Musings On Social Impact Start-Ups In Cultures Very Different Than Your Own

Two Posts ago, I went on a tangent and began musing on perceived prospects of the Rotary Club to End Human Trafficking, Economic Development Initiative versus the Theodora Project. I made the statement.

"This isn't because I think the concept is bad, unworkable, or have the potential to make it. The problem is I don't have the time and the energy to make the start-up work."

Daughter #3, who has spent much of her recent career in the business start-up space, commented on her observations related to the massive amounts of time and energy that start-ups take, She further related that in the past she never questioned the costs that extracts on other parts of your life, but now she does. And she asked me to go into more depth with my related to my statement related to EDI. So here goes.

I would start by observing that not all start-ups are equal. For example, the start-ups that #3 has mostly been involved with - technology based, aggressively funded, with massive expectations for success are a special kind of artificial pressure cooker that can totally consume and grind down people. On the other hand, the kinds of small business start-ups that I have dealt with over my career, that often relate to the livelihood of those involved, have a different kind of pressure. Most that pressure is self-generated and relates to the need for the business to succeed in order for the founders to avoid financial disaster!

All start-ups take a lot of time and energy. I have always equated it to the laws of physics. If we think of Newton's First Law of Motion (special shout for extra credit from R in Madrid for using a physics reference), an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted on by an external force. Think of the start-up business as an object at rest. It has no customers. It is not producing a product or service. There is no cash flow. The external forces that start to change this are the time and energy of the entrepreneur / founder (or plural as the case may be) and capital. In the tech rapid growth world, much more capital is used to hire lots of bodies to do things. In the small business, it is the entrepreneur / founder who applies energy and time in lieu of capital to do things. 

In both cases, there will be a steep learning curve. No matter what one has thought the model will be or the prior experience one has, there will be lots of changes and adjustments along the way until a dependable model is moving along and the amount of energy, time and money can be backed off. In the small business start-up that almost always takes about 5 years.

Now look at the kind of social impact models with which I've been working. These have all the characteristics of the small business start-up but with the added complexity of simultaneously requiring complete culture attitude change. This takes the challenge to a substantially higher level. 

As I have slogged through all the learning necessary to get Theodora to a level of sustainability, I have begun to realize why most attempts to build new sustainable business models in less developed worlds fail...people simply are not willing to put in the massive amounts of time that are necessary to change the inertia of the existing cultural models. In my personal case if I had not been so 

a) determined, 

b) obsessed, 

c) crazy, 

d) stubborn, 

e) a & c, 

f) b & d, 

g) all of the above, 

I certainly would not have gotten us to where we are today.

Hence my comments related to EDI. It is a different model. The nature of the cultural challenges and change that must be overcome are different. I can see the energy and time that will be required. And I don't have it. And even if I did, I doubt I'd be willing to make that kind of commitment again. I will try to do somethings that involve more people to see if I can get at least a prototype started. But I would have to say overall, I'm not optimistic this one is going to happen.