Entrepreneurship itself is a pit.

Entrepreneurship is a pit, or you dug it yourself.

The state encourages mass entrepreneurship. Someone is starting a business, and everyone is talking about starting a business. It is no longer a chicken soup that stays in a circle of friends. But before entering the entrepreneurial circle, you should know that entrepreneurship itself is a pit. In addition to jumping, you can choose to use 107 B or into the pit to turn your arms back and tuck your knees for three weeks.

Entrepreneurship is like immigration. Time will tell you that not everyone is suitable for starting a business. Maybe one day we can see the glory of the second when you ring the bell. For this second, how many people fell into the pit and missed the hammer.

We dug a few pits from Didi's entrepreneurial story that you must step on before starting a business. I hope you can make a soft landing.

The first pit you have to cross is yourself.

Every idea of starting a business will be questioned at the beginning. You have to ask yourself, can't others say no? Just as others say you can do it, can you really do it? You don't need to build confidence from others, but you should have your own value judgment on business, which is an essential quality for entrepreneurs. The key is, how can you be sure that your judgment is correct? No way, the only safe way is to draw inspiration from your own areas of concern or daily life. Every time Didi CEO Cheng Wei goes to Beijing for a business trip, he will crash because he can't get a taxi. This is what he just needs, and it is also the pain point of the public. At that time, taxi drivers didn't need smart phones, and everyone thought Didi was unreliable. Cheng Wei doesn't know whether he can do it. He trusts his intuition and follows it. When the market is immature, there will be opportunities, that is, when everyone thinks it is feasible, the market will be saturated. The premise of starting a business is that you are impulsive in confident business judgment, not the other way around.

The second pit, as long as you work hard, you will have results.

"In the end, things will be solved. When there is no escape, God will give you a window. Entrepreneurship is not chicken soup for the soul. If you really believe it, then don't start a business. Entrepreneurship is often stepping on the node of luck. Cheng Wei couldn't find a partner, so he happened to meet the right chief technology officer. Finally, the driver didn't order, and there was a heavy snow at the end of 20 12, and the order broke through a thousand overnight; If you don't meet the other half, if it doesn't snow, what if it doesn't rain? The only thing you can do is to try and make mistakes as quickly as possible, polish the product and get ready for all the wind. If there is no drip, who can snow achieve?

In the third pit, as long as the entrepreneurial project is heavily vertical, the chances of winning are great.

Pure dry goods that are familiar in the entrepreneurial circle, such as "entrepreneurship should be narrow and deep", "lean entrepreneurship" and "aiming at sub-sectors and building market barriers quickly", will definitely make you want to move. Once you start a business, the little potential energy you have accumulated in the vertical field immediately attracts your attention. When Didi entered the market, some Yi Dao cars were transformed to the Internet. When a certain climate is formed, the opponents are LBS (Location-based Service) platforms with a large number of highly sticky users, such as Baidu, Gaode and Dianping. Later, I chose to cooperate with Tencent Map to open WeChat payment (big cities use Didi to make tickets to force users to open WeChat payment, and WeChat red envelopes are later). Then they continued to spend money quickly, and they also came from abroad when they were doing car business. Without the government's red tape, Didi was almost asked to be taken off the shelf for various reasons, such as unsafe driving to see the mobile phone and suspected of disturbing the order of vehicle management. A taxi APP with a simple function can't be simpler, and it is really a tragic fight behind it. There is actually a crisis behind the micro-innovation you envision. BAT (the three giants of the Internet: Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent), peers and the government are only visible rivals. Your invisible enemy is actually time. Whoever can seize the market share quickly will win the battle. Didi can fly at the speed of light, regardless of time constraints. In addition to being rooted in the vertical field, it also relies on its excellent resource integration ability, super team execution and the opportunity to cut into the market. A slight negligence will soon be quickly surpassed, and the overlord of the rivers and lakes will cease to exist.

The fourth pit, entrepreneurs must be industry elites with rich experience.

Where did you get so many necessities? No Zuckerberg's Facebook, no Jobs' Apple, no Musk's Tesla? None of them had much experience at first. Their gifts are foresight and the ability to realize ideas. You have to ask yourself, is your company inseparable from you? What really pushes everyone forward is your vision, and the bottleneck of realizing your vision is your understanding. Work experience is probably the reason for your failure in starting a business. Success under a mature system and success under brutal market competition are two different things. Mature enterprises minimize the probability of making mistakes through process management, which leads to procrastination and difficulty in making a breakthrough. In order to survive, start-ups must try and make mistakes efficiently, find the best way to play, and continue to iterate after finding it. The entrepreneurial advantage of industry elites is not work experience, but industry insight, contacts and resources accumulated through work. Cheng Wei of Didi was born in Ali, and his business ability is offline. He completed the O2O transformation of traditional industries through an APP, relying on bundling the Internet thinking and the execution of offline exercise learned in Ali into soft power that can be grafted to new businesses. He has a keen eye, sees the opportunities brought by the fatigue of the taxi market, and at the same time has the ability to constantly break through the customs, which has created the current Didi, and these are only indirectly related to work experience. Entrepreneurship in the Internet era, many markets have not yet been discovered. At this point, young people, as deep users who have grown up with the Internet, have a more accurate vision. It is a natural advantage to be afraid of tigers when you first start out.

The fifth pit, you should have a team.

Admittedly, as the founder/CEO, your only task is to form a team with superhuman ideas. And your best friends, family members and classmates often join on the basis of emotions and hope to get economic benefits, which is far less than the long-term development of emotions based on economic interests. You don't have to have a team, you have to have a good team. Therefore, a team with hidden dangers is not as good as no team, and it will be clearer to fight alone for a while. When you meet your partner, ask them what they want most. Not with you, but with life and what life wants. Then think about how you can give them what they want. Cheng Wei of Didi can knock Liu Qing (managing director of Goldman Sachs Asia Pacific and daughter of Liu Chuanzhi) to death. He must have given her something that money can't buy. In fact, it is not enough to have a dream team in the end. Come back and ponder this sentence if you don't believe me. Entrepreneurship itself is a lonely journey, which has nothing to do with the team. Entrepreneurs have aristocratic temperament that can enjoy loneliness.

We just dug a few pits when you were about to start a business, so that you can think again before starting a business. It's a good idea. Entrepreneurship is a mental journey, a course and a mental journey with poor experience. In the next column, we will talk more about the pit in the process of starting a business. I hope you can see the bottom of the pit at a glance.

Entrepreneurship is a pit. You really dug it yourself.

Listen, the other one rolled forward three and a half times.

Comments: Tian Li (Associate Professor, Nankai University Business School)

As a WeChat entrepreneurship education column jointly launched by Nankai University Entrepreneurship Management Research Center and Hechang Liantou Company, the series "Above the Deep Pit" is our inaugural issue. The theme of this paper is intended to stand at the starting point of the entrepreneurial process, prompting several difficulties that entrepreneurs may encounter and helping them make entrepreneurial decisions more rationally. The reason why we pay attention to these topics is that the entrepreneurial upsurge in China is getting higher and higher, and the entrepreneurial penetration rate is not low, but there are obviously few opportunistic entrepreneurial enterprises with high potential and high growth. How to avoid blind and irrational entrepreneurial decision-making is not only related to the formation and growth of entrepreneurial enterprises, but also an important factor affecting the entrepreneurial structure of a country.

First of all, in academic research, scholars of entrepreneurial cognition and decision-making pay attention to "why some people choose to be entrepreneurs" and think that the formation of entrepreneurial intention is the result of subjective cognitive process under the condition of interaction between individuals and environment. It is found that entrepreneurs join enterprises because they think their success rate is high, but this estimate will not only be higher than their perceived success rate of other enterprises in the industry, but also higher than the objective success rate indicated by historical data in the industry. This phenomenon is closely related to the common cognitive bias and unique way of thinking of entrepreneurs. For example, compared with non-entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs have self-service bias, are overly optimistic and self-confident, and pay more attention to their own abilities than the environment. As stated at the beginning, "Time will tell you that not everyone is suitable for starting a business". It is the first key decision before starting a business to objectively and rationally evaluate entrepreneurial opportunities and evaluate the matching degree between opportunities and individuals.

Secondly, the paper mentions the speed of entering the market and how to accumulate organizational ability after entering. It is mentioned in the traditional competitive strategy that start-ups often choose to enter the market from the focus strategy and develop vertically in the market segments. However, if this market segment has profit space, it will soon attract retaliatory counterattacks from incumbent enterprises. As soon as Didi entered the market, it faced a scuffle between various competitors in the industry. At this time, on the one hand, we need to beat the market quickly and iteratively before the opportunity window is copied in large numbers; On the other hand, it is necessary to accumulate resources and team ability, grow together and form mutual support.

Thirdly, this paper mentioned the influence of previous experience on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial success. This is a long-standing topic in the theory of new characteristics of entrepreneurial research. To what extent does the quantity and quality of past experience (industry or entrepreneurial experience) help you realize your entrepreneurial dream? Can lead the coquettish "industry elite" or "newborn calf"? The research conclusions are not consistent. But at least we all agree that "success in a well-structured system and success in cruel market competition are two different things", so how to transform the effective components of past experience and quickly adjust the cognitive inertia brought by experience is probably more critical.

Finally, with the rise of knowledge economy, the complexity and uncertainty of entrepreneurial activities have become higher, far beyond the control ability of individual entrepreneurs, so team entrepreneurship has become the mainstream, and entrepreneurial research has changed from focusing on individual entrepreneurs to studying entrepreneurial teams. Related research topics emerge one after another, from the composition analysis of entrepreneurial team to the process of conflict and interaction among team members, and how these affect entrepreneurial performance, which greatly enriches the perspective of entrepreneurial research. This paper throws out several interesting points. For example, business-based friendship is far more reliable than friendship-based business, which inspires researchers to study the matching of entrepreneurial teams from the perspective of social belonging, which may be more likely to explain the success of entrepreneurship than simply analyzing the demographic characteristics of team members or the matching of industry functional experience.

To sum up, I hope that several interesting phenomena mentioned in this paper can not only inspire entrepreneurs, but also help entrepreneurs to effectively link phenomena and theories in their research and enhance their interpretation of reality. In short, entrepreneurship is risky and decision-making needs to be cautious.

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