Continuing Education In Entrepreneurship

Startups offer a continuing education in entrepreneurship but effective entrepreneurs learn from other’s experience in addition to their own.

Continuing Education In Entrepreneurship

I was sitting in one of the nice conference rooms over at Fenwick & West earlier this year at a TVC half day seminar on “Entering the Entrepreneurial World” (TVC offers great seminars by the way, and they rotate the speakers so that the material doesn’t go stale)and I had a strong sense of deja vu for freshman year in college. Normally when I dream of being back in college I am in an exam for a course I haven’t really studied for–although in my case these are more accurately termed “recovered memories”–but this felt like freshman year again, where I slept spent a lot of time in a large lecture halls.

I had this epiphany that I had spent the last dozen years or so, since I started attending Software Entrepreneur Forum (now SDForum now SVForum) and Churchill Club meetings, in this ad hoc program in continuing entrepreneurial education. Books are valuable, and not enough entrepreneurs do enough reading, but there is also a category of knowledge that hasn’t been written down yet. And you can gain wisdom from listening to someone who has played the game–even if it’s just their mistakes–that you would otherwise have to gain from your mistakes experience.

I was reminded of this as we contemplate attending about a half dozen conferences in the next six weeks. Stay tuned: we will blog them as we go. Some closing quotes on education:

“Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study. Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life.”
Henry L. Doherty

“Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st Century.”
Sydney Joseph Perelman

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
Epictetus

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Alvin Toffler

“Most people have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win.”
Bobby Knight