Reflection: Sometimes it is Reasonable to Expect Failure Before you even Begin

Caption:

I am very sad whenever I listen to entrepreneurs talking in a cheerful tone. Business should be about mutation, and temporary growth, followed by culling of weaknesses. Too many people try to ignore these things. So I am being the change I wish to see in the world. :)

- Would you start a business expecting it to fail?

- Would you start, expecting the business to die, as long as you can make a profit?

- Would you start, expecting to make a profit, also expecting to hurt and maim other parties in the process?

- Actually, how many entrepreneurs expect to extract value without taking it away from someone else? Can we be honest about this? Not just saying, or even hoping that it is true, but being willing to accept based on evidence that we may be wrong, and profit may necessarily destroy another party's livelihood? Do you still dare to be a business operator? Every day I ask myself... and strangely, I remain willing...

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Essay:

I've been thinking about risk profiles, this week. For most of my life, people have called me cynical. Yet expecting a negative return on investment is fairly reasonable when one expects the environment as a whole to fail (if everyone is going to die, simply aim to die last). So I started Googling about the #etiology and #epidemiology of businesses, to stimulate my thoughts about this.

Most businesses are short-lived, taking profit early on and shutting down under unprofitable conditions. But when I started my first business, I thought it might be the case that I would be stuck in it, whether it would be profitable or not, for twenty to thirty years... since I had no greater ambitions for my life. We're currently in our fifth year, and just the other day a supportive shareholder said he had simply hoped that we lasted more than three years - if only all shareholders were so kindly, as I believe, most are incensed by my management tactics.

As I think about the numbers, I realise that most businesses are designed to have no positive impact on their ecosystem - most are designed to extract resources, then dump the ecosystem for another. Perhaps part of why we have survived four years is because we aren't designed to do that - quite the opposite, since we are cognizant that the majority of our competitors are designed that way, we simply park all our brand equity investments in longevity. Most wars are won by attrition, and our brand is not supposed to be an exception to this rule.

I never intended to go into business to change the world, to this day my primary motive is to make money. I believe neither in human nor animal rights in an absolute sense, while I think these concepts can be useful in a society as long as their definitions are clear and legally enforced. But in the business ecosystem, a business that seeks to skim profit from the universe of all ecosystems must be able to thrive across all ecosystems, and building such a business from scratch is not supposed to be easy. In fact, to make the most money, a business is compelled to aim to change the world... that becomes a means to delivering shareholder profit, not a moral ends in itself.