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So what do entrepreneurs need and universities don’t provide? I have personally met several graduates who did an Entrepreneurship MBA from Babson, a well-known business school for entrepreneurship, and ended up working for large corporations, and many students who seemed to have started their companies during their education and dropped out to start their business. As someone who has worked at Dun and Bradstreet and several large companies in the United States, and who has started numerous start-ups, some of which have failed or ultimately become unprofitable, I have found that the education provided at these Business schools produce good managers and executives who can run and manage billions of dollars and have clear business processes and a focus on repeatability.

When I reflect on these skills taught by Sloan or the Harvard business school near where I live, I found that these are great skills for CEOs of large corporations, and they are definitely what made such colleges and education so sought after. However, I was wondering if an entrepreneur needs such skills during the startup phase of a business? Reflecting on my successful startups, I realized that the skills needed for an Entrepreneur during the startup phase are very different compared to those of a CEO of a large corporation. For a startup looking for its initial sales and first repeat sales, the metrics the startup CEO should focus on should not be the same as those of a large corporation.

I have met a number of venture capitalists, government agencies, and other start-up funding organizations, and I find that many of them who do not understand the nature of entrepreneurship and start-ups are wrong.

The metrics that a startup should worry about for its business are:

• Customer Acquisition Cost.
• viral coefficient
• Customer lifetime value
• Average Selling Price/Order Size
• Monthly burn rate.

NO cash flow, balance sheet and income statement

I have been to many meetings with the board of directors and venture capitalists, and when they ask for financial and accounting statements, there is always a depressed feeling like for a new company, initial sales and income are always: ZERO, and cash flow box always — NEGATIVE. If a startup has a unique selling point, the “angels” should focus on customer development. Customer development is about testing hypotheses and developing a “minimum feature set” for the product, and finding out about early adopters, and what prices and features they are willing to pay. the majority of customers are one-offs and not repeat customers, and early customer retention is key.

The key entrepreneurial skills needed are to pivot and have agile development that is able to continually change and learn and develop products and features to meet the changing needs of its customers. Most of the skills taught in business schools are strategy, planning, and process. It’s not that they’re not useful, but the concerns of a startup are much more different than those of a large corporation. An entrepreneur needs to be very agile and manage chaos and use processes to make a profit, while a CEO of a large corporation needs repeatability, bureaucracy and management to continue the profitability of the company.

For an entrepreneur, developing a dynamic and constantly updated business model, a diagram of how a company creates, delivers and captures value, is more important than adjusting minor practices and replicating success. I believe entrepreneurship is a collective process, and an entrepreneur has to continually network, experiment, and engage customers to gain the skills necessary to run the business. Learn, Test, Adopt and Teach Others is a new method that has been successfully collaborated and tested by various incubators and entrepreneurs, which is more successful than the previous method where there is one author, one textbook and not much more interaction. Today, with social media, learning for entrepreneurs is an iterative process that is interactive and collectively makes us smarter.

What you can’t learn in books, you can experience in articles and blogs, and by interacting with others online and learning from their experience. Web 2.0 enables two-way communication, the most natural way to learn and develop the skills necessary to run a business. Managerial accounting, modeling for optimization, and global value chain strategies can be learned in business school, but what an entrepreneur really needs to know is technological entrepreneurship, patent law, finance, and technology. business management.

Lastly, I feel that creativity and innovation cannot be taught in schools, but can be influenced by practical experience and learning from other successful entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is an art and not just a balanced spreadsheet.