Back in September of 2017 Bryce Roberts of Indie.vc fame wrote a most interesting piece entitled “Permissionless Entrepreneurship.” In this media segment the author states that
“We want to enable a world where founders DON’T NEED PERMISSION from an increasingly small group of FICKLE FUNDERS to exist.”
Within this piece the author goes on to share how venture capital firms, angel investors and seed funding providers often serve as “gate keepers” to those who are looking to both launch and possibly scale their startup or business enterprise. This is essentially the entrepreneurial landscape for those who operate within the confines of Silicon Valley and all of the other “Wanna Be Like” Silicon Valley’s of the world.
Over the past 7+ years there is another application of this concept that our team at the I85Cyber.org Launch & Learn Labs Accelerator often shares with our accelerator cohort members. The concept of “Permissionless Entrepreneurship” is also very much applicable in areas where the VC landscape may be non existent or not very mature. In these areas of the country/world permission is often granted by
- A panel of business pitch competition judges, some of whom have never ever thought about launching a company.
- A non profit organization that has been established by the local/regional/state government whose primary purpose is to foster innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development.
- The local/regional Chamber Of Commerce or Economic Development Partner who may also serve in the role as the proverbial gatekeepers of all things that revolve around entrepreneurship and business development for a particular city, county or state.
- Tech accelerators/incubators, which are often underwritten by a corporate entity, economic development agency, division of government, etc which may offer $20K, $50K or $100K of seed funding and/or technical assistance services but offers very little in the form of mentoring founders through process of how to discover, develop or track the experiences of a check writing, credit card swiping, crypto coin transferring and cash on the barrelhead paying users/customers. To this particular mindset our own Launch & Learn Labs Tech/Creative Accelerator IS NOT IMMUNE and MUST PERPETUALLY WORK TOWARDS NOT being practitioners of these tendencies and methodologies.
One could argue that for the vast majority of the US and North America these are the entities, agencies and organizations from whom approval and permission is often sought out by and granted to startup founders.
History has shown that these groups and entities can be much more “FICKLE” than any venture capital firm due to the fact that they often DO NOT have to show a return on an investment opportunity and the respective organizations are often seriously embedded within some of the most bureaucratic entities on planet earth. As a result all forms of gate keeping can be observed where the managers within these organizations often desire to “CHOOSE THE WINNERS AND LOSERS” even before an effort or competition begins.
For instance, a few of our L&LL Accelerator Instructions have served as competition judges where they have observed fellow judges berate the presentations of participating founders simply due to the judges being ignorant of the particulars of the business opportunity being pursued by a particular startup. In another instance one of our team members was working with a group of founders who had a very novel solution to a very obvious problem. When asked why they spent 4 months practicing their pitch to win a portion of a $50K prize in stead of selling their solution to a most obvious set of customers and users and easily generating one the low end of things $50K/month in revenue, the founders simply had no answer and possessed a stare similar to that of an animal into the beam of the headlights of an automobile. Ultimately they had no idea that they had the freedom to simply launch a company without the permission of the hosts of the business plan competition. BTW, our instructions were no longer asked to work with these founders
Finally, from Bryce Robert’s article
“Real Businesses create their own source of funding and don’t have to ask anyone for permission to exist.”
Entrepreneurially this statements represents “FREEDOM” at its highest levels and to which the members of the I85Cyber.org Launch & Learn Labs Accelerator team would simply say, Amen, Amen and Amen Again!!!
Let’s keep empowering entrepreneurs and founders to “KICK IN” | “KNOCK DOWN” DOORS and to operate OUTSIDE | INSIDE System(s) of THEIR OWN Choosing!!”