Starting the Journey

Starting the Journey > Entrepreneurship > Video: Overcoming the Hurdles to Start

• Reaching the customers in a new way or reaching new customers.
• How do I get in front of the right investors? And get funded? How do high school students balance starting a company and all their other time commitments? Do high school entrepeneurs just get no sleep? Where do I begin? If you’ve asked these questions before, you’re not alone.
• You have the capacity to learn things extremely quickly, and you have less responsibility and therefore the capacity to take on even more risk.
• What’s more, you’re at an ideal age where you have some experience but haven’t yet learned so much that you’ve built in assumptions about the way the world should work, and instead can imagine the way it could work.
• You’re uniquely positioned to innovate and take risks in a way that older generations might be afraid to because they’re afraid of what people might think.
• You should only be considering an investment once you have an offering that’s been selling in the market and you need the capital to be able to keep up with demand and grow.
• Taking investment would still be too much risk to an investor, and they’d want too much equity in your company.
• Finally, when you do take investment, it will be worth becoming a little bit knowledgeable about the different types of potential investors.
• Don’t let fear of this later step stop you from taking the first step.
• First time entrepreneurs may worry that they don’t have the perfect mindset at the outset, but taking that leap will allow unparalleled growth in focus, decisiveness, initiative, and adaptability.
• A lot of people think they need to come up with that perfect innovative idea that no one’s ever thought of before, customers didn’t even know that they needed, and has no competition.
• They point to an example like the iPad, saying that customers didn’t even know that they needed a tablet.
• The innovation wasn’t filling the need for a tablet, though.
• The iPad just executed on the same idea in a way that made their product better.
• First time or aspiring entrepreneurs often think they need to be able to do everything, or are tempted to work long hours trying to take on everything themselves.
• When instead, finding teammates that share their motivations and vision with complementary skills would both alleviate the gaps while providing much needed moral support during the inevitable ups and downs of starting a company.
• If you find something you’re passionate about that’s worth carving out time, it just comes down to managing your time well, and focusing on the things that matter.
• You’ll drive yourself crazy in a start up if you strive to make things perfect.
• You can let these barriers stand in your way or you can be one of the brave ones, an entrepreneur, who pursues opportunities regardless of what stands in their way.