Why Haven't You Started A Startup?
The article which indirectly sparked my Is Cambridge The UK’s Startup Hub? post has been causing further conversations through a number of other blogs that I read. Not all are centred around working out how to encourage more people to start their own businesses but that’s what intrigues me most.
Having thought about it some more, I think that the most important factor in encouraging more startups is people. A business can’t start without a founder.
That sounds obvious, and maybe it was to everyone else, but I’d spent some time thinking about all sorts of other factors like location, availability of staff, living costs, and so on before realising that the best way to gain more new businesses would be for more people to decide to start them.
Almost everyone I know has at some point speculated about starting their own company, or getting out of the rat race and having more control over their own life. Yet far fewer have actually done so. Why is that? I’m not well placed to answer the question, because I’ve started my own company - there are all sorts of challenges and problems that I’ve encountered, but solving them would just have made the startup journey easier rather than affecting whether or not I embarked upon the journey at all.
So, what I’d like to know is have you ever thought of starting your own business? And if you have, why didn’t you continue with it? Or did you start it but decide to stop? And what affected your decision?
Or is it the case with starting your own business that those that are going to do this do, and those that aren’t shouldn’t be encouraged?
What would it take to persuade you to start your own business?
Bonus links, if you want to read some more about the debate
- Paul Graham's article that kicked off the whole discussion - "How to Be Silicon Valley"
- Scoble on the discussion (he also later pointed to Evelyn's post on the matter).
- Crossroads Dispatches: Monied Sex, Sexy Money, and Silicon Valley's Word
- The Next Silicon Valley? Part One - Inc. magazine present the case against Silicon Valley being the ideal model for startup hubs.
- The Next Silicon Valley? Part Two.