Loneliness and isolation spell the death of the startup: Founders should seek good communities, not workspaces
There are negative tones around the UK’s startup ecosystem right now. We’re witnessing a downturn where it’s expected many companies will struggle to survive, let alone grow.
Out of the 600,000 new companies founded in the UK each year, the majority fail. Most never make it past year three. Their exciting new ideas join the rest in the ‘tried but failed’ pile as further proof of the immense challenge of creating a successful business.
As founders, we’re reminded of this every day by the media, our friends, our families. The public and the media perceive our work as a sort of hobby. We’ve all heard the joke about VC being the middle class dole. Attempts to convince it of our serious attitude towards business are often met with smiles of sympathy. ‘When do you think you’ll get a real job?’, they ask.
Such an approach only does one thing to us: it isolates us. Yes, we know the odds of success are low, but we’re fine with that, otherwise we wouldn’t have started. Our friends’ negative approach may be unintentional, but to succeed we know that we need to surround ourselves with positivity. We stop talking to them about work. We begin to suffer from ‘founder loneliness’.
This, in my opinion, kills more startups than anything else. Sure, we can blame a lack of sales. But finding out what causes the sales shortage is the real question. The solution to that is the key to success.
Getting to the root of the problem
Recognising the cause of the problem is no simple task. It’s obscure, and therefore not easily defined.
One man who has tried is Tom Eisenmann, a 25-year Harvard Business School professor, angel investor, and member of multiple elective boards. Discovering the root cause of startup failure was so important to Eisenmann that he dedicated an entire book to it. Hundreds of founders and investors contributed insight to Why Startups Fail. And through it, Eisenmann made a conclusion: bad ideas were not the problem. It was the people behind them.
For startups to succeed, in Eisenmann’s opinion, they need to pull the right people into their project. That includes investors, cofounders, partners, and contractors. All need to be selected with the utmost care. They need relevant industry experience. They should be invested in the success of the business in some way - even third parties.
But for most of us Eisenmann’s solution is really hard to achieve: access to those prime industry contacts and partners is a tough feat for most founders, even those with MBAs from Harvard. It’ll definitely be a struggle for most to convince a garment manufacturer to invest in your company instead of a VC, as Eisenmann suggests in his book.
Considering our workspaces
Communities are often associated with the spaces they occupy, and the pandemic has forced a lot of companies to reconsider those spaces. For early-stage founders, that won’t be a big open-plan office in the centre of their nearest city. One of their team’s dining rooms might be a better bet. A nearby café perhaps. Or, as is most popular, a flexi-location co-working space.
The ideal of the co-working space appears to offer the missing jigsaw piece to our complex puzzle of success: community. For those working alone or in small groups, like founders, co-working spaces claim to eliminate loneliness. They’re supposed to be about being together. But many of my founders and I have found the reality is far from that ideal.
Co-working spaces have become synonymous with the exact problem they attempt to eliminate. They’ve become hives of loneliness. Most of the people who use them are corporate salespeople who want to get away/have been forced to move from the traditional office. Everyone focuses on their own thing. And instead of bringing us closer together, co-working spaces just concentrate our isolation in small spaces.
The reason this has happened is simpler than you might think. In attempting to create spaces where collaboration thrives, co-working office companies focussed on design and location. Many assumed these two factors would create the necessary climate. Their customers would do the rest.
Co-working office companies got the wrong end of the stick. Spaces aren’t good for building communities because of the way they’ve been designed. It’s the strength of the communities that make those spaces good. Especially for us Brits, we’re awful at having meaningful conversations with strangers. Co-working spaces can hardly expect to throw us together and, ta-da!
Instead of focussing on the places we choose to work, founders should be focussing on the people they bring with them and surround themselves with. Dining room, café, or co-working space - it really doesn’t matter. The important factor is finding a good group of people who have empathy with our work challenges and seek the same type of community we need as founders. We aim to fill our offices at all times with founders at Techstars London to drive that community - we know much of our value lies with the people we accept into the programme, our mentors and how we maintain that community.
Isolation is the #1 killer of startups. Finding a community to overcome it is crucial. But it’s important we find realistic ways to build those communities. Relocating to a ‘collaborative’ co-working space is rarely the answer, unless there’s more to being part of that community than just money as the barrier to entry, there needs to be something that enables and facilitates bonding.
