Canadian geek in Myanmar

“So, tell me everything I need to know to start a tech company in Vietnam”

That was a question I was asked last week. And the guy was totally serious.  Even worse, he was an overseas Vietnamese or (VK as we are more commonly known here), in his 40’s and had just joined a tech startup as an ‘advisor’.

I had breakfast with a lovely female entrepreneur today and she told me she gets many similar kinds of enquiries. Either that or ‘how do you balance entrepreneurship with life/kids/etc’.  We had a good laugh over this supposed secret sauce of entrepreneurship, as if there was a silver bullet of some kind that made you brave (or crazy) enough to take the leap into this world.  If I had this sauce, I’d be rich and taking a helicopter to breakfast not a beat up, hot and run down Yangon taxi.

But after a couple of hours mulling this conversation, I realized that there actually is an answer.  The next time a want-erpreneur asks me, I’m going to say just fucking get on with it. Or I guess the more common vernacular is JFDI – just fucking do it.  Here’s the big secret: not one of us has all the answers and if we’re doing it right, we start with way more questions than answers. Every single entrepreneur I know goes through patches of faking it because that’s just what needs to happen.

Someone asked me today what my biggest lesson from last year was and I said that I learned to forgive myself.  Just fucking get on with it but give yourself room to fail.  Just fucking get on with it but forgive yourself when you make mistakes. Just fucking get on with it and when you fall, pick yourself up and move on.  So just fucking get on with it.  What’s the worse that can happen? Well, I guess a whole lot actually. But take it from someone who has gone through the worse possible first “exit”, it’s all survivable.