1.1 – The Start Up Roller Coaster: Understanding the Highs & Lows
1.1 – The Start Up Roller Coaster: Understanding the Highs & Lows
This module describes the emotional roller coaster you ride when starting a company and suggests some principles for choosing your right approach. This emotional roller coaster represents a natural part of the entrepreneurship process, and you will find other chief executive officers (CEO), founders, and entrepreneurs go through similar experiences.
This module makes a case for being intrinsically motivated and passionate about problem solving as a method for surviving the emotional ups and downs of entrepreneurship.
The module covers the following topics:
- Romanticized CEO versus Reality CEO
- Recognizing The Hype Cycle
- Choosing Passion versus Profit and Risk versus Reward
- What Type of Entrepreneur Are You?
- What’s Your Motivation?
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
- Identify the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur
- Recall various concepts associated with entrepreneurship
- Discover personal motivations for considering entrepreneurship
Section A: Romanticized CEO versus Reality CEO
Modern media often romanticize startup founders as geniuses, visionaries, or mavericks. While becoming a chief executive officer (CEO), founder, or entrepreneur might offer the biggest buzz you’ve ever felt, entrepreneurship can also be a lonely activity. You may work harder than ever before, but may also spend long hours battling uncertainty. That’s why embarking on this journey requires conviction and passion to both embrace the joys of succeeding in your own business, and to survive both the naysayers and the emotional ups and downs.
To highlight both sides of this perspective, here are two examples:
| Romanticized CEO | Read about the glorification of the entrepreneur. |
| Reality CEO | Read about the realities of being a founder from the perspective of 2SLGBTQ+ entrepreneurs. |
Pause
Boyd Reid, Nick Baksh, and Tenille Spencer give their opinions on the reality of being an entrepreneur and discuss some specific challenges that they encountered on their entrepreneurial journey.
Reality CEO
The job description of a CEO is a bit of a paradox: it’s both simple and complex. A CEO has five main responsibilities:
1. Set & Communicate Strategy
The CEO sets the company’s strategy. Once that strategy gets established, the CEO needs to communicate their strategy clearly to everyone in the company.
Think of the startup as a ship and the CEO as the Captain. The ship and its crew want to sail from a starting point to a destination. The Captain charts the course and communicates the heading to the crew. If the crew misunderstands the direction, however, or worse decides to set their own course, the ship will lie stalled in the water. If it doesn’t sink first….
Authenticity and repetition should become key aspects of how CEO’s communicate to their teams. Great leaders communicate their strategy consistently and often. And if the strategy needs to change, a leader must have the confidence and