Visions make the world turn, and so do ideas. But none of those ideas would be worth shit, if there wasn’t a pool of talent to make them tangible. None of those ideas would ever be executed without the teams who execute them.

The Demonization of Employment

It is the spin of the pseudo entrepreneur. They spin entreprepreneurship as a zero sum game. According to them , if you are an entrepreneur, you are everything right; hardworking, creative, driven, and on your way to self actualization. That attribution could be true but is not only limited to entrepreneurs, nor is it guaranteed that all entrepreneurs have them. Conversely, when you are employed, you are lazy, unmotivated and, lack ambition. This is counterproductive as any entrepreneur needs a team. It can actually be argued that a team is more important than an entrepreneur. Daudi Were, the ED for Ushahidi likes to say there is no need to hire someone who is less brilliant than you. Any entrepreneur who doesn’t recognize that is in for a high turnover rate. Research shows that employees leave bosses, not jobs.

Moreover, most founders cut their teeth working elsewhere. The bottomline is there is room for both, and we should, in the words of Chinua Achebe, let the eagle perch, and let the hawk perch.

A typical public image of an entrepreneur is cool. At the extreme end of this cool entrepreneur spectrum is the too bright ivy league dropout, who once called a garage an office, now heading a global behemoth. When this story is told by the entrepreneur, it tends to include the hard bits. However, over time, they become a passing reference that only merits a phrase. The rest of the story becomes condensed into anecdotes and sound bites so sleek you’d think there are no major challenges in entrepreneurship, or any major challenge encountered will be overcome, therefore, a true entrepreneur will always be successful. Even events that have been setup to evaluate failure lionize it. This is the story most get to hear. The sheer sacrifice required to get there is overlooked. The challenge with sound bites and polished anecdotes is they mask some truths that whomever wishes to join the bandwagon should consider.

Similarly, you need certain skills to make it work as entrepreneur. Someone I spoke to for this article said, people overestimate what they are capable of. He went further to wonder why people assume they can execute in entrepreneurship when they couldn’t hit targets in employment. They posited that entrepreneurship is about creative freedom. You start your own thing when the alternative spaces are too constraining for you to realize it.

em·ploy /əmˈploi/ - Make use of.
(eg: the methods they have employed to collect the data)

Be careful and wise though because once they are done using you, you'll be discarded as you can see it happening in the Kenyan market.