This podcast is brought to you by Brightrock, provider of the first-ever life insurance that changes as your life changes.
According to the Grand Fable of startup entrepreneurship, if you want to make it big and change the world, all you have to do is get into a garage with your pals, tinker around with spreadsheets and computers, and voilà – you’re the next Apple Inc. In the real world, it takes a lot more than that to make a startup work. It takes guts, toil, chutzpah, a lot of sleepless nights, a product or service that can solve a real problem and make a real difference, and of course, a fair bit of venture capital to get it off the ground. BrightRock’s Change Exchange held a Connection Session to hear the war-stories of two South African entrepreneurs who have dared to work their way to success. Ravi Naidoo, founder of the Design Indaba, and Ernst Herzog, who runs a venture capital company called Action Hero Ventures, in Stellenbosch.
- Learn to Love Change – it could Change your life!
The days of settling into one job, and making that job your living and your life, are long-gone. No matter what your qualifications, don’t be afraid to step out and try something different, challenging, and new.
Ravi was a scientist, working on painstaking research in a lab, before he wrote a “wacky letter” to advertising agencies, and landed himself a career in marketing.
Ernst studied Engineering and got himself an MBA, before deciding that his job in the “cubicle farm” at a healthcare company wasn’t what he’d dreamed of doing with his life.
So he moved into venture funding for startups, and now devotes his days to the quest for the next entrepreneurial Action Hero: “People who are brave and adventurous and want to have a bit of fun in the process of taking over the world.”
A dream job, helping to make the dream jobs of others come true.
- Don’t expect people to care about your business
“Do what you love and love what you do” has become a mantra in the startup world, but it is possible, says Ernst, to fall too deeply in love with your product.
“It can be dangerous to have too much passion” he says. He also cautions against the expectation that everyone you meet will automatically share your enthusiasm and vigour for what you’re doing.
“Generally, people don’t really care,” he says. The trick is, you have to make them care, and sometimes the best way to do that is to understate your ambitions, rather than to over-promise your plans to conquer and change the world.
- Learn to work within beautiful constraints
A haiku must consist of exactly 17 syllables, spread over only three lines. A tweet may contain no more than 140 characters. A photograph on Instagram must be cropped to fit a square format.
Working within strict constraints, paradoxically, can be a spur to the type of fresh thinking that shatters boundaries. Ravi likens the process to the art of growing and pruning a bonsai.
“I place a lot of store on work-life balance,” he says. “As soon as it gets too unwieldy, I start pruning. I run a happy little bonsai. You need to have beautiful constraints to work with.”
- Find a real problem, and a real way to solve it
From content solutions to technology solutions to integrated service solutions, it seems everyone is in the solutions business these days.
But beyond the marketing buzz-speak, few businesses are really built on providing solutions to actual, real-world problems.
“Many people come up with a product,” says Ernst, “and then they start looking for a problem to solve.”
Rather begin by solving a problem, and then build your business around that.
“Find a real, tangible pain that people care about, and focus on that,” he suggests. “Don’t try to be everything to everyone.”
- Read a lot, and not just the business books
Reading is a vital life-skill, a gateway not just to learning and knowledge, but to other ways of seeing and understanding the world. But just because you’re in business, doesn’t mean you should limit your reading to the business shelf.
Asked what book has meant the most to him as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Ernst quickly answers: “Lord of the Rings”.
The epic adventure by JRR Tolkien may be set in a mythical land of hobbits and evil overlords, but the lessons it offers can be of great help in the real world.
“It’s shown me that with patience and perseverance and by doing the right thing, you can have massive success and beat the odds,” says Ernst. Just watch out for that conniving little Gollum along the way.
- Pitch the heretical proposition
One of the big lessons of business, in more ways than one, is that Life is a Pitch. First, you have to pitch up for the job, and then you have to come up with a pitch that makes the job worth doing.
The secret is to think like a heretic, says Ravi. His big breakthrough as a marketer came with a “rather heretical proposition” to Alan Knott-Craig, the CEO of Vodacom, in the early days of mobile technology.
The product was simply a magazine for Vodacom subscribers, but Ravi smartly pitched it as a “Trojan horse”, a way to kick-start conversations with customers and make Vodacom stand out in an age of product parity.
The strategy worked, allowing Ravi to live his dream as an entrepreneur: “I wanted to have an umbilical cord to corporate South Africa,” he says, “and also be a hired gun on the fringes.”
* This article first appeared on the Change Exchange, an online platform by BrightRock, provider of the first-ever life insurance that changes as your life changes.
