Do you actually want a £100,000,000 startup, and have to go through the heartache and hassle of building something that could be a unicorn with all the courting and dealing with investors that entails, along with all the stress and heartache.
Or do you want a simple £2m, £4m annual recurring revenue business that posts £500k, £1m profit per year that you can build without selling your soul?
Like the sort of business where it is actually a family and you’re small enough to care and help people who work with you build the professional life you want?
For many, many years we’ve been pushing the definition of entrepreneur more and more into the stratosphere – for me this goes all the way back to the dotcom boom days – where you don’t have a real business, where you’re not doing anything proper unless you’ve pitched to a hundred VCs, and leased a loft space in Shoreditch, and have so may staff you can’t remember when you stopped trying to remember their names.
There’s real value in trying to bootstrap and build something smaller, from your own resources and cashflow. It doesn’t need to be huge.