Dealing with Stumbling Blocks

By Vivek Wadhwa | Tuesday,August 11,2009 | 1 Comments

apolis, it was rejection all the way. He couldn't qualify for small-business loans because of his age, couldn't get potential partners or customers to take him seriously, and couldn't find an experienced mentor. People brushed off his passion and determination as a fad or childishness.

But Lee was and is determined to succeed and make his Simple Life Records a major player. He urges young entrepreneurs to "define the limitations that you are bound by, and work like hell to overcome them." Ironically, Lee was able to sign young artists to his label by playing up one quality they both shared: their youth.

3. Be willing to acquire more experience.

Another student of mine, Wynn Xiao Wu, 25, is a serial entrepreneur who found it difficult to get going with one of his ventures despite previous successes. He founded a startup to develop and market LED-based gadgets when he was 19 and a café on his college campus when he was 20. While studying in Beijing last year, he teamed with other students to start a social-networking Web site, www.tontong.com.

Wu and his Chinese partners found it hard to find experienced mentors, be taken seriously by customers and potential partners, and raise money. Dealing with older employees was especially difficult given that Chinese culture requires young people to show respect to elders. And he says it was almost impossible to navigate the Chinese bureaucracy.

His solution to the hurdles he experienced? Learning the skills he lacked by going back to school. After completing his bachelor's degree, Wynn Xiao Wu joined Duke University's Engineering Management program to acquire more business and engineering management skills. As soon as he finishes, Wu plans on returning to China to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams, equipped with new confidence and credibility.

4. Get ready to act mature.

Jon Thomas, 24, was the youngest team member of a medical-device startup spun off from Stanford's biodesign program. When he joined Stanford on a teaching-assistant fellowship, he tried to act older than his age to gain the respect of other students. He says this ability came naturally to him partially because his brother is four years older than him, and he often hung out with his brothers' friends rather than people his own age.

Today, he is a co-founder and lead developer at Vascular Precision, where he hopes to make improvements in the way in which endovascular procedures are performed. He says the only problems he faces are when potential investors find out how old he is. Those are the situations when he always seems to be on the defensive, so he tries to avoid mentioning his age until the end of a meeting. He says that "if it were the first thing that was discussed, then it might interfere with their ability to remain unbiased as they hear our pitch."

All of these young entrepreneurs agree that entrepreneurship is an incredible experience but warn that there are no guarantees of success at any age. To succeed, they say, you need to weather rejection and keep at your goal until you get it right. The advantage of starting young is that you have more time to learn and grow.

Earlier published in Business Week. The author of the article is Vivek Wadhwa, a Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and an Executive in residence at Duke University.

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Reader's comments(1)

1: While entrepreneurship is for the select few, you can increase your chances of success by being chosing the right idea, being persistent and learning from the successful entrepreneurs.

Posted by:Guru gbk - 10th Sep 2009

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