How not to get divorced – lessons from serial entrepreneurs

I was at a dinner at Downing College (Cambridge) where our after dinner speaker was Jody Chatterjee who has had a rich career in many different roles. His honesty about the roller coaster ride of an entrepreneur was engaging! Jody spoke at the end of a long day of thinking about entrepreneurship in large organisations that was being run for Haniel by Ashridge Management College. Haniel is a family owned 35,000 employee organisation from Germany, with a diversity of businesses.
The others contributors were Claudio Marinelli from Nokia, Dan Sandhu from ACIS and Rob Stewart from Stevenage Packaging.
Each painted a rich picture for us to think about.
They were pretty unanimous on the fact that entrepreneurs work with a passion to make things better or to make better things – that solve problems.
Entrepreneurial people are driven by seeking freedom and autonomy to make decisions. This is a dominant theme from the conversations. If entrepreneurial people involved did not have this freedom to act and to act quickly they would wilt.
Entrepreneurs are impatient to get things done; making them hard to live and work with, but the passion to make things better comes with the impatience to get it done. The impatience also comes over as being somewhat “crazy”. So they are seen as disruptive influences within the organisation!
Very low tolerance for internal politics – in the end is it possible to be an entrepreneurial employee in a large organisation to succeed without “political skills”?
On a very personal level – everyone acknowledged the role played by their family in supporting them. The short hand was framed in the evening as “find out how not to get divorced”. The point being – what is the purpose of entrepreneurial success if in the end it breaks up the things that in the long term are what matter – family?
In the past – in my consulting role when I have been mentoring people with their ambitions to start and to grow their businesses – the key question that has stopped people in their tracks about what they want to do – has been to ask – Do you have a “contract” with your family? Do they know you will put the house on the line, the level of risk you want to take, that you will behave in a totally obsessive ways for months, not sleep much, get irritable if things are not going the way you want, feel highs and lows of emotions and you will hardly be around either mentally, physically or emotionally? The family needs to understand this in order to be able to truly support you!
Entrepreneurs I have met who have managed to be realistic about the work load and the risks and been able to get the support of the family – whether this is their partner or their parents or siblings have been truly amazing because they have a kind of freedom that others who are trying to balance their entrepreneurial ambitions with family obligations simply do not have.
It is unlikely you will find the answers in books and videos, just talk openly to a friend with wisdom.

Enterprise Tuesday kicks off on October 20th

This year the flagship course at Cambridge - Enterprise Tuesday which attracts over 1500 registrations and regular attendance of 300 - 400 is set to be a blockbuster! The main reasons is that we have made some radical changes to the format this year. In addition to the classic evenings of very high quality talks followed by networking we also have aligned with "Silicon Valley comes to Cambridge" and are part hosts to a debate at the Cambridge Union (on a Thursday!). We are also doing a networking only evening - having invited 20+ of the local successes - our Entrepreneurs in residence - to interact with the audience. This will be hosted in the magnificent setting of the Judge Business School over two floors.

There are also going to be "Live" rehearsals of elevator pitches and panel discussions on several evenings.

Beyond the format changes - the speaker line up - the headlines are as follows:

Plastic Logic founder Prof Henning Sirringhaus with his investment and management team members. This is a big current story as the research and the commercial ambition is to stimulate the start up - not just of a company - but also of an industry - in plastic electronics.

We then have Kell Ryan - to tell us about meeting customer needs. He recently retired from marketing position at Ryan Air (The name is no coincidence).

Sanjeev Bikchandani is coming over from India to talk about growing his business. It is one of the fastest growing internet companies around - and the biggest job site in India. He is a dynamic entrepreneur and is coming over just to do our talk!

David Cleevely and Andy Richards are highly successful Cambridge based Business angels and serial entrepreneurs. David is in wireless and telecoms while Andy is in biotechnology. Both are highly influential in the investment community and in their industries.

E T will be on a Thursday this year to make best connections to our regulars - and the guest line up includes the founders of LInkedIn, Twitter etc., The event has its own website - SVC2C.

Finally we hear from a panel of recent alumni of Enterprise Tuesday. People who have been inspired to get started with their own companies. They will share with us the why and the how on the evening. It is bound to be animated. The names are less famous - but the energy and the future prospects are fabulous.

Next term - we kick off with Prof Chris Winter who was co-founder of Cambridge Antibodies. He has done a number of other companies in biotech and is a hugely respected academic.

In order not to protract the blog - let me say that the last of the series is with Warren East from ARM - and I am hoping we will get as much of a public view as possible about the battle lines between ARM and Intel