The Story of Umar

Changing Founders’ Possibility Horizons

Rachel Aliana
6 min readMay 24, 2022
Created by ChatGPT.

This article is a part of the book “How to Build Thriving Start-up Ecosystems: Five Information Patterns for Success.

The last section focused on Annika’s story, a student on the brink of pursuing entrepreneurship. This section looks at founders a bit later in their entrepreneurial journey. These students are doing entrepreneurial activities, but they have gotten caught focusing on small problems or utilizing processes that cannot scale. These people are doing “subsistence entrepreneurship.” They never make more money than the amount of time that they put in, and are never able to systematize their work. Community Interaction Designers (CIDs) can play an important role to connect these founders to deeper problems and better tools to make the effort they put in have a larger impact.

A Tale of Two Kinds of Universities

While most of the interviews conducted were of founders at the University of Michigan, I also had the opportunity to speak with a dozen students at two other universities. The first university was Wayne State University, the second Stony Brook University. Both universities have a lot of entrepreneurship activity on their campuses, but most of this activity does not translate into high growth companies.

At Wayne State University I spoke with students who wanted to start entrepreneurial ventures that included: becoming a DJ, opening a bakery, and expanding a family member’s landscaping business. At Stony Brook University some of the businesses encountered were for reselling sneakers, opening a hair salon, and creating healthier chocolate bars to sell on Etsy.

Meanwhile, at the University of Michigan there were students who wanted to deliver better emergency room diagnostics across the country, who wanted to use big data analysis to create more resilient farms in developing countries, or who were developing a brain-controlled interface for paraplegic people to communicate. Almost every founder I spoke with at Michigan believed there would be a highly technical component to their company and that their reach could be national or international.

The students at Wayne State and Stony Brook were extremely intelligent and ambitious, but there was a difference in their perceived spheres of influence between them and the founders at Michigan. The Wayne State and Stony Brook founders had a distinct perception that they could only impact their local level and could not develop a start-up that was national or global in scale. Since these students believed they could only impact their local area, they only developed local mental maps of the entrepreneurship landscapes around them.

Possibility has a Price Tag

The ability to dream big and take big gambles is mediated by time, money, and knowledge. At Stony Brook I had the chance to talk with a man named Umar (name changed for privacy). His entrepreneurial journey played out differently than many at the University of Michigan largely because of his need to choose a business model that had a high probability of generating monetary returns in a short amount of time.

Umar did not have a car, so he was limited to jobs either on campus or accessible by bus. On Wednesday nights he would crash at a friend’s place on campus because he had early classes Thursday morning and he could not afford to live anywhere but his parents’ apartment, an almost two hour train ride away. While financial aid covered his tuition, he needed to pay for food and other supplies necessary for school. Entrepreneurship for him was not a resume opportunity but a necessity.

Umar noticed his friends had a hard time getting vape supplies. The closest store that sold vapes and cartridges was over a mile walk, and had a small selection with large mark-ups. Umar began casually by helping a friend get access to better vapes. He would purchase vape cartridges in bulk that he knew were good, pick them up at his parent’s apartment, and resell them on campus.

His business grew as he started to help an ever wider circle of friends. He became the go-to person for fast access to vapes. Umar had become so successful at this point that he considered printing his own labels for the vape cartridges he sold, and mixing his own vape juice to increase his profits and build his brand.

Umar’s business growth was some of the purest entrepreneurship I had ever seen. No pitch decks, no investors, no five-year business plans. Umar understood his community and their needs, and offered a solution to a problem his customers would immediately pay for. Yet, the scope of his endeavors never reached outside of the university. He also never tried to tackle other markets, such as helping student access other kinds of off-campus goods. His experimentation had a clear limit: he needed to see the returns of his entrepreneurial efforts by the first of every month.

Entrepreneurship As An Economic Risk Calculation

Every day all of us do innumerable economic calculations in our head across various different scales. Is that vacation worth the cost? Can I afford my rent and my phone bill? Can I add an avocado in with my groceries? When people become entrepreneurs, they are doing this same mental calculus but with more factors and several unknown variables.

One of these factors is simple. It is the number in one’s bank account. The probability of self-employment, specifically as the founder of a company “depends markedly upon whether the individual ever received an inheritance or gift ” (Blanchflower). When you can pay for help in designing, developing, or marketing your product or service, many of the obstacles that come with creating a start-up are easier to achieve. Still certainly not easy, but easier. And those with a larger initial stack have more time to test out their product, learn, and test again until they get product market fit right.

On the other hand of the equation, money also provides a parachute should one’s company be unsuccessful. Brockhaus and Macko both found in their research that entrepreneurs actually do not have a higher tolerance for risk (Brockhaus,Macko). They simply have more familial capital that has created “adjustments in risk perception.” The cost to start and run a business in its first year averages $40,000 in 2022 (Voidonicolas). To a rich person, forty thousand spent on creating a startup is a missed vacation around Europe. To someone in the middle class, it means having less money in one’s retirement account or losing out on a house downpayment. To someone who is poor it means not having food, shelter, or health insurance that year.

Resources Can Broaden the Mental Map

While universities should absolutely invest money in their strongest student entrepreneurs, many local colleges or state universities do not have large endowments or investment teams, making these kinds of trajectory-changing investments infeasible. In the absence of money that allows students to have more time to prototype, test, and learn, CIDs can play a pivotal role to help founders broaden their possibility horizons in economically feasible ways.

One way is to provide founders tools that increase the efficiency of their actions. More efficient tools that enable founders to do more with less energy expenditure enables them extra energy to widen the network of problems they can tackle. This idea is developed in the chapter “Building a Collaborative Toolbox.”

CIDs can also help founders find deeper problem areas that can lead to scalable businesses through programming, detailed in the section “The Work & Start Model.” The Work & Start Model enables students to intern with organizations while they develop a potential company idea.

With each lever CIDs can pull — -provide better tools, or access to deeper problems — — CIDs make it possible for founders in subsistence entrepreneurship situations to expand their possibility horizons. Helping these students build scalable organizations helps the entire ecosystem become a place where students from any walk of life can dream bigger. This is one of the deepest goals of a university.

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Rachel Aliana
Rachel Aliana

Written by Rachel Aliana

Interaction Writer and CEO of Adjacent

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