Innovate Santa Cruz – Ryan Coonerty – Why you should be an Entrepreneur

Ryan Coonerty – Why you should be an Entrepreneur
3 November 2011 by Tim 0 Comments

“If I was 22, I would start a company, and if I failed, I would do it all over again.”

There is a limited time in your life when you have the ability to take risk with minimal consequences. You cannot start a company as easily with a mortgage, a family, and a full time job mind the lack in physical stamina. When you are young, there is an unique opportunity for you to take the responsibility of establishing your own venture with limited risk. At that point in your life, you do not have much to lose, so the barriers to start a company are extremely low. Best case scenario, your company is successful and profitable; worst case scenario, you learn from your mistakes and can use your failure as a badge of honor for being bold and attempting to do something you were passionate about. Ryan saw how executives from Italy were coming to the Silicon Valley simply to learn how to fail. In countries like Italy and Japan, once you fail at starting a business, your credibility is incredibly depreciated. In America, however, you have the amazing ability to be gutsy, go out and start a company from nothing, and be rewarded in either case, whether it be success or failure. With failure, it is important to learn from the mistakes you made, iterate that process, and try again. This is how successful entrepreneurs are made.

In this day and age, information is a currency. It is essential that you learn how to use information, from reading on how to bootstrap to business, to watching a few TED talks a day, and use this as resource to stimulate your creativity and develop some sort of innovation. To think like an entrepreneur, it is important to find opportunities and learn how to exploit them. For example, Reed Hastings from Netflix found that it was inconvenient to drive back and forth from a video rental store which imposed a limited time for you to hold onto a movie. Entrepreneurs like Reed was able to find a problem that affected a large volume of people and found a unique solution to fix it. Solving people’s problems is not only a source of profit but key for a sustainable and successful business.

Your ability to network can singly determine your ability to be a successful entrepreneur. Ryan met his business partner Jeremy Nuener at a book signing, where a single conversation led to the founding of NextSpace, an innovative business that promotes co-working for start-ups and entrepreneurs. Steve Jobs met Steve Wozniak through a close friend, and formed a friendship that led to the founding of Apple. It is a myth that individual creators are responsible for singlehandedly creating companies. It is the interactions between other individuals, the bouncing around of ideas, and the personal relationships between people passionate about an innovation, that fuel the creation of a successful company.