Riding the Wave: How Emerging Entrepreneurs Can Surf the Tides of Uncertainty – Learn to Paddle Out

When you’re just starting out as an entrepreneur, it can feel like you’re a surfer trying to catch your first wave. The ocean of opportunities stretches out before you, vast and intimidating. How do you know where to position yourself to catch that perfect swell before it passes you by?

The key is to start paddling out, even when you don’t see an obvious wave coming your way. As any experienced surfer knows, you have to get beyond the breakers and constant white wash before you can put yourself in the lineup for some real waves. This means having the persistence and patience to keep moving forward, even when progress seems slow.
Many entrepreneurial ventures go through long stretches where nothing major seems to be happening. You’re putting in the work day after day but don’t have a lot to show for it yet. This can be discouraging, making you feel like you’re just treading water and not actually moving towards your goal. But in reality, all that effort is increasing your strength, endurance and knowledge. It’s preparing you for when your opportunity does come.
Think of it as paddling out through the choppy whitewater near shore. It takes focus and determination to push through, but with every stroke you’re getting closer to the smoother waters beyond the surf zone. This is where you need to position yourself to seize your wave when it comes.
The same is true in business. All the research, planning, networking and small wins are gradually moving you into the realm of real opportunity. You’re honing your skills, making connections and gathering momentum. Even on days when it seems you’ve barely budged, you’re still progressing.

Take PayPal co-founder Max Levchin as an example. For over a year he and his partners worked hard on building their initial cryptography company without much success. But when the internet took off, they were able to adapt their technology to the world of online payments. Because they’d continued striving forward, they were ready to ride this new wave.

Riding the Wave: How Emerging Entrepreneurs Can Surf the Tides of Uncertainty – Spotting the Next Big Wave

 

To catch the great waves in business, you need to develop a knack for spotting opportunities before they fully form. This means constantly analyzing the horizon for signs of the next swell through market research, reading industry publications, going to conferences and simply paying attention to emerging trends.

Some of the most successful companies have ridden new waves early because they recognized potentials that others initially dismissed. Take Netflix spotting the opportunity for streaming media while most video rental stores like Blockbuster focused on their brick-and-mortar model. Or Amazon seeing the power of online commerce before many traditional retailers did.
Opportunities often begin as small ripples that most ignore. It takes vision to imagine how they might gather strength. When Marc Andreessen and his partners conceived of the first internet browser in the early 1990s, the internet was still a niche technology. But they had faith that as more people got online, browsers would become a crucial gateway. Their foresight made Netscape an early internet success story.

You increase your chances of catching the big waves by paddling out to where new swells are most likely to emerge. This means exploring frontiers that could soon impact mainstream markets. Quantum computing, cryptocurrencies, VR and driverless cars are all examples of emerging technologies with huge disruptive potential. The entrepreneurs prepared to ride these waves are venturing out early.

It’s also helpful to draw on the knowledge of those already in the lineup. Find mentors and partners who are deeply immersed in your industry and adjacent spaces. They can alert you to trends before you’d spot them yourself. And take time to reflect on patterns from the past. Understanding previous technological shifts and societal inflection points provides perspective on market evolutions.
But even with diligent monitoring and sharp intuition, the ocean’s rhythms remain unpredictable. Luck and timing play a role in catching a wave that takes you for a long, profitable ride. All you can do is commit to continual exploration and preparation. Analyze both steady currents and possible disturbances that could signal an incoming swell. With a little fortune, when the big one comes you’ll be in perfect position.
The most lucrative opportunities often appear when bold vision meets a rapidly changing landscape. Skype’s founders saw the potential for free calls over the internet just as broadband adoption was exploding. Their timing secured Skype’s huge success. Similarly, Airbnb recognized the value of person-to-person home rentals right as social media made people more comfortable engaging in the sharing economy.

Riding the Wave: How Emerging Entrepreneurs Can Surf the Tides of Uncertainty – Wax On, Wax Off

 

When you’re trying to catch a wave, proper board preparation can make all the difference. In business, this translates to honing your skills, refining your offering and building relationships before the right opportunity arrives.

Waxing your board ensures you’ll stick to it when riding a wave, just like developing your capabilities keeps you engaged in executing your business idea. Emerging entrepreneurs should identify weaknesses in their expertise and work diligently to improve. Take courses, find mentors, join professional organizations – whatever channels allow you to level up. The more mastery you have over the key domains of your venture, the greater control you’ll have riding the wave.
Dick Smith exemplified this tireless skill development in his journey creating a namesake electronics retailer. As a young boy, Smith was fascinated by electronics but lacked resources to explore this interest. So he got up at 4am to study electronics textbooks before school, then spent his evenings experimenting. His dedication made him an electronics expert by age 15. When he eventually opened his electronics kit business, his technical fluency let him ride its expansion into a retail empire.
You also need to refine your business proposition through repeated feedback. Before there was Girl Scout cookies, founder Juliette Gordon Low tested different approaches of engaging girls in skills development. After iterating based on input from early troops, she arrived at the model focused on learning hands-on skills through earning badges. This ultimately propelled the growth of Girl Scouts nationwide.
Like waxing a surfboard, small adjustments can make a big difference in streamlining your business for success. Identify potential areas of friction in your customer experience and smooth them out. Dissect the user journey and pinpoint where conversions get stuck. Resolve user pain points and perfect product-market fit. Modify pricing structure or go-to-market strategy based on early data. Making your business model as slick as possible ensures you’ll glide effortlessly when opportunity swells.
Finally, build connections across the industry to expand your perspective and capitalize quickly when the time is right.Successful surfers cultivate community, sharing tips about ocean conditions and choice surf spots. Likewise, networking creates touchpoints to gather intel, access resources and form partnerships that aid your entrepreneurial journey.

Share your vision with potential partners, investors and mentors. Ask for advice, not just capital. These relationships help alert you to emerging trends and steer you towards overlooked possibilities. When the promising wave arrives, having an engaged network around you provides stability and balance to ride it with success.

Riding the Wave: How Emerging Entrepreneurs Can Surf the Tides of Uncertainty – Read the Forecast

 

To consistently ride the best waves, surfers need to understand the weather patterns and ocean swells that create prime surfing conditions. Likewise, business success relies on accurately forecasting market trends, consumer demand, and technological changes that dictate which opportunities offer the most potential. Emerging entrepreneurs should become students of their industry climate.

Charlie Munger, business partner of Warren Buffett, believes in “worldly wisdom” – gathering broad knowledge across disciplines to sharpen foresight. He cautions: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” This reflects his philosophy of carefully assessing risks, analyzing leading indicators, and projecting changes to avoid future hazards.
“We started the business at a time when the trends of how businesses would accept money and make payments were going to fundamentally change. Things like smartphones becoming ubiquitous, more application-based experiences, social networking. These things were gaining traction and changing customer behaviors. We had a vision of where the payment industry needed to go as a result of this.”

By tracking mobile adoption trends and changing consumer payment preferences, Clerico saw opportunity in making payments software built for the next generation. This led WePay to catch the payments modernization wave well ahead of legacy processors.
Aspiring entrepreneurs should research not just current conditions, but leading indicators giving insight into where their industry is headed. Democratizing technologies like AI and internet broadband access can upend established players; shifts in cultural attitudes and generational preferences open new markets.

David Grannan relied on reading emerging trends to ride the natural foods wave with his company Plum Organics. As a new father, he saw growing parental concerns about child nutrition and chemical additives in food. He also saw promising innovations in sourcing healthy, organic ingredients. By leveraging data on these tailwinds, Plum became a hugely successful organic baby food brand.

Grannan reflects: “You need some wind at your back in order to build a successful business. The odds of success go up when you’re riding a wave vs. trying to create a market that doesn’t exist.”

Forecasting tools go beyond market analysis. Collecting broad customer data reveals pain points begging for solutions. Tracking technological breakthroughs pinpoints new capabilities to deploy. Supply chain monitoring surfaces upstream innovations ripe for integration.
No analysis is perfect. The future holds surprises even for savvy forecasters. But being deeply immersed in your ecosystem provides the perception to anticipate inflection points. You expand the possibility of luck striking by placing yourself in the market currents surging with the highest potential.

Riding the Wave: How Emerging Entrepreneurs Can Surf the Tides of Uncertainty – Don’t Be Afraid to Wipe Out

Wiping out is an inevitable part of surfing – and entrepreneurship. No matter how skilled you become, the ocean’s volatility guarantees falls. The difference between pro surfers and amateurs is their reaction to crashing. Pros take wipe outs in stride, analyzing what caused them, then getting back on their boards to catch the next wave. Aspiring entrepreneurs need this same unflappability.

When your startup journey meets hurdles, embrace failures as learning opportunities, not final defeats. Autopsy why things went wrong, correct course, and keep paddling out. Every wipeout brings insights that improve your skills and strategy.

The biggest business crashes often happen when success builds complacency. Digital camera pioneer Kodak dominated the photography industry for over a century before being decimated by their sluggishness to adapt to digital platforms. Their early successes blinded them to how quickly the market was changing. Founder of Kodak George Eastman once claimed “You press the button, we do the rest.” This hubris that they would control photography forever locked them into film even as world shifted to digital.
Contrast Kodak with Netflix, which suffered its own massive wipeout when they bungled a transition to streaming in 2011. Despite being a pioneer in mailing DVDs to homes, Netflix lagged entering the streaming market. To catch up, they spun off their DVD business as Qwikster, hiking prices 60% overnight. Customers revolted – Netflix stock plunged 77% as they hemorrhaged 800,000 subscribers.

But Netflix learned from this wipeout. CEO Reed Hastings took responsibility, apologized to customers and killed the Qwikster separation. More critically, they used the failure to refocus entirely on streaming. Just 2 years after their wipeout, Netflix original series like House of Cards made them leaders in on-demand entertainment. Their nimbleness to recover revolutionized how the world watches video.
This resilience mirrors big wave surfing legend Laird Hamilton, considered the greatest surfer of all time. He became so adept by treating wipeouts as data. He actually learned to enjoy being held under water by monster waves for 4-5 minutes, analyzing why he was caught and how to avoid it next time. Says Hamilton: “The more wipeouts, more learning, more adapting. Failure teaches you.”

Hamilton used a lifetime of wipeout insights to master waves up to 70 feet high that others feared to even attempt. He understood failure was part of the path to riding unprecedented surf.
This mindset allows entrepreneurs to bounce back from devastating crashes too. When emerging electric automaker Faraday Future imploded after launching to fanfare in 2015, it looked like the end. Mismanagement had driven out founders, top engineers and vital investors. But a remaining team rallied to save Faraday from bankruptcy in 2017. They refused to let failure kill their vision of revolutionizing mobility.

This grit allowed Faraday to retool and unveil their luxury FF91 model last year. They now plan an IPO within 2 years, determined to disrupt autos despite early stumbles. Their comeback was only possible because they never let initial wipeouts sink them.
Setbacks must be expected and examined, not feared. Every tumble holds lessons to prevent another. James Dyson failed 5,126 times over 15 years before developing his revolutionary bagless vacuum cleaner. He survived by viewing each failure as narrowing the path to success. This resilience propelled Dyson into a $9.5 billion profit machine.

Riding the Wave: How Emerging Entrepreneurs Can Surf the Tides of Uncertainty – Pace Yourself

Surfing massive waves requires impeccable timing and rhythm to match the ocean’s tempo. Rushing either risks the wave breaking on top of you or shooting down the face too early. The most experienced big wave surfers know success comes from staying centered and pausing at the proper moments to harness energy. Mastering your pace allows you to conserve strength while maximizing momentum.

For entrepreneurs riding uncertain business seas, pacing yourself similarly enhances prospects of staying balanced through volatility. Prematurely pushing too hard in the wrong direction or moving erratically risks destabilizing your venture. But timing your effort and expenditure of resources to align with market cycles conserves stability.

An example is how John Mackey paced Whole Foods’ expansion. In the late 1980s he was eager to scale nationally, but fate intervened. The stock market crash and recession dried up funding for growth, almost sinking Whole Foods. Mackey realized they had moved too fast and needed to consolidate.

Mackey spent the next decade strengthening Whole Foods’ core operations and balance sheet before again pursuing wider reach. This measured escalation matched their capabilities and opportunities better than headlong, unchecked growth. By 2004, Whole Foods had the foundation and cash flow to sustain successful nationwide expansion. Their deliberate pacing through ups and downs allowed them to spread without overextending.
Contrast this with transportation startup Beepi, which zoomed to market too hastily then collapsed. Beepi’s peer-to-peer car sales model attracted close to $150 million in investment by 2015. Their strategy was sound and technology impressive, so founders rushed to capitalize with 70 locations nationwide.

But Beepi lacked understanding of regional differences that complicated replicating their model at scale. Each new geography meant relearning regulations, marketing approaches and operational nuances – and Beepi stumbled adapting. They wound up hemorrhaging cash and angry customers due to uneven execution. Just two years after their frenetic expansion began, Beepi ran out of funding and folded.
Beepi’s downfall underscores the danger of moving at the wrong velocity. Their brilliant idea failed by expanding faster than their capabilities allowed. More measured growth could have honed operations and conserved capital to establish footholds.
Extensive research by venture capital firm TCV underscores why pacing matters so much. TCV’s analysis of over 1,900 tech companies found 70% of fast-growing startups will either stall or implode due to premature scaling. Investor Euphemia Wong summarizes the peril: “Companies are hyper-focused on growth, but growing too fast can kill them. Restraint is so important but underappreciated.”

The most resilient founders internalize this. Brian Chesky has kept Airbnb’s growth tidal, with expansionary waves followed by periods of assimilation. He wants scaling that’s aggressive but never uncontrolled: “We need to grow as quickly as we can without getting ahead of ourselves.”

Chesky holds growth pauses after major new product releases to inspect what’s working then tweak tactics. These rhythmic slowdowns help Airbnb master innovations before pushing further. Says Chesky: “Don’t scale until you can replicate what’s making you successful.” By modulating their metabolism, Airbnb has spread to 100,000+ cities worldwide without losing balance.

Riding the Wave: How Emerging Entrepreneurs Can Surf the Tides of Uncertainty – Ride the Momentum

Riding business momentum requires keen awareness and aggressive exploitation of your temporary advantage. Being attuned to shifts that alter market forces in your favor allows seizing opportunities before competitors. Savvy entrepreneurs latch their ventures onto tailwinds when detected then propel growth by investing to broaden reach quickly.

The most successful founders obsess over identifyingCatalysts that could accelerate their enterprises’ progress. They understand market dynamics are constantly evolving in ways that strengthen or weaken positioning. Distilling signals from noise reveals which changes offer momentum to leverage. The earlier you detect and react to advantageous developments, the further momentum can propel you ahead.
Harry’s exemplified this by capitalizing when external factors aligned to disrupt men’s shaving. As the subscription model gained traction in consumer goods, Harry’s founders saw potential to challenge the shaving giants. At the same time, direct-to-consumer e-commerce unlocked new distribution channels beyond retail.

Harry’s gambled on the momentum of these innovations to build a shaving empire targeting millennials. They concentrated spends on digital media and honed product messaging for online buyers. This allowed them to acquire customers 75% more efficiently than legacy brands dependent on traditional retail shelves. Harry’s has now surpassed $375 million in sales and captured over 2% of the $2.8 billion men’s shaving market.

Entrepreneurs must also know when to push aggressively to extend the benefits of advantageous conditions. Capital and brand awareness are like rocket fuel – they amplify momentum. But their power fades quickly, so harness them to build velocity when available.

In 2017 Tesla saw demand swelling globally for electric vehicles. But a production ramp was needed to fulfill orders. So Tesla intensified spending, expanding their vehicle assembly line and acquiring one of America’s largest solar panel makers to integrate clean energy capabilities. This rapid mobilization of resources extended their lead in electric mobility while interest was sky high.
However, momentum can shift swiftly. Conditions altering market dynamics can turn against you fast. Thus, it’s critical to keep probing for signs your temporarily favorable position is deteriorating. Strong momentum may hide looming pitfalls.
Consider how Kodak found itself blindsided by digital photography due to complacency from film dominance. Or how Nokia failed to adapt its top-selling mobile phones as Apple and Android smartphones revolutionized expectations. Both clung stubbornly to what worked before, failing to sense shifting consumer behavior that killed their momentum.
Thus, constantly reevaluating your playing field is vital. Momentum is fleeting – you must perpetually hunt the next wave to ride. Never become complacent or treat any advantage as permanent. Andy Grove, legendary CEO of Intel, advised: “Only the paranoid survive.” His maxim reflects how momentum depends on vigilant adaptation. Letting the pace slip means losing ground quick.

Riding the Wave: How Emerging Entrepreneurs Can Surf the Tides of Uncertainty – Enjoy the View

 

Riding a wave as an entrepreneur is about more than reaching some business finish line as quickly as possible. The journey itself holds meaning and moments of triumph you must relish. In the rush of scaling, changing market dynamics and competing, it’s easy to forget to appreciate the daily wins that cumulatively build something special. But pausing to enjoy the view as you work sustains energy and passion.
When entrepreneur Guy Raz interviewed fellow founders about their biggest learnings, a common insight was not moving purposefully enough to celebrate milestones. Entrepreneur Jonathan Neman reflected on the frenetic pace starting Sweetgreen: “We never stopped to look around and realize how far we’d come.” Completing funding rounds, opening new stores and gaining buzz felt like just boxes to check. In hindsight, Neman wishes he’d savored special moments like their first festival or 100th shop.

Enjoying the journey’s view inspires your team too. Sharing successes, no matter how small, makes progress feel tangible when building a business can otherwise seem abstract. Ezra Roizen, a venture advisor, says pausing on accomplishments keeps teams motivated through the slog: “Celebrating wins gets people excited to keep winning.”

Roizen shared how Les Otten, founder of the American Skiing Company, made sure his employees relished the view. As they added new resorts and improved mountain infrastructure over decades, Otten insisted on commemorating every enhancement. He’d gather staff to formally recognize upgrades like a new ski lift or lodge. These rituals allowed everyone to feel proud of bettering experiences for skiers. For Otten, savoring each accomplishment out on the mountains sustained his team’s drive to build a ski industry leader.
When reward comes only after long, intense effort, it’s easy to discount incremental gains. But the long view reveals how each small step evolves into something great. Neman came to appreciate that Sweetgreen likely wouldn’t exist without celebrating the first day they broke even and other humble wins.
Brian Scudamore, founder of 1-800-Got-Junk?, also learned to enjoy the ride after regretting early grind. He wished he’d reveled more in winning first customers and hitting revenue milestones vs. fixating on expansion. Now Scudamore makes time to soak in the view by having his team share personal stories at meetings. This keeps him connected to the humans behind the numbers.
Late Fiat chairman Sergio Marchionne put it another way: “The true value of an enterprise is realizing its ultimate ability to improve the human condition.” Beyond financial and operational success, entrepreneurship done right changes lives. Keeping this higher view matters amidst constant demands.
Building any venture that grows at scale is an endless hike requiring stamina. But on even the most arduous trails, pausing to admire forests, lakes and meadows passed makes the climb rewarding. Likewise, entrepreneurs who appreciate the daily vistas report sustaining greater fulfillment.