What’s Wrong With Today’s Entrepreneurs — And Lessons ekstemic Is Learning

If you’ve heard of Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, you’re likely familiar with the idea of pivoting and quickly reacting to changing demands. But if you listen to Harvard Business Review‘s Dan McGinn, you’ll hear a slightly different message: in today’s entrepreneurial circles, there’s a little too much pivoting — and not enough passion.

The notion that entrepreneurs aspire to start companies in which they have little vested interest is a relatively recent phenomenon. Time and time again, you may hear of an app that started off as x, pivoted to y, and now exists as z. Should entrepreneurs focus more on quality and long-standing value, or are there benefits to building enterprises as quickly and bare-bones as possible?

McGinn’s podcast, “What’s Wrong With Today’s Entrepreneurs“, is worth a listen, if only to get you thinking about the different approaches to starting a business or building a product.

In ekstemic‘s case, we like to think of ourselves as “in beta”. Though many consider the term to be overused — and perhaps a bit unusual for a blog — the phrasing gives us room to tinker and toy with new ideas and approaches before making a larger leap. Overhead has been minimal, and experiments have both succeeded and failed. But so far, our biggest lessons have been the ones we’ve learned along the way. There’s no better way to learn than to do — and for us, that means starting with a passion.