Are you an innovator or a chicken?
In almost any EE Times survey we've done over the decades (whether it's Salary and Opinion Survey or something else), engineers overwhelmingly view themselves as entrepreneurs. More than three-quarters will say they will start a company at some time in their career.
In reality, about 10 percent do.
This bubbled up in my mind as I read Bruce Gibney and Ken Howery's piece on Harvard Business online this week: Just How Risky Is Entrepreneurship, Really?
The authors, who work for the San Francisco-based VC firm Founders Fund, argue that working for 'the man' in many professions is far riskier than starting your own company. Counterintuitive? Yes. And to be sure, they're in the business of starting companies, so they have that ax to grind, but let's hang with this a second.
Failure rate
Gibney and Howery write that half of all law graduates in the coming years will get to practice their professions, but 56 percent of businesses started in 2004 are still chugging away.
That's a far better success rate than conventional wisdom has suggested. Some people are just geared to start companies. And it does take passion: Look at the restaurant industry, where supposedly 90 percent of all restaurant startups fail in the first two years; yet every day new restaurants open that are run by people with hopes, dreams and a tolerance for risk. (The failure rate there actually isn't that high, according to one study; it's actually on par with overall business failure rates).
Be that as it may, certain perceptions remain. So where do you fall on the spectrum?
- + Do you plan to start a company in the next few years?
- + If you've been a longtime engineer, tell us about any experiences you've had starting an innovative company.
- + Any advice for younger engineers?
About Brian
Editorial Director for EE Times' EE Life engineering community. Baseball fan and road trip guy for the next several months. View all posts by Brian →3 Responses to Are you an innovator or a chicken?
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I started a SW company a while ago to write an O/S for a couple of friends who where starting their own thing doing HW stuff.
I lost a few billion $ in recent years, but the whole adventure still worked out OK I guess.
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I am too "scared to fail" to start a business.
But I am not too scared to admit it.
I did start my own company, and kept working at it while holding a full time job, because the new company was not making enough to live on. Of course there are risks in engineering, new company or not, the challenge is to spot the failures really early in the game, and make corrections. Spotting a failure at the "sketch stage", even before a detailed drawing, is the best way for things to work. The worst failure is the one that is discovered by the customers after the design is delivered. So the challenge in engineering is knowing enough about what you are doing to spot the failures in the sketch stage, and the risk is not knowing enough to catch them there.
On a separate topic, the anti-whatever "gotcha" thing you have here is a royal pain, and this will be my last submission until it becomes less of a pain.