The Everyone, Everywhere, Now Entrepreneurial Manifesto.

The startup, innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems are struggling. Here are our guiding beliefs for fixing them. We're starting now.

1- Everyone can be entrepreneurial.

For too long we've been focused on Founders, Startups and Unicorns. That excludes anyone who wants to bring a better future into their present.

Be that a company, charity, or someone with a small side project and big dreams.

But how do you turn your dreams into reality?

The existing startup approach is fractured and fragmented – a mix of books, events, personality worship and accessible advisors.

We are almost random in our approach:

Books: Read The Lean Startup? The Secrets of Sandhill Road? Zero to One?

Seminars: We have wall-to-wall webinars and podcasts-a-plenty. Pick which?

Conferences: Have you been to Disrupt? Startup Grind? Websummit?

Personalities: Elon Musk can fill an auditorium anywhere. How will he help you?

Advisors: Ask who’s done it before. Let’s hope the experience has no half-life.

The result is a piecemeal approach. How does streaming together disparate, disconnected topics contribute to a new business-building foundation?

A few may succeed in founding a company, but...

How do we learn to build a new business?

2- Opportunity is not evenly distributed.

If you're successful as an entrepreneur, it's probably an accident.

An accident of birth.

Invention success is statistically correlated to where and when you were born. So, arguments about whether entrepreneurs are born or made are moot.

Your chance of success goes up if you're born in the right place.

And it's not your big idea either – research shows it's mostly about timing.

"So I look back on all of our ideas … I always thought that the idea mattered the most in coming up with a great idea ahead of its time was crucial. I always thought the business plan really mattered. I thought that the business model mattered - how are you going to make money. I thought that the executive team and the work ethic really mattered and of course, all of those things matter. But timing really really makes a very big difference because it can kill an otherwise great idea. " Bill Gross, CEO of Idea Lab.

How do we ensure everyone is positioned to act on opportunities?

3- Failure still predominates.

Starting is easy. Success eludes most.

In 2021, Harvard Business School stated that more than two-thirds of startups never provide a positive return to investors.

In the US, new business starts have a 70% failure rate within 10 years.

Failure is painful.

We see it redeemed in only one way: through learning.

How can we best learn from failure?

4- There is too much focus on funding.

The extraordinary attention paid to funding, in all its forms, eclipses an entrepreneur's important task of building a working business model.

Money is fuel, but if you don't have a spark and the means to turn combustion into motion (an engine), it's useless – you're focused on the wrong thing.

"Fundraising has become the sport in place of the nuts and bolts of building a sustainable business" Jason Fried, Cofounder and CEO of Basecamp.

How can we know risks, revenue and return on investment before starting?

5- Founders are part of the problem.

In one instantiation of an entrepreneur, we repeatedly find the same fault: A love of our solutions.

We declare we're makers and builders simply searching for a better way. But in the end, we are beset by a pathological pursuit of a product-first mindset.

This leads to the still-leading cause of failure: We build something no one wants.

We believe in building around a love of the problem. First-generation entrepreneurs built products that solve problems. But that still leaves opportunity.

The next generation of entrepreneurs will study old solutions to find new problems worth solving.

How can we be sure we're building something that people will buy?

6- The startup ecosystem fails first-time founders.

The primary entry point for founders is failing them: The Startup Accelerator.

There has been an explosion of startups and entrepreneurs in the last decade. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor estimates there 100 million startups created per year.

Antler proudly brands itself as the world's day zero investor. It "currently invests in nearly 1 percent of more than 50,000 founders annually."

That means 99% of founders would fall out of a typical investor funnel. Dropped because their first, and sometimes only, entrepreneurial endeavour is judged inadequate.

100 million startups X 99% funnel fall out = 99 million entrepreneurial endeavours lost annually.

That's an enormous loss of entrepreneurial capacity and opportunity.

How can we build entrepreneurial capacity?

7- Globalization and technology can be a force for good.

From climate change to conflicts. Our 'little blue globe' is under significant stress.

Globalization – the action of increasing international flows of trade, capital, information and people– can be a force for good. Some disagree.

It is fashionable to criticise untrammelled globalisation as the cause of inequality, the global financial crisis and neglect of the climate. But the achievements of the 1990s and 2000s—the high point of liberal capitalism—are unmatched in history. (The Economist on May 9th 2024 in Leaders)

When you travel, you participate in globalization. That 'flow' can benefit and damage your destination. We make a choice that has an impact.

Entrepreneurs helped enhance flow with the advent of the Internet and its applications. Yet, it also enhanced divisions and disinformation. Platforms like Uber and Airbnb have made people's flow easier. But they've also created destruction within their respective industries.

By creating something new, entrepreneurs must recognize this involves (what we think are) moral questions.

We must be better equipped to understand the consequences of new product development and innovation within our globe (before we go multi-planetary).

The line between good and evil cuts through every human heart" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. "The Gulag Archipelago"

How can entrepreneurs contribute to building a better world?

8- Corporate innovation is in crisis.

Many entrepreneurs exchange the risk of a startup for contributing to a bigger cause inside a company.

So begins their struggle...

They step inside systems that are set against three crucial factors in a new venture's success: speed, focus, and learning.

They do themselves no favours by cut-and-pasting startup methods and mantras, overlapping with new product development, outsourcing crucial conversations with customers and ignoring that a company's essential focus is to generate a return on investment.

Simply pleading for more time and C-suite support for innovation won't work.

Locating innovation within a department or persons, regardless of their title, increases the probability of a single point of failure. The most substantial innovations are disruptive and dispersive.

This crisis is another case of good people in a bad system.

Might it be better to distribute entrepreneurial capacity across an organization?

How do we cause innovation within an organization?

9- Higher education is failing entrepreneurs.

Business schools are built to turn out employees for businesses, not entrepreneurs. They may have streams of study relating to entrepreneurship and professors who carry the title. But there is little preparation for going through the fire of starting a new business.

MBAs are designed to differentiate you from your company peers. Not build a new business.

Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal and investor in Facebook, sponsors students to drop out of university and start companies. "The Thiel Fellowship gives $100000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom."

He feels higher education is overvalued and stifles innovation and entrepreneurship. So much so that you're not allowed to apply for the fellowship if you've completed an undergraduate degree or have not dropped out.

We disagree.

However, we empathize with educational institutions and find it difficult to argue with The Thiel Fellowship's alumnus valuation outcomes: 11 of 271 recipients are valued at U$1 Billion or more. (Bloomberg)

How do we teach entrepreneurship?

We need a new approach.

We don't have all the answers, but one propelling belief is this:

We believe that entrepreneurship is a craft that can be taught, learned and improved.

To everyone, everywhere, who wants a bigger future.

We're inviting you to join us, starting now.

Sign up to receive information and event invitations to help you grow as a globally competent new business builder at OnGlobalVentures.com or https://blog.onglobal.co/about/.

Press on...

Jerry Everett. Entrepreneur. Engineer. Executive

p.s. If you resonate with some part of this, you can share it with attribution.

I'm indebted to many sources that both inspire and inform this manifesto. In many cases, I could find no better words than the original author's. I've strived to cite sources and give full attribution. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Ash Maurya's mentorship and work. Including the "Just Start" manifesto and "The Innovator's Gift".
• Dr. Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta influenced my thinking on innovation and customer choice. Particularly Dr. Christensen's 'How Will You Measure Your Life?' (I've copied The Rewired Group's podcast intro on my call to action.)
• Shopify's statement that opportunity is not equally distributed.
• Jason Fried's views on funding and building product profitability.
• Bill Gross's Ted Talk and research at Idea Lab on startup success factors.
• The US Chamber of Commerce statistics on new business starts and failures.
• Harvard Business Review's publications and research on startup failure.
• The Equality of Opportunity Project's summary paper on the importance of exposure to innovation.
• Dan Sullivan's statement of a coach inviting others into a bigger future.
• Alan Sear's mentorship on education and history. His book helped me find a working definition of a craft in "The Arts and the Teaching of History: Historical F(r)ictions"
• I reworked OECD.org's statement "Education is fundamental to individual fulfillment, social progress, and economic prosperity in modern societies." into a simple statement combining education, value and making progress.
• Dr. Pankaj Ghemewat helped me understand what globalization is and is not, along with recognizing the hard reality of global expansion. Dr. Steven Altman and his work on the DHL Global Connectedness report continued that.
• Grammarly helped rewrite the first edition of this on September 30th, 2024.

If you feel we've missed a citation or source, please contact me at OnGlobal Ventures.