The Parallel Entrepreneur
By now, you’ve heard of serial entrepreneurs – you might even be one. Many of us embedded in the entrepreneurial ecosystem could be classified as serial entrepreneurs, even if we don’t think of ourselves as such. Serial entrepreneurs are the backbone of any local startup community. They’re the folks who dive into a new idea, bring products and services to market, scale the business, and exit. Those who successfully exit help fuel the community through investments in new endeavors, helping those startups to scale quickly and build even more momentum. Serial entrepreneurs embrace uncertainty, pivot quickly, prioritize action, and are usually not stymied by setbacks, looking at failures and mistakes as learning opportunities rather than business-ending events.
Most people are unable to make the transition from a one-time founder to a serial entrepreneur. There’s nothing wrong with being a “one-hit wonder” – most entrepreneurs enjoy this title and, once their successful exit is complete, they’re content to retire from the grind of business building and make the transition to angel investor, community builder, or professional hobby enthusiast. As we all know, entrepreneurship can be a battle, and most people don’t have the fortitude to put themselves through the grind more than once. Others may only have one world-changing idea in the tank, while some founders decide to quit after one startup in order to make up for the time they missed with friends and family. Serial entrepreneurs need a healthy combination of mindset, resources, and stamina – a rare combination.
I propose a variation on the serial entrepreneur: the parallel entrepreneur. Serial suggests that a founder works on one project at a time, diving completely into scaling from startup to successful exit. Parallel entrepreneurs, on the other hand, attempt to bypass the long period of time it takes to build several businesses from start to finish, trying to build all the things at the same time. People who are able to easily generate business ideas can fall into the trap of becoming a parallel entrepreneur – it’s difficult to pick a path when all of the paths look equally promising.
At first, a founder might have an overwhelming confidence about being able to manage multiple startups at the same time. When your startup is pre-product and pre-revenue, you don’t have customers and investors breathing down your neck. When you don’t yet have employees and you as the solo founder are wearing all of the hats, there is nothing holding you accountable to meet deadlines. Projects start to become drawn out, and you can find yourself not making progress on anything.
Just because one project seems to hit a stopping point doesn’t mean that you need to start working on something else to fill the time. There are plenty of tasks a founder – especially a solo founder – can do in order to stay productive while waiting for other things to develop. This is why I heavily suggest founders make a comprehensive list of all tasks that need to be completed in order to launch a product or a business. Taking about an hour to write everything on sticky notes or input everything into a project management solution like Trello and then spending some time organizing everything by level of importance and estimated length of time to complete. With all tasks organized by importance and estimated time to complete, a founder or founding team can easily find short “side projects” to work on while waiting for other, longer tasks to resolve.
Many new founders point to “super founders” such as Elon Musk, who seem to be able to balance multiple companies. Early-stage founders cannot and should not try to mimic this. Elon has a web of managers and C-suite officers that take care of the vast majority of those businesses. You, as a solo founder, do not have that luxury. So long as you have to wear multiple hats, you cannot sit in multiple seats. Each of Elon’s businesses have at one time or another, required his full attention when those businesses were first building a product. Once the product was released, he was able to move onto the next thing – serial entrepreneurship, not parallel entrepreneurship.
From my own experience, I’ve had to dive deeply into building EntrePartners over the past 18 months or so. This doesn’t mean that I’ve quit working on Cider Finder – it’s just making the process of completing the app take much longer than it probably should. Running a business incubator and coworking space on my own, with all of the events and services involved, has taken significantly more time than I originally budgeted. Working with people as they build solutions to the world’s problems is unpredictable, and some have needed a bit more advice and encouragement than others. Once I’m not the lynchpin for the operation – once I’m not wearing more than one hat at EntrePartners – I’ll be able to build out everything I have planned with Cider Finder. I just know that there aren’t enough hours in a day in order to do both things at once.
If your goal in life is to become a serial entrepreneur, great! We need people who want to repeatedly invest their time and money building world-changing solutions. However, unless that solution is to clone yourself in order to build multiple businesses at once, just dive deeply into one thing at a time. Ship that product, launch that storefront, publish that software – in serial, not parallel.