When Your Entrepreneur Friend Avoids You — It’s Not Personal (Mostly)

Entrepreneurship is really fun and really satisfying. It also requires extreme focus and time discipline. It’s not for most people.

This post is one tool to understand when you have a friend who’s an entrepreneur and you haven’t heard from them in awhile and they seem to be avoiding you. The main four reasons described below include misunderstanding of what entrepreneurship is, expectations and alignment relative to stage of the company, along with social and technological changes.

1. Most people don’t understand entrepreneurship.

Successful entrepreneurs need to be highly self actualized and lucky to have a village that is helping leverage intellect, resources, drive, competitiveness, & risk taking towards the goal. It takes a village; but not a regular one. The necessary entrepreneur’s village is primarily comprised of Jedi knight types as technologists and business, legal specialists and Yodas, the latter in the form of wise serial entrepreneurs and investors training the next classes. At the worst, if you don’t understand how the system works, you might put the entrepreneur in harm’s way even inadvertently. With a 40 year low of innovation and startups, entrepreneurs literally cannot AFFORD to be naive. There’s lots of potential dangers which ignite a drive to successfully avoid for example, Death Stars. An entrepreneur will therefore avoid you if you expose them unnecessarily to these kinds of risks to the business or team.

image credit: followingthenerd.com

One thing entrepreneurs have to do is conceptualize what resources they require in the listed domains below and identify how to get access to them as well as put them to best use. Yodas help light the paths and open doors to these resources.

Entrepreneurs require a clear view of what’s required and what’s available in this ecosystem

2. One paradox of company building is the role of advice.

Great advice propels your company but bad or irrelevant advice can kill it if it isn’t filtered. Advice that works in one context might be wrong in another. Company building is NOT linear. The best advice I ever got was from a Professor who both founded a company & bought a solution from a startup as CTO of a larger one. He said, “Until you prove out the system of your company, only focus on customer prospects who do or CAN share your vision.” All else is wasted now; the biggest problem in filtering bad advice is even if someone has been successful, if they don’t understand your vertical, your technology, and customers’ needs in excruciating details — including when & how they vary; their passionate advice is likely wrong. Also, one of the biggest pain points of company building is that most people don’t understand or know anything about it. Further, company building during one era or one market may have little overlap with today or any new specific market. While there is no “perfect linear definition” to company building, including this graphic below, at least it touches on some basic literacy regarding sequence. If you keep bringing up topics that don’t match the stage of company being built, the entrepreneur might avoid interacting with you out of frustration.

Alignment on “where the company is” — is the most important attribute underpinning productive alignment

3. Many people who have been successful in the past end up with a closed, narrow network of friends.

Because of this, they may be less aware of the way the world of work is changing. If this is you; you will not understand the people challenge the entrepreneur faces due to the acceleration of a fragmented and changing society.

Entrepreneurs will often have to bridge multiple worlds, if you make that harder than it needs to be, they may avoid you

4. There’s a lot of nuance in building new companies by leveraging new technologies.

Things that were right in the past for example in our case, comparing legacy desktop or web app stationary oriented use case computing has nothing to do with mobile computing. We don’t want to bug you with the fine multi disciplinary and technical details for why we disagree with you in this instance. Therefore, you might stop hearing from us for awhile.

If your friend the entrepreneur seems to be avoiding you, it’s not personal. I am sure they still love you even if you did accidentally put them in harm’s way or you did argue something irrelevant to their company stage, market, or technology.

By: Sherri Douville CEO & Board Member at Medigram, Inc. https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdouville/