Reason to think entrepreneurship: why do these entrepreneurs commit suicide

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This paper originates from the economist Economist

Entrepreneurship is unbearable. What we need to do is to think rationally about the "grey side" of entrepreneurship.

February 2014, according to media reports, Singapore Bitcoin trading platform of the 28-year-old Beauty CEO Autumn Radtke recently killed himself, the cause of the unknown.

January 2013, a company specializing in the sale of children's environmental health products online companies Ecomom bankruptcy, start-up company's boss Jody Sherman suicide, a few weeks after the shop shut down. June the new boss took over the business reopened.

And Sherman suicide almost at the same time, there are Internet rookie, network active politician Aaron Swartz suicide.

While this alone does not justify a higher rate of suicide among entrepreneurs than in other high-pressure industries, a series of events has sparked a rare rethink in the entrepreneurial world. A senior entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis, asked in a blog whether "the pressures of being an entrepreneur, and the pressure to lead the team to pursue progress, have in some ways contributed to their demise." ”

These elements, in contrast to the shiny side of entrepreneurship, undoubtedly constitute a gloomy side of entrepreneurship, and it is also thought that, while entrepreneurship is conceptually internationalized, the majority of the members are young white males. There is also concern that the bursting of software start-ups will cause a new wave of business.

When the founders were asked why they had to endure such a difficult entrepreneurial process, they would get enthusiastic answers, such as CEO Daan Weddepohl of Peerby, a Dutch start-up, who said, "because they want to change the world." This is not an empty talk, if the Peerby works smoothly, Weddepohl can really create a neighbor of idle consumer goods leased new market.

But such enthusiasm must face various uncertainties. For entrepreneurs, their job is to "make it out of nothing" and convince people that they can start from 0 and create results from their ideas. "The process of building a start-up is the process of building trust--building trust with investors, partners, customers, the media," Weddepohl explains.

Andreas Klinger, co-founder of an online custom apparel company in London, explains that a big part of the start-up is hype: "Everything sounds good, but the success of what startups say can be all sorts of problems." Klinger's clothing company is now gone.

Daily mood swings are one of the sources of pressure for entrepreneurs. "It feels like everything is going to be normal in the morning and it's a mess at night," explains Shawn Zvinis, co-founder of a london-based start-up company tab. When you get up in the morning of frustration--ask yourself: does it really feel so bad to do the job of changing the world? Another unfortunate fact that Tab was declared bankrupt last December.

For entrepreneurs, always worry about the "money" problem. The amount that investors give each time may be just a drop in the bucket, and entrepreneurs can only make sure they pay for their employees by cutting spending and lowering their cost of living. Quote another entrepreneur: "If you haven't Met your income, you're embarrassed to say you're starting a business." ”

Many entrepreneurs give up their lives outside the company, and the company is their family. Such a role has left the long-term employees, and even the founders, out of the way that entrepreneurs cannot afford. Weddepohl himself had two times the experience of cooperating with the founders: "Like a Divorce" is hard.

For startups to fail, people from different cultures don't have the same interpretation, though for most of them the disaster of personal careers-after all the years of effort, entrepreneurs realise that their entrepreneurial dreams are over. But many people are still willing to try again. "Failure is part of the entrepreneurial game," said Gaith Kawar, a Jordanian entrepreneur. What losers need to do is to reflect, find what they've learned, and move on. "And he himself is the firm practitioner of this understanding, is for his seventh pioneering effort."

New attempts include not only providing new services, but also trying new work patterns. A Hamburg company, Jimdo, offers a simplified site-building service, with employees setting up a set of internal rules to record what they want to do, and to keep everyone fully rested. This seems to have achieved good results in the company, Jimdo in San Francisco, Tokyo, Shanghai and other companies have helped users to do tens of thousands of sites, the number of employees also reached 170 people.

Entrepreneurship in "diversification"

The time that an entrepreneur leaves a private life may be the least of any industry--which may explain the characteristics of the entrepreneurial people: according to Compass's survey, female entrepreneurs account for only 10% of the survey of entrepreneurship, and few women entrepreneurial success models, and many organizations do not support women in the computer industry, The latter both weaken the proportion of women starting a business.

In the financial sector, like the entrepreneurial world, men occupy an absolute majority. According to the PitchBook research company, in 2013 IT investments were less than 5% of those invested in female start-up companies. The reason for this is that the number of companies created by women is only one aspect, and on the other hand, investors in the world are mostly white males.

The singleness of this composition is also evident in the incubation project of the start-up company, and founder of Gen Y Combinator described the incubation project as a project involving "a group of whites and Asians". This lack of diversity seems to be a constraint on innovation, but from now on, at least a growing number of investors are beginning to admit that this is a real problem. Entrepreneur, a incubator for personal entrepreneurs, and the City of London, which focuses on the lack of women in the current applicants, has launched a campaign called Codefirst:girls, which offers women a series of lessons on how to write code. Of the 31 start-ups that recently hatched, 4 were women, with a significantly lower percentage than men.

A diverse group of entrepreneurs gives people a more mature image. Many founders embraced the dream of being the next Steve Jobs or Zach, but Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm Consulting gave another insight: "Startups will create new labor groups" (entrepreneurs are the "the" Labour) He also published a series of blog posts with the same name. Indeed "rent and bubble noodles" can portray the hard life of entrepreneurs, but Rao conducted a more in-depth analysis, pointing out that today's entrepreneurial landscape is similar to the development of British industry in the second half of the 19th century, when the Victorian blacksmith entered the commercialization phase and became the core of the new working class, and the current group of entrepreneurs will also become the backbone of the new manufacturing industry.

Streamlined entrepreneurship theory, entrepreneurial incubators and standardized investment regulations all show that entrepreneurship is becoming more and more modular and commercialized. With the resulting power imbalance between investors and entrepreneurs, Rao argues, "Investors have prevailed, and the relationship between investors and entrepreneurs is becoming more and more like the relationship between management and employees." ”

Rao also proposed the current popular "talent Acquisition" (acqui-hired): Big companies buy small startups not to buy technology, but to acquire the latter's entrepreneurial team. It's not bad for engineers: the rate of promotion through talent acquisitions may be twice times that of traditional processes, and the cost is far less than the latter. But it's a bit stale for startups or accelerators: they don't seem to care about digging up real entrepreneurs, nurturing the next great talent like Zach or Steve Jobs, but taking the easy way out for the knowledge-driven workforce.

Entrepreneurship in Job Opportunities

Looking at jobs, at least, do startups have a job to offer? According to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Fund, a survey of the 1-5-year information and communication technology (ICT) start-ups in the United States in 1990-2011 showed that the number of employees hired was 10% Growth rate. But given the size of the company, the sheer volume of growth remains limited. Although start-ups are expanding very quickly, the number of companies that are really big is small.

In a second machine time (the Second Machine age), the author Andrew McAfee and Mr Brynjolfsson compared the Kodak company established in 1880 with Instagram, a photo-sharing application, 18 months after the launch, Facebook is acquiring 1 billion dollars. Kodak in the heyday of the staff number of more than 145000 people, and indirectly provide thousands of jobs. Instagram was acquired several months after Kodak filed for bankruptcy, with 130 million users and only 16 employees. Even top social networking companies such as Facebook have more than 1.2 billion users and only about 5800 employees.

But Mr Brynjolfsson suggests that, by virtue of these examples alone, it is not enough to argue that the eruption of startups will lead to more people's careers. Startups do have a real impact on existing companies, but at the same time they create more jobs outside of startups. For example, online handmade products sales Etsy for more than 1 million sellers to provide shop opportunities. Elance and odesk two freelance web sites, providing services to 2.3 million and 4.5 million people respectively.

In addition to job opportunities, what is more important is that digital technology creates limitless possibilities for products. "Reducing startups is not going to solve the problem," Brynjolfsson said. "Instead, we should welcome more startups." Not only do not worry about the enthusiasm of entrepreneurial groups to try, but also from software development to the hardware industry, the entrepreneurial side has widened. The