“A global battle unlike any the world has ever seen approaches. November 9th-18th, Startup Weekend teams will compete as a part of Global Entrepreneurship Week…”[1]
That’s the promotion for a startup competition set for November 9-19, the “world’s largest startup competition.”
“This year’s edition of Global Startup Battle is going to be bigger and better than ever. More than 1000 teams in more than 100 cities compete for world startup domination…”[2]
“Rally your troops for battle and defend your city’s startup pride.”[3]
Their heart is in the right place, we suppose. Contests build excitement, encourage budding entrepreneurs, bring people together.
But “battle?” “World domination?” “Rally your troops?” We’re not so certain about all the military analogies that slop into business strategy or literature, let alone in the business of fledging entrepreneur hopefuls. Is this really the way we want them to see the world?
And we’re not at all sure that business plan competitions are the best way to help people learn to build successful companies. For one thing, competitions are decided by judges, not customers and P&Ls. For another, in competitions there is a winner and the rest are losers. Are the teams who put together plans and poured their souls into their ideas in the hope of succeeding really “losers” because they didn’t win a beauty contest?
A Russian botanist friend, world-renowned as a taxonomist (a classifier of plants) was fond of saying over shots of brandy: “Competition produces fitness!” David Sarnoff, first president of RCA and a pioneer in consumer television, often said, “Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in men.” In a macro-economic sense, competition is a good thing. In the marketplace, even in politics, we recognize that competing interests in the long run produce a more fit economy and better livings standards, challenges in equitable distribution of benefits notwithstanding. But we think we would all do well in the world of fostering the next generation of entrepreneurs to keep in mind the kind of “competing” that will actually help them learn and grow.
In the startup world, unlike winner-take-all contests, unless two or more startups are going head-to-head at exactly the same market, it’s not a winner-take-all framework, not world domination as the hottest new team with the best idea. What does a contest teach all those companies the judges don’t love? Especially if it’s a global battle for survival? Survival for what? In the startup world the competition is not with other startups vying for the favor of people passing judgment on plans and presentations. Instead, the competitor to focus on is anyone who is vying for the favor of your customer’s wallet. Any entrepreneur with a good idea filling a valid need that someone will pay for, any team with good execution and a differentiated solution can be a winner. Sometimes the best allies and resources a startup team can have are the startups around them. Anyone in an accelerator or incubator can tell you that. They are not in some guerilla war to out-dominate each other.
There’s no social value in war and battles, except maybe survival. Entrepreneurship doesn’t need to be about destroying an enemy (aka competitor) so much as collaborating and marshaling resources to be successful and produce a social good. Maybe we would all do well to remind ourselves once in awhile that building and running companies is not war, or even battles in a war. The only thing war and launching a company have in common is that both are a struggle for survival. In war you use violence to survive by killing your enemy. The biggest enemies of startup entrepreneurs are not their brethren starting other companies: the true enemies are Sloppy Thinking about Markets, Misguided Execution, and Sloth. Clever ideas and slick presentations that impress judges can win contests but they’re not necessarily the formula for success in starting successful companies. Which is the more important in building the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators?
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