Wantrepreneur
*Names and certain topics have been hidden to preserve anonymity.
Alright. I’m really gonna do it.
I’m about to straight up shit talk startups. Screw you, Evan Spiegel, and your boyish face!
But Kirstin! the commenter says. Everybody loves startups! Startups are the new sexy! Haven’t you heard of Elon Musk?
The quiet stalker of my LinkedIn adds, Didn’t you work in innovation? Aren’t you supposed to like this stuff?
All of this is true! But unfortunately, no number of glowing Atlantic articles or amount of job experience changes what I see as a growing tumour plaguing the otherwise indomitable rise of entrepreneurship.
Maybe this is all a bit out of the blue. Cue context.
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Two years ago, I was just starting my second year at university. My accomplishments to date included a semi-respectable grade in intro economics and a seminar class in political philosophy. I was still learning to do my laundry properly.
I was approached by someone two years my junior, whom I had briefly known in high school. I wouldn’t call us friends; maybe amicable acquaintances at best. He was just about to begin his senior year of high school.
He approached me on Facebook. With a novel idea.
He wanted to create a startup based on investments. But for young people. You know, because we were young people and young people are the relevant and sexy target demographic right now. And investments because, you know, Wolf of Wall Street almost won an Oscar. Training young people to invest, competitively, in a nutshell.
It was two winning ideas, in one really winning idea. He wanted me to come on as an advisor. Or a mentor. Or something. ‘We can sort out the details later’, sort of thing.
“I literally don’t know anything about investments though.” I said. “I got a 67% in intro economics.”
“That’s okay, you can read up on Investopedia.”
I was linked to a very fancy website. The ‘About’ page was sparse, with an oddly broad and vague mission statement. Something about connecting youth to opportunities. (Synonyms include: career centre.)
Clicking on the ‘Team’ tab, however, led to a prominent and proud roster of young faces, presumably ambitious university students in similar business programs, all of whom were ‘mentors’ like me. My profile was among them. Our majors and school names were listed underneath our pristine headshots. The founder, my junior, had his picture displayed at the top; a child, not yet even graduated from high school, with his declared Ivy League university displayed right underneath. And that title: “Founder.”
I felt strange.
I never heard from him again, even though my name and title continued to be used on the page. I never received an update on the status of the program, nor did I ever speak to any of the other mentors/advisors/’wecansortoutthedetailslater’s; they forever remained well-framed headshots on that About page.
At some point one of the teams contacted me, some six months after I was initially approached to join. Apparently I was their mentor. (I don’t recall an introduction.) They asked me whether they should invest in a certain stock given events X and Y. I literally said, “I have no clue, but I heard Investopedia is a great resource.”
That was the last that I heard of that team. It was also the last I heard of that company. That startup founder went on to greater things, in the States, netting internships left and right.
I thought the idea was supposed to help people. I thought if it was really about connecting to students to opportunities, it was worth more than a blank ‘About’ page. But nothing ever became of the company or his novel idea, except for the one line it occupied on his resume: “Startup Founder.”
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Startups are popular, nowadays. And I understand why, particularly because I did work in innovation, and I know the type of people it attracts. (Note: everyone.)
We have this perception that startups are just for the young and ambitious, but the most inspiring people I met at work were often people well into their 40s and 50s; folks who had learned to play the corporate game but still spent their 10 minute breaks building things. Completing a Python tutorial on the commute home. Doodling into the margins of their notes, like kids. We worked in a bank but there were people here who were stubbornly creative, like weeds growing out of cracks in concrete.
I loved my job, more for the people than anything. The exact message that we had, while working in Intrapreneurship, was that innovation was for everybody, no matter who you were or where you came from. The next big idea could come from anyone. It was exciting, and invigorating, to see people twice my age being the most imaginative or crazy in the room.
What’s the problem, then?
It’s not older folks, who see the the new entrepreneurial environment as a chance to launch new ideas. It’s younger people.
It’s young people, who are desperate for jobs and accreditation. It’s young people, who no longer spend their summers flipping burgers or volunteering at a summer camp, but sitting in offices till 7 or 8pm, doing research, making models, programming. Or young people who want to be doing that, who, in a crowd of 6000 applicants, can’t get that initial interview. And then it occurs to them.
Wouldn’t things be different if I was a startup founder?
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A year ago, another friend approached me. They wanted to start a club.
I perked up a little. “I’m also starting a club,” I said. “What’s your club idea?” We were having coffee in a very fancy cafe near campus. 6 dollar lattes, boys.
“Tell me yours first,” they smiled, sipping their coffee. “I want to hear about yours.”
“Well,” I said, a bit sheepishly. “It’s a little vague right now. I still haven’t picked a team. And honestly it’s pretty disorganized. But this club basically is intended to make consulting services accessible to small non-profits. Like management consulting firms are really expensive, right?”
“Right.” They seemed a little lost, gaze shifting towards outdoors. What’s management consulting?
“I know it’s a bit different, but I’m hoping we can recruit students to do consulting for these non-profits. It’ll be way cheaper, and it’s a way to get students experience in a competitive field, plus make things more accessible to non-profits.” I deflated a little. “It’s like…killing two birds with one stone, you know?”
“Ahh.” They nodded politely, as one does when presented with a terrible pitch. “It does suit you.”
I stirred my cold coffee, moving on from the topic. “Tell me about yours, though. Were you looking to bring on some people to work with you?”
“Yes.” They brought out their laptop, prepared to take notes. “My idea involves ______.*”
“Oh. I didn’t know you were into ______*.”
They paused. “I’m not, not really. I just figure…” they trailed off a little, quieter. “You know, it’s my fourth year, and I need to have something on there.”
We fell into a small silence. They looked out the window, sipping the last of their drink.
“And it’s a great cause, I think it’ll look really good on a resume.”
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Something harmful is growing out of startup culture. And it’s not the number of startups. It’s not the mindset that you can be an entrepreneur. It’s not the sense that we can make the world better.
It’s the number of young people who are becoming startup founders just for the title.
We live in a society addicted to labels. We love titles. We love Vice-President. We love ‘executive’. Who wants to be called ‘volunteer’ when you can be called ‘VP of Marketing’? (Even though the work is, essentially, extremely tedious volunteer work.) We crave it, only because such high titles are rewarded enormously upon graduation. Or so we think.
This may be a reality limited to university students, but it’s one we university students know all too well. When my parents were in university, the norm was to spend your summer playing sports, working at a summer camp, putting pizzas into ovens, and delivering newspapers. The norm among my friends is to have a title like ‘Business Analyst’. The expectation for what young people achieve before graduation has skyrocketed in the past few decades.
And we don’t do it because any of us like being a business analyst. Literally, nobody likes combing through an old and ugly PowerPoint just for the sake of it. We do it because there’s some quality associated with it, something implied about yourself by working in a big organization when you’re young. You are a certain kind of person if you have a big title, compared to if you work a retail job. But business analyst jobs are in short supply, and the number of ambitious students only increases.
We also live in an age where we want things to go faster. Who’s got the time to investigate what you really did at Job X? As Vice-President of X? Who’s going to lie on a resume? It’s far easier to assume someone is telling the truth with their titles.
Combine these two noxious ingredients: students desperate for recognition + a lack of accountability, and you get what I call the wantrepreneur.
Wantrepreneurs: people who are more concerned about the titles of their positions than the value imparted by what they do.
Think about it. Why are there so many startup founders nowadays? Why do many startups disappear as soon as they start? Why do some people claim to be founder of 50 things?
How likely do you think it is that an entire generation of students suddenly became uniquely more brave, socially conscious, and generous than any to precede it? Or perhaps a better question: how likely do you think it is that students have seen how we glorify, practically reify, startup founders, realizing that you can achieve immense wealth and glory before 30, and subsequently hoped that by attaching the words “entrepreneur” and “startup” to themselves, they might potentially fool others into believing they were the same?
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Startup Founder. Nothing rings more glamorous. What does it say about you? That you’re ambitious, that you’re hard-working, that you don’t take no for an answer, that you don’t accept any of that corporate bullshit that anyone else buys into. And what does it imply? Hundreds of hours pored over your laptop, dozens of emails that are never returned, an astonishing ability to bounce back from failure coupled with an ability to build structure and organization from a small seed of an idea.
You get to be an Elon fucking Musk. You’re different from everybody else. You’re special.
(Are you still with me?)
Kids who have a hard time finding job security + harder time getting recognition in the job search + craving for labels + lack of investigation into value provided at previous jobs = wantrepreneurs.
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It makes me sad.
It’s the millennial in me talking, but I do happen to think the world is just a bit harder for people our age. You don’t get to apply to a job by walking in with a paper resume. You need to write a custom resume and cover letter, submitted to a laggy job portal, and wait, just like the other 500 students who applied, for a shot at an interview. And sometimes, you never get anything out of it. I was literally just served coffee by a recent graduate from Health Sciences at U of T. (A top program at a top university apparently doesn’t equal a job anymore.)
So I understand the desperation. But it does make me sad. And a little angry. To see smart students resorting to lying. To see kids as young as 13 who have LinkedIn. To see students who are ‘founder’ of 30 different things; all meaningless, valueless startups.
And why? Why do they lie about it?
I mean, some part of it is ego. It feels great to call yourself a founder. It felt great when I finally got to call myself a founder, on my own resume. But I think another part of it is self-doubt. Why lie unless there was no other option? Lying sucks.
All these kids claim to be founders: how else are you supposed to differentiate yourself? You’re not special because you worked 10 hours a week in a business club. (re: every business student ever). You’re not special if you played a sport or instrument. You’re not special if you’re multilingual, if you know Adobe, if you know how to code.
Nothing makes you special anymore, because we’ve normalized prodigies; a day won’t pass that you won’t hear about some 15 year old kid who changed the world, some new startup whose ‘revolutionized X industry’. Being special is normal. And being normal is not okay.
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This is a two-sided problem. On the one hand, students are struggling to be noticed for their work, and are resorting to lying to make themselves noticeable.
But the other problem is that there is a disturbing trend in the quality of startups that are emerging. I question whether these startups originate from a desire to create value, or to pad a resume or boost an ego. I think it should strike people as overwhelmingly concerning that many students claim to have a startup. Because one then has to beg the question: how many of those startups have actually imparted value?
There is a massive difference between claiming to have provided value, and actually giving it.
When we meet startup founders, we ought not to sit back in awe at the fact that they have started a company. It takes practically zero effort to start a website, zero effort to talk about an idea, zero effort to update your LinkedIn profile with a title. What takes substantial bravery is the ability to do good work without taking credit for it, to sit and wait for returns that may never come, to live with massive uncertainty and doubt because of an idea only you believe in. That’s what a startup means to me; believing, maybe just a bit too much, in a single idea.
So we ought to be critical. We ought to raise an eyebrow at someone who is founder of 38 million things. Startup founders are people who ought to be willing to give up everything for their idea. Surely if their idea crumbles after a bit of questioning, it’s not worth much at all in the end.
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Which is not to say, by the way, that you should discourage risk-taking.
Risk-taking is a wholly necessary, yet wholly undervalued skill. The newfound sexiness of entrepreneurship has been able to mitigate some of that, but along the way it’s encouraged unbridled arrogance, a trend of announcing one’s accomplishments rather than demonstrating them, and (in my opinion) a harmful movement in which we’d rather start new organizations rather than try to remedy existing ones; quantity over quality.
Language is a powerful tool, and the more we abuse the language of startups (entrepreneurship, innovation, new, disruptive) the less impactful it becomes, and the less we are willing to take risks on ideas that worth it. Let’s give credence to the ideas that deserve it; and perhaps most importantly, support to the students who feel they need to lie to think they have value.
