Reading :: Entrepreneurship in the Wild

Entrepreneurship in the Wild

By Felipe G. Massa

I’m always on the lookout for a textbook that suits my upper-division class, Writing for Entrepreneurs. So when I saw this book, I went ahead and ordered it. I’m glad I did. Although it doesn’t quite hit the target for that class, it’s a good explanation of how to move from an idea to launching a startup. 

The book draws from Lean Startup methodology, Design Thinking techniques, the Jobs to be Done framework, Moore’s positioning statement, personas, customer journeys, and other familiar bits and pieces that have been adopted by entrepreneurs. And, importantly, it provides worksheets and guided exercises so that readers — whether students or budding entrepreneurs — can follow along, building their own entrepreneurial ideas step by step.

The process starts with generating ideas, and progresses from there. The chapters are:

1. Ideas with legs
2. Finding your first customer
3. Validating the opportunity
4. Designing customer journeys
5. Modeling your business
6. Positioning your solution
7. Validating your solution
8. Projecting financials
9. Pitching your startup
10. Launching your startup

And the book demystifies financials, which are a weak point for me.

So the book has a lot going for it. However, I’m not sold on it for my specific class, for the following reasons:

There’s no overarching concept. Like most entrepreneurship books, it doesn’t offer a unified framework so much as a grab bag of different bits-and-pieces solutions (listed above). These components are all useful, but they are also disjointed: they don’t have an overarching theory or theme that pulls them together. I don’t think this is a problem with the book so much as it is a symptom of entrepreneurship as a practice. These components work in practice, but I want them to work together, fitting into an overall thesis / argument / concept. 

It’s about entrepreneurship, not entrepreneurship communication. The book focuses on the broader process of entrepreneurship, while my class is really more focused on entrepreneurship communication. So, for my purposes, it doesn’t focus enough on developing the value proposition as a claim or using a minimal viable product (MVP) to communicate with potential customers about expectations. 

It’s about success, not failure. Entrepreneurship is inherently risky, and even when the entrepreneur does everything right, they might fail for reasons beyond their control. I discuss failure a lot in my Writing for Entrepreneurs course, but it’s not discussed here. 

It presents entrepreneurship as linear, not iterative. Related to the above, entrepreneurship is about finding a viable pathway to sustainable success, and that pathway rarely follows a straight line. I wanted the book to cover iterating, pivoting, and questing more than it did.

It’s anchored in business cases, not in empirical research. Look, business books usually draw on business cases, and these are usually retrospective stories told by successful founders. These can be very useful, but they tend to skew our ideas because we end up hearing edited stories from winners about how they won. These retrospective stories leave out a lot, and winners often overestimate how much they had to do with the win. To learn about entrepreneurship, we need to hear more about losing and how to handle it, and we need a more systematic account of what entrepreneurs do. 

But keep in mind that I’m providing a wish list for the book I want, not the book that entrepreneurs necessarily need or the one that this author wanted to write. Although I stand by all of the above, at the end of the day, this is a good solid book for entrepreneurs, one that gives them vital tools and maps out a journey for them. If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, but don’t know where to start, this is a really good place.