trendpreneur

In the past, I may have lamented the slightly smaller worldview that’s a natural side-effect of starting a business outside the Silicon Valley bubble. (Balanced, of course, by a heightened awareness of how the world works outside California and the US, in places without early adopters and device penetration and AT&T.)

However, idly musing on my longer term ambitions and ideas, a thought crystallised. While thinking big is definitely the path to changing the world, thinking too big can stop you even getting off the ground in the first place. Businesses evolve and rewrite their raison d’être on a constant basis – start with something safe, something that will a) work, b) get built, c) launch, d) have customers and e) get bigger. I’ve seen startups with grandiose dreams stuck at all stages of this iterative cycle without the rocket fuel to propel themselves around again.

In other words: execute! But to execute you need to pick something executable in the first place.

On a more individual level this thinking leads me to the conclusion: there’s no shame or harm in creating a small, successful business and then doing your Big Idea. In fact, while a lot of the media successes are focused on first-time college kids, there are plenty of serial entrepreneurs who aren’t learning everything for the first time, and doing jolly well as a result.

‘Safe’ is a curse word in a world where risk is everything, and I don’t advocate starting a franchise of Subway or anything like that. Even things like starting up a coding or design consultancy, selling handmade jewellery on Etsy, or becoming a paid blogger all – to me – count as baby steps on the entrepreneurial ladder. Course, I’ve done two of the three so maybe I’m biased. (I had an eBay shop, not Etsy.) Depending on your day job, a lot of the relevant experience might already be yours – but don’t underestimate the differences between flying solo and with a harness.

If you’re burning with a big idea, the time and team are right, and you have money to play with, by all means go for the gold. If not, think of how many of today’s successes started as small, experimental, safe side projects – “let’s build a website to scratch that itch” rather than “great idea, let’s raise $5mm” – and just get out there trying stuff that can give you a winning formula to base your future efforts on, or fail quickly enough that it doesn’t matter.

I’m personally going to try out idea iteration – spending two week cycles on each idea in my ideas book, long enough to build a prototype and do some acid testing, short enough to avoid tunnel vision. The test? If after two weeks I don’t want to change tracks, I’m on to something ;)

Are you in your late twenties or early thirties? Did you grow up in Britain and have fond memories of Britpop, Blair and Big Brother? (Scratch that last one..)

I’m working on a wee project combining video and music of the times, and I’d love to collect memories from the time. Wow, that makes it sound like history… Anyway, we all have fond flashbacks to the age of heat reactive tie-dye shirts, and although my middle-of-the-road upbringing is chock full of happy reminiscences, I want more variety!

So, if you have a story, a memory, a moment to share from around 1992 to 2000 – for me, my high school years – and especially if it’s closely related to (or described by) a song popular in the same time period – please share it with me :) You can comment here/on Facebook, or email me (mail at jennielees dot net). Oh, and it doesn’t have to be meaningful or funny – just true.

Hmm, should I start a site to collect these or keep them private?

Here’s mine: our endless school assembly pop culture parodies. I remember dressing up as Mikey from Boyzone (I secretly wanted to be Ronan), doing a Grease ripoff for a departing Latin teacher that was, in retrospect, dangerously suggestive, and for some reason I posed as Renton from Trainspotting in front of our class blackboard in N3. God knows why. Anyway, cue montage! I wonder if kids these days do the same type of thing…

It’s strange being back in Edinburgh after six months away. The city feels comfortable, like an old pair of shoes you forgot you had; the weather isn’t a patch on the South Bay, of course, though it’s not too dissimilar from San Francisco. Minus the wind.

I’m fortunate enough to have lived in and around three lovely cities in my lifetime; Brighton, Edinburgh and San Francisco. Cambridge was pretty nice, too, inspiring yet overwhelming (and suffocating) in its way. Recently, my management coach (for I am growed up and have such things) advised me to travel as much as I can now — to visit the places I’ve always wanted to visit, to live in new countries, to have these sought-after experiences.

So, I shall.

Living in a different country is a fun experience, no matter how similar the country to your own. Even living in Scotland was a change from England — accents, customs, friendliness, the health service… America is a step beyond, a strange mirror country where things are sort-of-but-not-quite the same. On returning to the UK, I see it clearer than ever before. It’s not just that cars drive on the wrong side of the road, it’s the traffic customs around crossing in certain places. It’s not that the health service is totally different, it’s that doctors’ offices have credit card terminals at the front.

Stephen Fry puts it far better than I ever could, and hits the nail on the head — it’s not just that things are superficially different, but under the skin, that’s where it’s interesting.

The next adventure is to go somewhere totally different. In a way, it seems that it would be easier to learn a completely new culture than to do a botch job of assimilating one slightly but not quite the same. But we shall see. For now, I am enjoying the comfort of an old friend in Edinburgh, and secretly plotting my eventual growing of roots here.