Unemployment solution? Start up a RIM and win
For some struggling to find meaningful work, taking entrepreneurial risks is the best option
“You have to be very comfortable with ambiguity, (with) taking on risks. You have to be confident.” ALYSSA RICHARD, 26 ON BEING AN ENTREPRENEUR
In a world where young job-seekers feel powerless, a growing number are taking matters into their own hands, and handhelds. They are starting their own businesses. Many will fail. A few will keep trying until they succeed. Along the way, they will create jobs not just for themselves but for others, too.
It is one answer for the young and jobless. And, in fact, researchers at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found that among all new enterprises that survived after three years, the highest employment growth was in companies started by people under 30.
Here’s a look at two vastly different programs trying to build the next generation of entrepreneurs:
FRIDAY EVENING
in Toronto. Queen St. W. is buzzing with 20-somethings primed for a night out. I pause to check the invitation for a young entrepreneurs event called Startup Weekend. I imagine a dull affair, a haven for a dozen dateless commerce students. How smug I am, and how wrong.
“If you go to Silicon Valley, most entrepreneurs have failed six times before they hit it big.” REZA SATCHU, NEXT 36 CO-FOUNDER ON BEING WILLING TO TAKE A RISK
I walk up two flights in a building more shabby than chic. The room is a wall of noise. A crush of 25- to 35-years-olds are laughing, swapping business cards and sketching their ideas on iPads. They are software developers, designers, marketers and, yes, commerce grads. Three hundred of them. And they have paid $99 to be here.
Soon they will have11⁄ 2 minutes to take the open mike, pitch their business concept and rally a team around them.
This evening, more than 90 make a pitch. Judges choose the 20 most promising ideas. The 300 attendees then join a team to develop one of those 20 ideas.
And in the next, sleep-deprived 54 hours, they will try to create the next killer app, taking it from drawing board to demo. The prize is $60,000 worth of free services — a marketing video, legal advice, office space and mentoring.
This is Alyssa Richard’s second Startup Weekend. She tells me it is a place to spot talent, what organizers call “cofounder dating.” Working under the pressure of a tight deadline you quickly find out who you can work with. At an earlier Startup Weekend she met a designer who is now a colleague.
Richard, 26, strains over her laptop. With a bachelor’s degree in commerce from Queen’s University, she has already founded a business called RateHub. It connects home buyers to the best mortgage rates. At the Startup event she’s trying to launch MyClosingCosts, a one-stop shop offering buyers home inspections, legal advice and online tools for calculating costs.
Richard says entrepreneurship is not for everyone. “You have to be very comfortable with ambiguity, (with) taking on risks. You have to be confident. But you also have to allow yourself to be turned on to entrepreneurship. Once you’ve lived through the process from idea to product creation to money in the bank, you start to believe in the system a little more.”
Chris Eben organizes Toronto’s Startup Weekend in co-operation with a non-profit organization in Seattle. Launched in 2007, Startup Weekends have attracted 56,000 attendees in more than 300 cities worldwide. Sometimes viable businesses are created. However, Eben sees the weekends’ primary purpose as offering the curious a chance “to dip their toe in” entrepreneurship. “They are getting to experience a condensed version of start-up life.”
This explosion of energy in startups is driven by two things. Recent technology has dramatically lowered the entry costs. Building an app is not that expensive. Second, according to Richard, “people have always been passionate about feeling the results of their work, and building products. For some people, that’s been lost in big corporations where you specialize in one thing.”
Robert Jackiewicz, a 26-year-old engineer, is one such person. After he finished a consulting job at a corporate giant, he was in no hurry to return.
“Big companies don’t make you matter,” he says. “You don’t feel like you’re making a difference.”
Now he’s here working all weekend without sleep because he wants to gain new skills, and to pursue something other than a profit.
“I don’t care if I make millions of dollars. I want to work on something that changes the world.”
ONE WEEK LATER,
the first stage of another young entrepreneurs’ event reaches its climax in downtown Toronto. If Startup Weekend was take-allcomers populist, this one is unabashedly elite.
At 8:59 a.m. this Saturday, the Earth moves for 36 of Canada’s brightest and best.
Having sweated through eight intense, one-on-one interviews the previous day, they have been selected for The Next 36, a program designed to forge Canada’s next generation of entrepreneurial leaders.
They were chosen from 1,003 applicants, all university undergraduates. Seventy-three of them had been flown to Toronto for the final round of interviews.
The next morning, after a nervous breakfast, the 73 finalists were asked to find their names on one of two lists, and to file into their designated room.
One group is thanked, offered some words of encouragement, and sent home. Behind closed doors in the second room, the group puzzles over what it means to be in the company of the 21-and 22-year-olds around them.
That girl over there is a star athlete. The one at the next table has two patents pending.
They are commerce, marketing and engineering students mostly, with a sprinkling from pharmacy, architecture and history. They wonder, is this the final selection or yet another test. Then they hear it. “You’re in.” The room erupts in applause, then hugs and handshakes. They are The Next 36. They will become friends and business partners. They will be lavished with CEO mentors, start-up capital and an entrée into a network of movers and shakers.
It is a moment to savour. But it is short-lived. After lunch they are placed in teams of four and given a pressurecooker assignment: create a viable business concept, then pitch it to a room peppered with Canada’s top business leaders the next morning.
They pull the first of countless caffeinated all-nighters.
As it turns out, the pitches are polished, but the business leaders ask tough questions. Only a handful of the original business ideas will survive in the months ahead. By design, The Next 36 will taste repeated failure.
From December to April, the 36 juggle their university studies while working long distance on their businesses. In May, they take up residence at Innis College at the University of Toronto, forgoing a summer job.
In exchange, they get an exclusive three-month entrepreneur’s boot camp that includes lectures by business faculty drawn from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Western University and the University of Toronto.
All the while, the teams work with their CEO mentors to get their venture off the ground and raise seed capital.
THIS IS NO ACADEMIC
exercise, no game of pretend. Without financial backing, their startups will fold. And by the end of the summer, some do. But then, building resilience to failure is part of the vision.
Reza Satchu, co-founder of The Next 36, believes that in Canada there is “the absolute fear of failure and the stigma around failure.”
“If you go to Silicon Valley, most entrepreneurs have failed six times before they hit it big. People who have failed here six times may as well have a big red balloon on them saying that they should never do anything.
“The Next 36 is all about finding highpotential students who are used to succeeding and showing them failure, with the hopes that they’ll learn from it and be stronger.”
After graduating from McGill University in 1991, Satchu landed a job on Wall Street. He recalls “being surrounded by all these kids from Harvard, Stanford and Yale and being completely intimidated, thinking these kids must be so much smarter.
“What I realized after a few months was that they weren’t any smarter but they had two critical advantages. Throughout their undergraduate career, early in their lives, they had tremendous exposure to leaders. Not just academic leaders, but business leaders, entrepreneurial leaders, civic leaders, political leaders.
“What this gave them was the second great thing — an expanded set of expectations. They didn’t want to just write a book, they wanted to win the Pulitzer Prize. They didn’t want to be vice-president of engineering in a company. They wanted to start the next Google.”
Satchu wanted to give that edge to entrepreneurs in Canada early in their career.
Afew years ago he teamed up with Tim Hodgson, then CEO of Goldman Sachs Canada, University of Toronto business professor Ajay Agrawal, and Claudia Hepburn, a social entrepreneur with an interest in education. They founded The Next 36.
Canada’s corporate leaders bought in with financial support. Galen Weston, Jim Pattison and Paul Desmarais were early supporters. The business community volunteered its time as mentors and advisers. In these youth many saw themselves. And they were sold on the long-term goal — nurturing a group of high achievers who might move the needle on prosperity.
Satchu himself has founded four successful businesses, including StorageNow, a self-storage company, and Alignvest Capital Management.
He wants to imprint The Next 36 with his vision of entrepreneurship.
“It’s the ability to say — what do I want to achieve, figuring out what the opportunity is and making it happen without thinking about what I have in my pocket today. Or how much experience do I have? If you had to calculate that, no one would ever do anything because the answer would be, not enough. The hallmark of entrepreneurship is not letting that stop you.”
Over the summer, while living in their self-paid lodgings at Innis College, the nine teams beaver away, creating their own businesses.
Among the promising startups this year: StrokeLink, an app aimed at helping stroke victims gain their independence by allowing therapists to remotely communicate with their patients. PenyoPal is creating a set of interactive games that help children learn Mandarin. Kira fuses video-based interview technology with social media to help managers in the hiring process. The Next 36 are encouraged to think big.
In the short term, Satchu will be happy if a couple of the startups become commercially viable. In the long term the program will be a success if alumni build “organizations of national and global significance,” and if they trace that back to “the confidence, the experience and the relationships” they developed early at The Next 36.
There are strings attached to this privileged opportunity: the weight of expectation. Much is given to The Next 36. But as Satchu often reminds them, much is expected.