This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage companies execute faster and cheaper. Check out his linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
I watch a lot of podcasts for the last couple of years. And one of my favorite is Brett Malinowski.
He’s a relatively young guy himself and he finds these really young entrepreneurs that are killing it to be his podcast guests.
For example, last week I was watching this one with Daniel Bitton, a guy that created a multimillion dollar business a couple years ago making Snapchat videos. And now is building a SaaS for creators that is already doing $600k/month in revenue.
And given traditional SaaS revenue multiples, you can already assume his company is worth roughly $30m!
I mean WTF!!!!
How is this kid doing this? Many of you out there have spent over a decade in software like me and have never come close to anything like this.
This made me reflect a bit. And I’ve turned those reflections into today’s post.
What I learned in the corporate world is mostly useless as an entrepreneur
When I see guys like Daniel I think to myself “how is this possible?”
I mean here I am with all of this real world business experience and despite this creating a successful business that scales is incredibly challenging.
How was this kid able to do it twice in a couple of years and make it almost look easy?
Then I realized that most of that ~15 years of business experience in the consulting and corporate world is useless.
I learned how to make consensus-based decisions over a very long period of time.
I learned how to deal with corporate politics.
I learned how to do long planning exercises where we would have fancy offsite meetings.
I learned how to set my goals for the year and optimize for 360 degree feedbacks.
In other words… I learned a bunch of horse shit. Hahahahaha
All of this crap is completely useless as an entrepreneur.
Scratch that… what I learned is harmful because it was outright wrong
As I further pondered I realized that not only was that shit was not just useless but it actually works against me.
It taught me behaviors that would actively work against me as an entrepreneur.
It is the equivalent of learning the wrong way to speak a language and then practicing it for 15 years. It becomes very difficult to break from the way you did it because it is ingrained in your head.
You need to first recognize that you are approaching the problem the old way and then consciously solve it differently.
Whereas for these kids they never learned any of that BS. And they just approached the problem as efficiently as they could without any preset notions from how corporates do it.
And that is far simpler & easier.
This is why corporate folks almost never make it as entrepreneurs
It is for this reason that I find that almost none of the folks I worked with in the ‘corporate’ world ever made it as entrepreneurs that scaled.
Sure they might have done some consulting or something, but none that I can remember actually created a business that did at least $1 million in revenue or beyond.
And I understand why.
It is because they’re fighting all of these preset notions about how to do things, which are absolutely wrong.
Each time I saw someone I know from the corporate world try to make it as fresh entrepreneurs they approached things very slowly.
They’d write a lengthy business plan.
They’d talk to people about the idea for many months before starting anything (usually secretly looking for a job at the same time).
They’d try to raise some money despite the fact that they didn’t have a single customer.
These kid entrepreneurs out there don’t do any of this shit
They come up with the idea and then usually within a week they’re talking to customers.
They’re getting feedback fast on social media and creating high quality content about the idea.
They’re launching products incredibly fast and then iterating on them.
Not because this is what they were taught in school. But rather simply because this is how their generation was brought up.
Speed. Social Media. Online community.
GenZ didn’t have to be taught this shit because it was all around them growing up.
My key learnings from these phenom entrepreneur kids
So having seen probably at least 10-20 podcast interviews with various young entrepreneurs like Daniel Bitton… here are some of my key learnings:
1 – They are lightning fast to execute
They go from idea to executing in hours and days. Not weeks and months.
And they’re testing the core hypothesis immediately. Not building a huge foundation that later becomes useless if the core hypothesis proves wrong.
2 – They are in love with the ‘game’, not the idea
By this, I mean that they fall in love with the process of getting a business to work, but are not hung up on their initial idea.
They have no problem changing the idea very quickly. In part because they went from idea to execution so quickly that they never had time to fall in love with the idea to begin with.
3 – They never learned how difficult things are
It’s kinda like when we were kids and would ask these philosophical questions about why the world is the way it is. And why humans do some of the stupid things we do.
As adults we already cannot ask these types of questions. The rules of society have already become too ingrained in us.
It’s the same with how these kids approach business. Nobody told them that fighting against huge corporates was extremely difficult and so they never assumed that it was.
But later on they end up finding success by doing things that those corporates could not do.
4 – They have instincts for virality
I grew up with Micheal Jackson and Micheal Jordan as a kid. GenZ grew up with social media.
Instagram and Snapchat come natural to them. They have a feel for it.
And so they know how to create content around their idea that gets feedback very quickly.
They understand virality and how to give themselves a better chance for it. Because that is one of the main things they talked about in the school lunchroom with their friends.
5 – Community-first
This is another huge one that I find all the successful young entrepreneurs like Daniel Bitton talk about. They’re coming up in the game together with others like them.
They are exchanging feedback and ideas with these peers constantly.
Like MrBeast who as a teen would get on a Skype call every morning for hours talking with three other kids his age that were as crazy about making it on YouTube as he was.
That is the real key to a lot of these young success stories. And being young really gives you a big advantage.
By the time you’re in your 30’s and 40’s you already don’t typically approach your friends in this way. You have families and responsibilities that take over.
Now for how this relates to the ‘Beast’ method
I like to think of the ‘Beast’ method as the antithesis to the corporate world. I developed it to get things done as efficiently as possible while paying zero respect to the ‘traditional’ way.
It abides by premises like:
- We don’t try to develop relationships because that leads to politics
- There is no investment in culture. The culture is adherence to very clean process.
- Everything is a task and all work is an update to a task. So transparency rules.
- Verbal communication, ability to create relationships and charisma are almost useless because the system minimizes their use.
And so I view these premises as the tools that I will use to level the playing field against these kids.
They might be better at certain things, but I’m gonna take them in the ‘getting shit done fast and efficiently’ department.
Because no matter how young and energetic they are…you don’t beat the ‘Beast method’ in that.
It’s just too good.
I consider it my ‘equalizer’ 🙂
