StartAp or Bounty Hunter

"Each person's career is essentially not much different from a startup - the authors of the book Reed Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and Ben Kasnoche are sure of this." Annotation to the book "Life as a startup: Build a career according to the laws of Silicon Valley"

Instead of the preface

In the process of final adjustments of this article, an acquaintance approached me and said that he liked my previous article “Blue Mazda or how to attract opportunities” , and that it is really easier to remember this effect, but he does not agree with the name of this effect (thanks to to the user, the alcanoid effect was interpreted as the “Baader-Meinhof effect”) and recommended me to read the book “Life as a startup: Build a career according to the laws of Silicon Valley” by Reed Hoffman and Ben Kasnoch. In this book, this effect is called serendipnost , but the essence of this does not change. But to my regret, and perhaps even happiness, in the same book, the principle is taken as the basis, which I wanted to state in this article. Compare Startup with job search. After some thought I left the text as I was before I got acquainted with the book, especially since it has not yet been read and the final conclusions have not been made.

We continue life stories from the series " How I do my startup or, if you wish, you can step on my rake ."

This time I want to show how I got rid of fear at the stage of searching for investment funds for the development of a startup. (Looking ahead, I will say right away, I refused investors, and the development of the project completely fell on my shoulders, but at a certain moment the “Idea” came how to ease this burden, but more on that later.)
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For myself, I came up with some kind of comparative characteristic (now fashionable to compare everything), which acts as a trick at the subconscious level.

In the event that you, as well as for me at one time, are scared and frightened by the very idea of ​​communicating with investors, I recommend this comparative characteristic. We train on cats, as they say.

We will compare the search for investors with job search.


The main indicators are presented below in the table. Thus, having drawn parallels, here I make the following main conclusions:

Startup	Work searches	findings
Investor	Employer	Startup - work for yourself / Work for uncle
Investments	Salary (remuneration)	The same uncles / aunts who hire you or donate money for development. That is, getting the money you need to work
Excess profit	Prize	According to the results of successful work (implemented projects, tasks, etc.), you can receive a bonus, that is, an additional profit to the salary. Also, in case of successful implementation of your idea, you can count on super-profit.
Idea	You yourself (your skills)	Here either you develop yourself and your idea or you and your skills are used for the benefit of a company.
Idea Presentation / Business Plan	Summary	It is generally almost the same. In the presentation, the product / idea is shown, whereas in the summary it is necessary to present yourself, and for some it is much more difficult to praise yourself.
Selling ideas / Search for investors	Interview Hike	During the interview, you have to tell about yourself, to present yourself, the main bias of which goes to your qualities, skills and experience, as a specialist in a certain field. The same with the idea of ​​an investor, you also talk about the advantages and principles of your idea / product. Awareness of this state of affairs makes the presentation process easier, gives an understanding of what to say and show, and what is better to remove and show after a trial period.
Accelerator	Labor exchange, job fair	A place where you will be noticed, accepted, warmed and taught how to work / develop a startup correctly.
Incubator	Advanced training courses, IBA	The place where you can apply your skills or learn new

For an investor, a startup, as well as for an employer, a hired employee is always a “cat in a bag”. After all, you can invest money, and in the bottom line you can’t get what you want, because the functions and skills stated in the resume and during the interview were greatly exaggerated, and sometimes implausible. And so it turns out that the employee in accordance with the resume is a professional, and in fact is an excellent corporate coffee and cookie shredder.
There is always a misunderstanding of what questions the investor will ask, what is right to reflect in the presentation, how much to ask for just enough.

After several trips to investors, as in the case of interviews, comes confidence and understanding of how some projects receive investments, while others do not. But we already discussed this issue in the article about “The Devil is in the Details or How to Go to an Investor” .

In conclusion, we can note the following: it is always easier to draw analogies, decompose into simple components and analyze in detail for oneself or another upcoming event. After all, fears arise before the unknown and incomprehensible, and when to work constructively on issues, then there will be no fear either. And this applies to the search for investors, and the search for work.