Trendy Cool Start-Up Rant

It’s suddenly “in” to be in a start-up, and trendy to be an entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur is a great, challenging and sometimes rewarding path to take in life. However being an entrepreneur is more than simply creating something. It’s hard work and dedication to your creation, to keep going in the face of adversity. Failing, then maybe failing again, and again, and all the time keeping the passion and faith alive inside you.

Like everything that’s cool and trendy, a community and culture spawns up around it, and like all communities, it contains it’s buzzwords and jargon. The problem with the start-up world, is that too many people look at Silicon Valley as the Mecca, Steve Jobs as the lost prophet, and Mark Zuckerberg as the second coming. The microcosm that is Silicon Valley and the US start-up scene does not apply to the UK. Yet every event I go to, I see young wantrepreneur’s with their 2k+ MAC books and hoodies talking the talk; “Pivot”, “Flip it”, “fund it”, VC this and VC that. The west coast US scene doesn’t even work on the east coast, never mind outside the US. Businesses move to Silicon Valley from New York to “get funded”.

Pursue our passions and I’m sure we’ll all make it. Building something from scratch that NEEDS funding to make it work, is asking for frustration and a long slog. If you can create something that people desperately want and need, you will find each other…without funding!

Rant over.