Every day I go for a walk and pick up trash.
Although there a lot of reasons for it, the two main ones are:
- It needs to be done — (a matter of faith / belief)
- There is information coded into the experience that I can’t otherwise get to
That first reason is quite simple to break down: I don’t believe that there should be trash on the streets.
The second is a bit more complicated, and reaches into a bunch of things— like human centered design / experience design, empathy, entrepreneurship, and how we build ecosystems from an individual up to global level.
There is an important relationship between the two, and it’s a relationship that’s largely about action, about testing what we believe and what we are most suited to work on in the world.
In the startup ecosystem this is expressed via investors saying things like “we want founders who are obsessed with solving problems” or founders saying “I won’t rest until I’ve understood and solved this problem for my target customer / market.”
Read MoreYesterday one of my roommates and I talked about the lack of diversity in tech / startups.
In particular, we were thinking out loud about pipeline problems. In plain English that just translates as: how to get a set of good, qualified applicants who aren’t all white, male, and from upper economic tiers.
This is a fairly regular conversation for me. It’s also something I’ve worked on in startups and corporate, at times directly via hiring and at times by supporting other people involved in or responsible for the process.
Even the best founders / tech companies struggle with this. It’s common to hear people say that they are open to having a diverse hiring culture….and then find out that they don’t know how or aren’t willing to make the effort beyond posting jobs in a few obvious places. This is usually followed by wondering why they seem to get the same type of applicants.
Other people have written extensively about why you might want to have a diverse hiring culture with respect to race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories, so I won’t do that here…if you are looking for stats and research for the whys, here’s a good / fairly comprehensive resource created by Brittany Laughlin, GM of the Union Square Ventures Network and multiple times an entrepreneur.
Read MoreA few days ago someone I know posted a note saying his father died.
He was unusually blunt in his assessment of the circumstances, and of watching his father suffer through hospital care when all he wanted was to go peacefully.
Entrepreneurs tend to absorb a great deal of grief. This is true of all humans, but the risk undertaken building a company from scratch leads to a deeper emotional risk than most people are willing to take.
It’s most frequently expressed by a conflicted relationship with winning and losing. We tend to punish ourselves for loss because we assume internally that we are strong enough to navigate all currents, if not direct or control them.
A friend who works in / with startups wrote about that dynamic a few months ago…
Read MoreA few years ago there was a Forbes post entitled “If I were a poor black kid.”
In it, the author (who is not poor, black, or a kid) imagines some ways disenfranchised children might use technology to get ahead, including via tools like Skype, Google Scholar, and Evernote. You can get a deeper look at his views via comments on this NPR response to the column.
The question that struck me while reading it isn’t whether or not he wants to be helpful (I think he clearly does), it’s that he wrote a piece from the perspective of someone he didn’t understand, whose experience he only casually related to.
More plainly, he wanted to solve a problem without first understanding the person having it.
This type of thinking comes up frequently when people talk about poverty who have not themselves experienced its’ paralyzing effects…
Read MoreBuilding a company from scratch is exhausting.
Entrepreneurs need various kinds of support to stay afloat —understanding friends and family, tough advisers / mentors, a good reading list to encourage contemplation, these are all important.
But the best source of support is the people actually using what you build. Their stories are the ones that open up your world when you’re thinking too narrowly, and provide inspiration to keep going. While solving a problem for one person typically doesn’t justify a stable small business or a rapidly growing startup, it’s the starting point for everything else.
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