The food: Poached Egg, Portugal Flower Sausage and Greens
Where to find it: AVENUE Restaurante, Lisbon, Portugal
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Welcome to another edition of #FoodEntrepreneur Friday, where I serve up an order of international food with a side of guidance for entrepreneurs.
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Sometimes a plate can come out of the kitchen and look like a complete mistake. The cook splatters the sauce everywhere, the sous chef undercooks the vegetables or the raw tartare could kill you from salmonella poisoning. Thankfully (and surprisingly) this hungry traveler has not had the chance to snap a picture of many edible mistakes. In fact, today’s #FoodFriday photo is a picture of a well-plated masterpiece before I guzzled it down; thus, I might be the mistake to the dish pictured here. Maybe my dearth of pictures that I deem ‘food mistakes’ makes me a terrible food critic, but it doesn’t ignore the fact that there are mistakes out there—especially when it comes to entrepreneurship.
Seasoned entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan (author of Startup–A Silicon Valley Adventure) once shared with me the top 5 mistakes startup founders make. Without further ado, here they are:
- Unclear goals and mission. – If you don’t at least have a basic recipe, then why start? Write down that plan/recipe and read it often.
- Trying to prove you’re smart. – There are many ‘cooks in the kitchen.’ As a startup founder, you have to be humble enough to let others lead.
- Greed. – Like I wrote in last week’s #FoodEntrepreneur Friday: Equity is like shit and yeast, if you pile it up in one heap, it stinks or festers like fungus. But if you spread it around, then things rise & grow. Be generous to your team and the people you serve.
- Hiring people you like, not people you need. – Just because you made brownies with your buddies during your pot-smoking days, doesn’t mean you should open a bakery with them too. In fact, that might be the exact reason not to open up a business with the bros.
- Not knowing when to let go. – Like seasonal ingredients, sometimes you have to change and adapt to the (market) environment you’re in.
If you want to start your business on the right foot, then learn from others who committed the top 5 mistakes startup founders make. If you do so successfully, then your business will flourish like this:
And hopefully it’ll flourish for a longer time than the brief moment this beautiful poached egg lasted before yours truly devoured and made it look like a culinary catastrophe and mistake.