Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Galactic, that span the globe.
While he concedes there wasn’t as much competition within the startup world ten years ago, he insists that today’s business climate is much more supportive of entrepreneurs.
Branson says: “Technology is advancing fast and demanding rapid innovation, self-employment is on the rise and becoming an accepted norm. Therefore companies and individuals are looking to invest in startups, and governments and business groups are supporting entrepreneurs with various loans, such as our own Virgin StartUp scheme. Provided that you have a product or service that fills a gap in the market, this is a great time to be an entrepreneur.”
Less competition for things like talent and business capital may have eased the pressures around innovation a decade ago, but getting ideas to market was a lot harder.
Swedish serial entrepreneur Jacob de Geer, founding CEO of payments company iZettle, who also co-founded movie sharing company Ameibo, and communications agency Tre Kronor Media in the last decade, says: “There were no smartphones, no truly global marketplaces such as the App Store, no 3G, low broadband penetration and computer literacy was limited, therefore finding a unique idea was probably easier, but finding a relevant market would have been a lot harder. I’ve been in the industry for more than ten years and have to say I prefer it today. The technology we have now is certainly more than I could have dreamed of back then.”
Starting a web company is infinitely easier and cheaper today than it was ten years ago, for the simple reason that many of the component elements that an entrepreneur had to build themselves back then are now readily available as services.
Christoph Janz, founding partner at Berlin-based early-stage VC Point Nine Capital. who spent nearly a decade co-founding major brands, including Dealpilot.com and Pageflakes, before becoming the first outside investor for Zendesk, says the dramatic increase in Internet usage and smartphone adoption has also made it so much easier to reach tens of millions of users.
“On the flipside,” he says. “Many categories, in e-commerce for example, have now been captured, plus lower barriers to entry mean more competition, so most markets are more crowded than ever before. Starting a company is easier than it’s ever been, but scaling it to a large success remains the real challenge.”
Scott Heiferman is another serial entrepreneur whose ventures have spanned more than a decade, his most famous and successful brand being Meetup.com, which he was inspired to create in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy as an easy way for people in local communities to connect online to meet offline.
He says: “The fact there are so many startups and entrepreneurs nowadays suggests that it is easier. When I was starting out, business owners could only wish for opportunities to find other people to work together with on similar things. And that’s what we have today. There are thousands of entrepreneurs using Meetup.com – an entrepreneur will always get more help and support from other entrepreneurs in the same town – and today that is so much easier to find.”
