Annika and the Pattern of Foundational Selection
This story is a part of the book “How to Build Thriving Start-up Ecosystems: Five Information Patterns for Success.”
“…Can I just have a muffin?” a woman plucked a muffin from the tray, but hesitated, and ended up sitting down across from me.
My Masters thesis centered around the question of how entrepreneurs built the information networks they needed to become successful founders. I wanted to start my research where every entrepreneur starts on their journey: when they have an idea but before they take action.
This is the least understood and well-mapped sector of entrepreneurship. Since most entrepreneurs at this stage have made only slight steps — maybe they attended a workshop, registered a domain, or created some sketches of their product — it is very hard to get concrete, tangible data on who these people are. What is more, entrepreneurs at later stages often look down at people in this stage as “want-apreneurs” that might talk about their ideas but make no action to follow through.
While “want-apreneurs” are often stereotyped as lazy, only wanting the fame and lifestyle of an entrepreneur instead of the hard work, through my research I found this depiction inaccurate. These people were calculated risk takers, and there was something in their internal risk calculations that made entrepreneurship not feasible. Understanding the motivations and roadblocks of founders at the very first stage of entrepreneurship can help schools and communities widen their pool of entrepreneurial talent at the top of the funnel.
To understand the mental state of potential entrepreneurs I conducted interviews with as general of an audience as possible. The University of Michigan’s Shapiro Library serves as a meeting place for students across every school and across a broad range of different programs from undergraduates to Ph.D.s. This seemed like one of the best places to speak with potential founders from a wide range of backgrounds.
I set up a table with a homemade poster that said, “10 Minute Interviews with People Interested In Entrepreneurship — Includes Muffins!” and a tray of homemade muffins. I found a large number of people interested in free homemade muffins. A few were also genuinely interested in talking to me about entrepreneurship.
One of these people was Annika (name changed for privacy). Annika was already doing entrepreneurship in a sense, but was not aware that the activities she did were some of the fundamental activities of founders.
Annika was a Ph.D. student in child psychology specifically in the area of play. She had the idea for a start-up where children would take a diagnostic test and based on their scores, they would get personalized “play plans” of toys to encourage cognitive and motor skills they needed help in. This idea touched on a deep need for parents to do best for their children; it also offered the potential for massive partnership deals with toy manufacturers. Annika already in her free time crafted toys for nieces, nephews, and children of friends based on her assessment of their individual learning needs. She naturally was doing some of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship in terms of customer discovery, prototyping, testing, and iterating on her ideas.
Yet, Annika said she never seriously considered entrepreneurship for several reasons:
- She was soft-spoken. To her, entrepreneurs had to be outgoing and talkative.
- She was in a Ph.D. program. It was seen as a bad thing to be interested in anything to do with industry as she would not be seen as a “serious” candidate for teaching positions.
- It was her understanding that to be an entrepreneur, you needed an MBA, not a Ph.D.
- She was an Indian woman, and her parents did not see entrepreneurship as an appropriate path.
- While she was single at the moment, Annika thought any guy she dated would see entrepreneurship as a negative thing since it would take away from her ability to raise children.
Since Annika believed that entrepreneurship was not a viable option for herself, she did not seek out any entrepreneurship programs. She was unaware of programs like the Innovation in Action competition that would enable her the chance to pitch her idea to investors. She did not know about the Entrepreneurs Leadership Program that could pair her with another entrepreneur to guide her in the first steps of starting her company. Even in a university system that has been ranked within the Top 10 Best Entrepreneurship Programs in the country the last five years, Annika was unaware of the opportunity around her because she was not looking for it.
At this stage in entrepreneurship, the thing that kept Annika back was the belief that entrepreneurship was never realistically in her life path. Because of this belief, Annika misses out on exploring a new side of herself. Thousands of children miss out on new modes of play that can help them to build cognitive and spatial reasoning skills that will benefit them for years to come. The University misses out on potentially lucrative investments in Annika’s company.
Annika’s story was similar to other almost-founders I heard from that day. The difference between the people who want to become entrepreneurs versus those that do starts with a moment where entrepreneurship seems like a viable enough path that a person starts paying attention to entrepreneur-related information within their environment.
Attention As Energy
Walk for a few minutes with a friend through a city and then discuss the top five things you noticed on your walk. If your friend is interested in architecture, chances are they noticed architectural elements or styles of a certain building or plaza. A person interested in music might hone in on a band poster, while someone who is hungry might be more preoccupied by the restaurants that line the city’s streets.
It is likely that you both paid attention to different aspects of the city. This concept is called selective attention, where your brain prioritizes a certain event within or feature of a location over other elements of the environment (Fiebelkorn and Kastner). The ecological view of attention (EVA) posits that attention evolved through evolution as a mechanism to help humans process complex environments. Selective attention is a computationally intensive task for the brain, with the brain actively trying to identify the most behaviorally relevant objects (Moore and Zirnsak). To weed out unimportant or irrelevant aspects of the environment, or “information noise” people’s goals shape their selective attention (Lev-Ari, Beeri, Gutfreund).
To get someone like Annika to seek out cues that can help her advance through the university’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, she needs to select-in to noticing entrepreneurial information around her. Community Information Designers (CIDs) that want to increase entrepreneurship at the top of the funnel should start here: make entrepreneurship a realistic enough goal to strive for that a wider range of students begin to pay attention to entrepreneurship-related information. This is the information pattern of Foundational Selection, the action of selecting in to building a mental map around a central concept.
Building a Broader Funnel
The next two sections look at how CIDs can practically apply this concept of Foundational Selection to get more founders opting in to building mental maps of the entrepreneurship ecosystem around them.
“Role Models as Life Path Success Indicators” looks at how role models in advertising can be used to gain initial attention from a more diverse audience, and then how to back up this initial attention with concrete details to move initial attention to longer term mental map development.
“Changing the Risk-to-Reward Ratio” looks at the evolutionary underpinnings to why the pattern of Foundational Selection exists, and how to use this concept to change potential founders’ internal calculus.
