Recap for March:

Here were the March themes.

1. Team Formation in startups.  What’s a good team, how do founders pick teams, and how might they do so more effectively.
2. “Purpose” and startups.  I believe that startups have to stand for something more than making money (although they should also make money!), for practical as well as idealistic reasons.  I want to review the literature and evidence for this point of view.  I guess I’ll start here with “Built to Last”.
3. “Know-how” and startups.  I want to review the literature on better outcomes for startups where the founder(s) know something special about the domain where they are working, something that gives them an unfair advantage.

Progress:

• To begin with, I was kind of whistling in the breeze that these were my themes.  What I found out was that I needed to learn how to research these topics rather than simply opine on them.
• Which I did do (learn how to research them).  I used my adjunct affiliations to access a boatload of online catalogs, databases, and other resources, and essentially search through the scholarly work on entrepreneurship to begin to characterize what makes a successful entrepreneur.
• I myself have strong feelings about what makes for a successful entrepreneur, which colored my selection of the three themes above.  But what I did was to set myself the goal of finding out what the scholars in the field thought, as opposed to what I thought.

I was particularly drawn to the work at Saras Sarasvarthy at the UVA Business School.  A major theme running through all of her work is the existence among entrepreneurs of a different kind of thinking.

Instead of reasoning about possible causes in order to bring about a certain effect (which she calls “causal thinking”), entrepreneurs deploy much more of what she calls “effectual thinking”, which reasons from means forward to ends.

A causal thinker, interested in blockchain, will ask: “What is the most attractive market I can enter that could use blockchain as an enabling technology?”

An effectual thinker, working on the same problem, would ask: “What steps can I take with my network, my know-how, and my insight into blockchain, in order to understand the next step to a successful business?”

(I hope I haven’t done (too much) violence to the concepts!)

Dr. Sarasvarthy did her graduate work with Herbert Simon, a man I knew as a pioneer in AI.  Some of his work informed her interest in effectual reasoning.

I’m not sure how effectual thinking plays into my project, but I believe at this point that it’s a fundamental element in the entrepreneur’s toolkit.

So my project for April is to fan out from here and see what research can tell us (me) about the “success factors” for entrepreneurs.

At least some of them are:

1. Effectual thinking and opportunities
2. Purpose and greed
3. Always replace yourself at every step of the enterprise

I think I’ll stop here.

As usual, please let me know your thoughts.