Last week I had the privilege of speaking at the Connecticut Innovations Annual Technology Celebration. It was an amazing turnout of over 600 to celebrate CI's 20th anniversary. I was on a panel talking to college students about being an entrepreneur. The question came up of, "Why do you do it?" While it seems like a reasonable question given the poor odds, the fact that everything is a variable and you typically risk much of what you've accomplished up to that point, but it just doesn't seem like a reasonable question to me.That which makes us, humans, the unique animal is seen in the things we create. The only better then the creation of each of us are those things that people create together, and one of the greatest forms of these creations is the company.
In these times of economic challenge and corporate excess, it's very easy to loose sight of this. The company, teams of men and women organized for the purpose of building and selling things, captures so much of what it means to be human. Creating companies is the ultim
ate creative activity. This group of like minded people are united by their ability to see a different future, a better one. They see how to do it, and infect others to see it with them. In the picture above is this group (a few folks are missing) for Continuity Engine.
Continuity Engine sees a better world for regulated smaller businesses. We are building tools to take the majority of work our of the compliance process. We thing that smaller businesses have significant advantages in servicing their clients, but material challenges caused by that same scale. Continuity Engine is using a series of trends for the purpose of eliminating this disadvantage. With the power of Software as a Service, open source licensing and social networking we think we can change this little corner of our world!
As a delusional college student I really wanted to change the world. As a schooled Marxist I thought that doing this would be accomplished in a very different way, but I'm happy to say that I've been given the privilege to do just that. Every entrepreneur is in the business of changing the world in their own way, big or small. Through innovation they let segments of the market solve problems better, save money or in some other way make their situations better.
Through Perimeter eSecurity I've meet dozens of entrepreneurs, in the ensuing time I've meet dozens more. In working with Connecticut Innovations with the CTech accelerator and Yale with the Yale Entrepreneurial institute I'm meeting hundreds of young entrepreneurs and it is intoxicating. The amalgam of optimism, creativity and the galvanized will of the entrepreneur is the source of most of humanities energy. It is something to behold in mass and something we need to make sure to nurture.
