The Entrepreneurship Bubble will burst sooner than later
Yes you read it right, like all bubbles out there, the entrepreneurship bubble will burst !! Ever since the advent of the internet and the dotcom boom in the 90s every single person just wants to be an entrepreneur. Adding to that is success stories of Harvard dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg, of the Facebook fame, if you dont know already. All my neighborhood kids are entrepreneurs of sorts. I mean its gotta end somewhere right? If everyone is opening up companies, who is working there. Any idea? Well I will give you an idea, no one. We will all have companies by the next century but no one will be employed there ! !
The worst part is that most such companies are in the services sector. Its high time entrepreneurs focused on development and manufacturing companies.
5 things that are making the entrepreneurship scene blow up.
1. The web is a place where you can all buy a domain for $7 a year, get various social networking accounts for doing free publicity and connecting with peers etc etc and happily start your own company at no or little cost. It is good for people who should actually be starting companies up and thankfully continue to do so, but it is also luring millions of teenagers to just open up weird sites, believing that they will be munching a million dollars by the time they are 25 . That’s just preposterous.
2. The availability of various sources of funding for the lamest of the ideas. Today there are a lot of VCs who will invest in you very readily. To top that there are websites where you can crowd-fund your idea very effortlessly. People who do not know the abc of Business planning, funding and investment returns will lend you money, which could be although, as little as 50$ per person, but could add up to $25,000 in seed funding in cases.
3. Movies being made, book being published on Success stories of internet entrepreneurs like Mark,Tom etc. One person struck gold mining the Kalahari desert , but does that mean you can overlook the vast majority of people who fail. Look at how yaari.com went down due to unethical practices being followed by a teenage founder.
4. The loss of sheen of the 9-5 job, come on, who would wanna get up every morning, dress up, do the same boring work day after day and get regular pay-cheques every month. Not my thing, right ? Instead, we all would like to sit in our couches, munching away a pizza happily and just keep dreaming and waiting for that that “one fat buyout paycheque” which will last a lifetime. Guys 9-5 jobs arent as bad as they are being advertised by the so called entrepreneurs. Infact they could be much more challenging than running meaningless start-ups. You could be easily managing accounts, lets say, across several continents at your 9 to 5 and be networking globally, a stage that your start-up may never ever achieve.
5. The flooding of people who call themselves start-up consultants and are filling the net with real bad advice. Yeah ! you would want all of us to start a new venture wouldn’t you ? So that you can keep publishing those books , writing those blogs and meanwhile we all just die hungry and go broke buying your books and worthless services.
People, we need a definitive change in this trend, before economies start crumpling up over this. Now, that would be a bad, bad scenario. Isn’t, it.
