What startups can learn from Brick & Mortar
What startups can learn from Brick & Mortar
What startups can learn from Brick & Mortar
- Patience is a key virtue of many successful Brick & Mortar entrepreneurs
- Startups should not feel they are special, school of hard knocks applies to all
I had an interesting conversation a few weeks ago with Norhalim Yunus, CEO of the Malaysian Technology Development Corporation (MTDC), a pioneer agency set up by the Malaysian government in 1992 to help its companies develop technology and increase the rate of innovation.
Having been with MTDC for 15 years, the last eight as its CEO, Halim, as he prefers to be called, has seen up close how hard and long the journey to success is for the entrepreneurs they fund and help grow through market access and capacity development programmes.
But today, he is bothered by the hype created around the concept of the unicorn startup. Specifically because it seems to be creating this notion that success can be fast-tracked and can be delivered to your feet by acquiring non paying users – while basking in a series of press conferences, media interviews and speaking at conferences.
The reality is the total opposite with success often taking more than a decade worth of hard work and built on many small steps forward. And startups could probably learn a lot from the slow and steady determination shown by traditional entrepreneurs who just roll up sleeves and start building bit by bit and with nary a journalist in sight or press conference given or full of complains about how large companies are taking advantage of them.
The latter was what a startup recently groused about. They faced a situation where a large company did not want to pay for their service but were willing to let the startup use them as a reference.
It is common to hear startups complain of this. But I got news for them. It’s not new. Ask any of the pioneers of the dot com era from the late 1990s on and you will hear the same thing.
And it’s not just the large companies. Even a smaller companies will do this. A media company back in 2001 negotiated for a dot com, as startups were known then, to build their Content Management System (CMS), in exchange for giving them credit on their site, ad space and using them as a reference customer. This went on for over five years!
Startup founders just have to grit their teeth and deal with it and stop feeling like it's a situation only they face. The journey is hard enough without some of them starting to form a belief that everyone is against them.
Even when you have moral support from the highest levels, it doesn’t translate to succees. A senior banking executive told me he will ignore emails from startups that talk about how the central bank, known as Bank Negara Malaysia, and the Securities Commission of Malaysia, are supportive of them and urge banks to partner with them. Drop that line, fintechs!
And with that, let me end my penultimate column for the year and wish all those celebrating Christmas, a Merry Christmas and to the rest of us, an extended weekend as Christmas falls on a Sunday. Watch out next week for DNA’s Fave 5, where all of the editorial team recollect their top five stories of the year and why those five stand out for them. I will get the ball rolling.
Have a restful weekend and productive week after.
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