Why I’m an entrepreneur

I’ve never built a successful business. I’m downright scared to on some days, even though that’s exactly what I’m trying to do with my co-founders.

I don’t really know what I’m doing most of the time. I’m just improvising, making it up as I go along. Or maybe it’s that I’m declaring core principles, hoping more than knowing that I can deliver on them, wondering whether I have what it takes to defend them as we scale.

Yet as of yesterday, I can tell you something that I do know about entrepreneurship with near certainty:

99% of what I’ve heard out there about why I should be an entrepreneur is complete crap.

For me, being an entrepreneur/starting an enterprise

• has nothing to do with what I currently know,
• has nothing to do with who I currently know,
• has nothing to do with how many hypotheses I have tested,
• and has nothing to do with whether I’m meeting a market demand.

So then what is entrepreneurship about for me?

First and foremost, it is a form of self-expression. When I get really excited about starting a company or creating something new in my current one, what I’m really getting excited about is the possibility of giving some feature inside of me an external form.

I get excited about building an inclusive, welcoming, and nurturing engineering culture because those are the big values that I’ve learned over the past few years in my personal life and want to share with everyone else. I get excited about microservices because when I think about developing small independent programs that can receive a lot of individual love and attention, on some level I think that I’m thinking of my inner child.

Entrepreneurship for me isn’t unlike being an artist. Both strive to express beauty and both are limited by the medium. Actually, it’s the tension between the artist/entrepreneur’s creative vision and the medium’s limitations that give their creations form — and therefore beauty.

An artist’s media are charcoal and marble, gesso and ink. The entrepreneur’s medium is money. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me when I think about what I want to create in the world through my company, and then when I think about how that vision must be proven profitable. Market validation doesn’t depress me; for some strange reason, it fills me with euphoria. I don’t know why.

(Maybe now you can understand why I say that my motivation for founding a company has nothing to do with validating hypotheses. It’s as absurd as suggesting that a painter paints because they are obsessed with how oil paint dries too quickly or how marble is difficult to work with. Limitations are very important, but don’t confuse limitations with origins.)

Another reason/metaphor for why I’m an entrepreneur: I love to grow things like a gardener.

A gardener expends tremendous water and effort in growing a plant. There’s a tension in that effort, because the plant depends on the gardener for love and care, yet it grows on its own; the more it grows, the less it needs you. But part of you loves this plant dearly, like your own child, and you can’t bear to think of yourself as apart from it. One thing is certain: a gardener wants their plant to grow strong, not just from the water they pour into it, but from the air and the soil that surrounds it. The gardener wants the plant to have a life of its own.

One more thing about gardeners. It’s not like they’re spreading kudzu. They want these plants to support them, to feed them, to be useful. And they dream of the day when they can invite their friends over and share the fruit of their labors. Perhaps they’ll even give their friends a few tomatoes to take home…or help them plant a few seeds of their own.

Don’t apologize

As I look back on this article that I’ve written, part of me thinks, “Man, you are corny and clickbait-y as all hell.” I might be guilty of that.

But I’ll tell you something real. I’m sick and tired of second guessing myself and my motivations for being an entrepreneur. From now on, I’m going to be brutally honest with myself about why I’m in this. It took me three-and-a-half years to figure it out, from the time that I dropped out of my history Ph.D. to now. I’ve earned the right.

If you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, don’t apologize for it. Embrace it. If you’re not sure of it, test it. It might take you years. But keep pushing, keep loving yourself, and always keep asking yourself the golden question:

“Why?”