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Founder Readiness 65

How do you stack up against the list? If you are like 99 percent
of startup founders, you possess some but not all of the above char-
acteristics. This shouldn’t deter you from pursuing your startup goals.
Few entrepreneurs cover all the bases when it comes to the perfect
entrepreneurial profile. But most highly successful founders under-
stand who they are and how their personality matches up with the
type and phase of startup they are launching. They then find and col-
laborate with people whose personalities and capabilities comple-
ment their own.

MAP YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Despite a few well-known examples of college dropouts who launch
world-changing startups, entrepreneurial research supports the no-
tion that the right kind of prior business experience, effectively ap-
plied, greatly enhances a founder’s probability of success.8 Even in
the technology sector, widely assumed to be the domain of young,
upstart entrepreneurs, data point to a strong link between experience
and success. A 2009 Kauffman Foundation study entitled “Education
and Tech Entrepreneurship” discovered that the majority of success-
ful tech founders are “middle-aged, well educated in business or
technical disciplines, with degrees from a wide assortment of schools.
Twice as many United States–born tech entrepreneurs start ventures
in their fifties as do those in their early twenties.”9

Beyond bringing skills and relationships that will help you as an
entrepreneur, the value of experience is primarily about pattern
recognition. A person who has spent years in a particular industry can
more quickly and accurately connect disparate data points into mean-
ingful trends and opportunities, seeing cause and effect where others
see only fog.

As with motivation, some types of experience are more beneficial
than others. Map your own background and skills against the following
six areas that prove valuable to almost any startup founder.

INDUSTRY, PROFESSIONAL, OR TECHNICAL EXPERIENCE THAT DIRECTLY

RELATES TO YOUR CHOSEN STARTUP – What do you know how to do at the
highest level? What can you do better than most everyone else? How does your

American Management Association • www.amanet.org