How I became an entrepreneur

It is once again election season in New Zealand, and as is usual when the incumbent government is right-wing, we get to hear a lot about how the most recent government has been encouraging tech, innovation, entrepreneurship and all of those things to "improve the economy" (given that Christopher Luxon seems to have taken a chainsaw to much of New Zealand's economy, he really needs some positive stories). Most recently, in a speech to Rotorua's business community (Rotorua is a city with an economy mostly focused around primary industries such as farming and logging), our Prime Minister managed to put his foot in his mouth by telling businesspeople that they were being childish and that they should be using Claude, because apparently that's what innovation is.

In point of fact, innovation and entrepreneurship are constant points of fixation for governments and business communities: there's constant worry about not enough of it happening, it not being good enough when it does happen and all these things. A lot of resources are dedicated to trying to encourage people to become entrepreneurs, trying to get them to innovate, motivating people and pumping them up... all of these kinds of things. Unfortunately, few of them work, and in New Zealand especially rates of innovation and entrepreneurship remain much lower than we'd like.

Well, I run a product and a service that I make available using a fair amount of tech infrastructure now. I've been building it for a few months and we've been launched for three weeks as of today, even. Given how the tech industry is, that practically makes me an expert! This means that I'm going to take today's article to pontificate a bunch about how I came to entrepreneurship and what I think our government could do to make entrepreneurship happen more. Buckle in and hear my (deeply inspirational and not at all awkward for the innovation community) story!

The process

Get brought up by extremely well-educated parents

The first stage in becoming an entrepreneur happened, in a sense, because of whom I was born to: two extremely well-educated parents, both with PhDs in biology and a gamut of other qualifications. They started out as scientists while I was in primary school, during high school my father taught while my mother completed a Fine Arts degree, and through university and beyond both of my parents found themselves teaching. I do not get on well with my parents, alas, for a wide array of reasons, but in this one thing they did well: I grew up in a household where learning was valued, books were held in high esteem and I was encouraged to learn from a wide range of fields. I was allowed, in essence, to have a wide range of ideas and try out new things. There is perhaps some irony to the fact that my parents created an environment in which this would inevitably happen and then stressed out and wondered a fair amount about why I ended up like this, but so it goes.

Do weird shit at university

Eventually, as people so often do, I grew up and went to university. Attempting to please my parents, I decided to pick something practical to study, and so chose engineering. Of course, when I had to choose my specialisation at the end of my first year I chose the most impractical one possible: Engineering Science, which at the University of Auckland is basically computational mathematics and physics. I learned calculus, not a little statistics and discrete mathematics, the arts of low-level programming in C and a good working knowledge of physics.

Of course, that was just the coursework. What I actually wound up spending a lot of time doing was a) hiding in the library reading the Vulgate bible and a bunch of other Latin texts when I should have been studying, b) activism and writing political essays, because I was, of course, one of those leftist activist shits that always seem to end up existing in universities and c) change ringing at a local church, among other such community activities. I still wish I'd been able to do more stuff, but looking back at it my university years were actually startlingly active in a bunch of ways.

I got a few things from all of this. The first is that I was exposed to, quite simply, a very wide range of different people, experiences and occupations, which was mind-expanding in the best possible way. This is generally good for people, but it's particularly relevant for entrepreneurship because it gives you some idea, generally, of what a wide range of different people need and what the best ways to communicate with them are. I also learned how to learn and study effectively and how to retain what I learned: important because, try as you might, ex nihilo nihil fit applies very strongly to human thinking. You cannot, however much you try to innovate, actually come up with anything innovative unless you have a lot of knowledge and material to work on. Finally, I came out of university with strong skills in both mathematics and writing: two skills that are universally useful in more or less anything you care to do. And thus it was that I left university, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and optimistic for the future.

Be ruined for all future employment by your first job

The worst thing that can happen to a young up-and-coming professional is that their first job is at a genuinely good workplace. The issue, of course, is that your first professional job tends to set expectations about what work should be like, what standards are expected and how people should interact with each other. If your first job turns out to be good, you'll find yourself spending the rest of your life chasing that high.

This is what happened to me, more or less: I signed up for a ten week internship at Marshall Day acoustics which turned into a year spent writing acoustic modelling software. My first year of professional work, then, was spent among extremely talented engineers and mathematicians and music nerds in an environment which felt, more than anything, like an extension of the university life I was already accustomed to. I learned a lot that year about writing software that people find useful, how engineering physics works in practice and, fatally, that work can be fun, engaging and have good people in it.

When I finally finished up my extended internship and had to start looking for my first permanent role, I took all those lessons with me, leading to...

Attempt to build a career the usual way. Crash out during the Covid pandemic

Leaving this bright, sheltered world and going into the real world was a shock, to say the least. All of a sudden, the assumptions that people generally acted in good faith, worked hard and were curious no longer applied, and instead I was thrown into a world of pointless work, office politics, inefficiency and a disturbing amount of exposure to McKinsey. I did not adapt well.

I managed to keep going, between working at an agritechnology company and a large market research agency. This happened at quite a high mental cost to me, but I did learn how the industries worked and what happened in them, managed to build a bit of prestige and even managed to get the occasional thing done under the auspices of the businesses I was at. The quality of the code I was writing improved quite a lot, certainly.

Then Covid hit. As soon as the company I was at got even a whiff of the pandemic becoming seriously disruptive, all promotions and pay increases were frozen, a few scant months before I became eligible. The thing that was holding me to the course was pulled out from under me. Add to that the social isolation, the micro-management that my manager immediately fixated on as soon as in-person management was no longer possible and the sheer political fuckery of those times and I quickly found myself unable to put the face on and pretend that what I was expected to do to maintain a career was something that I was capable long term. My performance at work suffered, my mental health fell apart. Eventually something was asked of me that I couldn't deal with, and that was that.

Realise that I'm a trans woman halfway through my career falling apart

This disintegration was not helped by the fact that halfway through this whole process, about two years before the pandemic struck in earnest enough things finally clicked together and I realised that I was a trans woman, putting me firmly into the category of one of the world's more reviled minorities. Being trans is an interesting kind of thing: it is, at base, the rejection of a core lie about yourself, when going along with the program comes with significant relative advantages in terms of not being faced with massive bigotry.

The trouble with rejecting the core lie, of course, is that it makes it a lot harder to accept all the smaller lies that surround it, especially when the lies are more directly offensive and, as smaller things often stick out more than larger ones, more glaringly obvious. And so, having let my career crumble, rebuilding the mass of delusion needed to get back into it became that much harder. There was only one option: grad school.

Do a Masters' degree and some contracting work

My Masters' degree made a pleasant change from the work of my career: I had some real fun studying fracture mechanics and doing some research in machine learning as a research assistant on the side. I learned lots about statistics, Bayesian Networks, all the fun things, and it was nice to have a moment to breathe. Once my thesis was done, I spent a few months working for a private company doing scientific research in an engagement that can only be described as a complete fucking disaster. Still, I moved on, and before too long I found myself contracting for a public sector organisation in New Zealand.

This was pretty eye-opening: I got paid quite a lot, I was respected and people actually listened to what I had to say. The actual work was dealing with some very messy R code, which wasn't so fulfilling as it could be, but even if they were small, I was able to actually make meaningful changes: yet another nail in the coffin of my private sector career.

Struggle while the bottom falls out of the tech market

I wound up with the public sector work at the end of 2022, having gotten the taste for working for myself and getting "working for myself" money. At the end of that, I didn't have anything really lined up, but I wasn't too worried: after all, I had some really solid recent public sector experience, I was getting to be quite a good engineer and statistician by this point and I was building a decent level of confidence. Surely finding an opportunity or three would be easy?

Nope!

In 2023, of course, two things happened. First off, the bottom fell out of the tech market globally as all of the Big Tech companies engaged in mass layoffs to drive salaries down and increase their stock prices. Secondly, the ChatGPT mania really started to gain momentum and people started getting ideas about all tech people being replaced in six months. As always with this kind of thing, minoritised people caught the brunt of it and while contracting opportunities in tech contracted sharply, my attempts to interview for new roles found themselves consistently sinking at the very final stages of some irritatingly long interview processes: a very demoralising process, all told.

After a bit of this, I decided that I should try my hand at consulting instead, so I set up a website, went to a whole lot of networking events, tried to do the thing as best as I could. That didn't work particularly well either, though I learned a fair bit about infrastructure, which was nice. My biggest challenge with consulting, I think, both was and remains marketing to a niche appropriately: to sell services you have to be able to effectively tell a story that someone with money can see themselves in, but the idea of branding myself as a Snowflake or Databricks specialist (which is the kind of framing that you need to make headway) is something that I couldn't, and honestly still can't, make myself do.

Make friends with a popular blogger

At some point during the whole process, I came across an interesting blog post and, on a whim, decided to send an email to the author asking for some advice. This quickly led to fairly frequent email exchanges and eventually to a meaningful friendship and inclusion in a community of dissident writers, engineers and tech people. Feeling less alone and as though there were other people out there in the same situation as me helped a lot with giving me the courage to try new and strange things rather than giving up and leaving the industry or simply continuing to try the same old things that didn't work over and over again. The social bonds and connections that this connection gave me are arguably the single biggest contributor towards my becoming an entrepreneur, as you'll see below.

Write a slightly popular blog

After a fair amount of encouragement from Nik and a certain amount of frustration at the lack of traffic to my consulting website, I eventually decided to, as a content marketing type thing, add a blog to my website. While it was initially intended as a marketing thing to drive traffic, I quite quickly found that I don't do well at writing marketing copy and let myself write some more analytical essays and dig in on the social analysis of tech.

Given that you're reading this, you all know how that one went: the blog took off quite fast and quickly developed a fairly small (on the global scale) but dedicated readership. Thanks to some people supporting the blog financially, I was able to gain a little bit more financial flexibility, and little by little, I was able to build up a body of work and more and more people steadily learned who I was and thought that I was somewhat clever.

Develop a coaching offering: have some people take me up on it

After a year or so of this, it became clear that I was quite obviously and seriously teacher-coded: I'm good at educating people, write clear and lucid explanations and know how to sequence stuff well for understanding. I also have quite decent knowledge of a few fields of study: certainly good enough to do effective professional training. Given that, I put up a coaching page on my website, offering coaching services in engineering fundamentals and statistics.

Take-up wasn't enormous, but I've been lucky enough to have a fairly steady stream of happy students learning statistics from me, and it's fulfilling work: you get to see people becoming more effective at their jobs and more confident in the decisions they make. It's good for the soul, all things considered.

Of course, students need notes and exercises to practice, which leads to...

Build some tools to make my life easier: realise they have wider applicability

I tend to write notes and exercises in Obsidian, using markdown and LaTeX for mathematical notation when needed. This mostly works, but as I quickly found, that's not a workflow that works for all my students. Happily, though, I'm a fairly adept software developer and already have a website, so it was easy enough to put notes up on my website behind a login, and even add support for people to ask questions through there rather than in person.

This was much more workable for my students, and importantly, at this point it was only a small leap from doing all of this to registering that other people beyond just my students might want to read my notes, get new ones as they come out and ask me questions.

Set up the infrastructure

And at this point, all that remained for me to become an entrepreneur with an SaaS-like product to sell was to set up subscription management and billing, which is just plumbing. And that, more or less, was that.

What can we learn from this?

So that's how I got to where I am now. What lessons might we take from this for encouraging people to innovate and do entrepreneurship stuff?

The most glaring thing to be seen here is that a lot of what happened was just weird and unpredictable, and often a direct result of me doing something strange in preference to what I apparently should have been doing. A lot of this was genuinely difficult to anticipate. This suggests that railroading people into specific innovation and entrepreneurship pathways (which a lot of of organisations do) might not only be a waste of money, but actively counterproductive. I do not fit into the likes of the CreativeHQ crowd at all, and I do not comport myself or really look or behave in a way that fits what they do at all, and yet, I currently know that I have a lot more paying customers than a lot of the companies they're explicitly supporting. One gets the feeling that what happens is often that these organisations support people who can fit the mould of what entrepreneurship is meant to look like, which doesn't comport well with the kind of weirdness that seems to be associated with actual new things.

In a similar vein, attempts to push education towards being more immediately relevant to entrepreneurship and innovation are also liable to be counterproductive. If we look at my background, there's not much business stuff in there, nor much in the way of strictly practical knowledge. There is, however, a lot of abstract mathematics, physics, classics, history, and just plain being well and widely read. This makes sense for an entrepreneur, believe it or not: having a wide range of rigorous ideas and concepts from a lot of different places, along with the ability to synthesise them effectively, is in fact quite important if you want to be a flexible and effective decision-maker. Not having that predisposes you to rigidity, blinkered thinking and dullness. This is, one suspects, part of why so many startups these days fail: the pattern for what a start-up is is very much established at this point, and money and support tends to flow, not to the weird shit that might actually work, but to the things that look like startups, even when nobody actually wants what they're selling. Having some idea of the overall scope of things that people want and have wanted in the past is excellent inoculation against this (yes, knowing about Roman consumption patterns is good preparation for running a startup).

Community and background is another common thread: having a lot of people, educating them well and letting them make friends through their writing and similar seems to be a highly effective way of forming the kinds of bond that you need to see new things come into being. People need to talk about matters intellectual, ideas need to be exchanged and people need to engage with ideas and the written word in general. Moreover, there needs to be respect for this kind of work from cultural and political power centres: entrepreneurship and the arts are much more closely linked than you might think, and when you disrespect and defund the arts, you're destroying the kinds of social and cultural space where people who might have new ideas that are actually useful can meet and talk to each other. Even when the right kinds of people are still around, isolating them from each other will quickly create a situation where not much innovation happens.

Finally, given the sheer amount of chance and weird, twisty turns that any genuinely new idea takes to come to full fruit, there's a lot of value in simply having in place the support structures needed to let these things play out without them being snuffed out by economic destitution. I've been very lucky inasmuch as a combination of enough smaller opportunities, external support and more recently income from actual sales of product have let me survive for long enough to work through all of this and actually build a new thing, but that's highly unlikely: for each person like me there are dozens that could try but won't because their economic position or appetite for risk will not let them. Affordable housing, salary grants, generous allowances, job guarantees where the work isn't too onerous... all of these things would do a lot towards making sure that people can actually do the weird shit that's needed to create genuinely new things.

For all that the modern culture of innovation has its issues (mostly, if we're to be honest, that it's actively hostile to new ideas), we're going to need, in this time of crisis, to try a whole lot of new ideas and find new ways of making life work if we wish to survive what's to come. Creating the conditions for more of us to do the kind of weird shit that leads to new ideas is important: we need to take it seriously. What our governments are currently doing is not that.