It's Better for Startups to be a Fool

By Anamika Sahu, SiliconIndia
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Fremont: I have been to few startup events. With wonderful ideas and products, the participants start their day with great enthusiasm. Keeping themselves engaged in explaining about their company and product. Several participants had wonderful idea and built their company from scratch trying to take it to a global spear. However, what I saw was a lot of show-off from many startups, trying to boost as if they know everything about the product and the industry. Such startups fail to understand the importance of these events and lack in leveraging the opportunity. Every startup guys have something unique in them. One should take the opportunity to talk to their peers and know about what they are into and how they got there. Share your knowledge and keep asking questions. At this point of time, it is good to be a fool and dig into to learn more about the industry. Also, there are several VCs participating in such events trying to figure out the best idea and the best company. Such events provide the startups a great opportunity to know what the VC industry is looking for and what they expect from the companies whom they want to fund. With several years of field experience and a roller coaster of success and failed funding, they can better help you to take your business off to fly in the high clouds. What is required is to take off your mask of being super intelligent and wear that of a fool. Such events provide the startups with a platform where in freshers; experienced entrepreneurs and VCs come to a place to know each other. However, I saw few of them never accepting the fact that they do not know everything about the industry. They feel mortified to ask questions as it would portray him as an ignorant person unaware of the industry. Even few of them use jargons to show off their expertise. But, the fact being that they themselves did not know the meaning of the word. There are several startups, who might be entirely from a different industry space or from the same fraternity, and provides you an awesome opportunity to interact with each other. Taking the advantage of the situation is what smart one does. And if you are one among those who do not do this, then you have failed to take the advantage of such events. It is better to be a fool for a few minutes than being a fool for lifetime, hampering your professional and personal life and also keeping in stake the career and life of the one who depends upon you.