Two Objections to State School Ventures
I’ve been running State School Ventures for two months so now’s a good time to write about objections I hear when I’m out and about talking SSV:
Objection 1 - “Lots of people go to state school, many of them are pretty privileged and they don’t really need your help”
I don’t believe for a second that the most advantaged state educated person is less advantaged than the most disadvantaged privately educated person but if SSV ends up helping someone succeed that would have succeeded anyway, I will be very happy. And besides life isn’t a simulation, for founders that do SSV, it’s not possible to know with certainty what would have happened without SSV.
Objection 2 “There will be people that need your help but don’t have much chance of building a great company, what are you going to do with them?
I will help them, I love helping people but this one is more nuanced. I won’t help anyone build a company that I don’t think they should build or that I think will probably fail. Other people I won’t help include people that need help in a specialism that I don’t have. If you pitch a catering startup to SSV, I’m not the right person to help so I’m not going to pretend that I am. I have real life examples of people I’ve helped whilst running SSV already and they’re all different but the easiest way to group them is “they needed advice to be better placed to make a decision or a plan and I had some relevant thoughts”.
If I’m on my deathbed and the two critiques of my time on earth are that I either got involved in too many successful companies that didn’t need my help or that I helped too many people that needed my help then I will die a very happy man (if you attend my funeral, feel free to mention this at the wake).
These objections are two ways of saying the same thing: that the system already perfectly sorts people into winners that don't need help and losers that won't succeed even with help. But this doesn’t chime with my lived experience. Every successful person I’ve met, in any domain, has been helped along the way. That help takes different forms: awareness, encouragement, friendship, practical help, introductions, money. The helper differs from case to case: parent, teacher, friend, peer, boss, investor, mentor, coach, but there’s *always* someone supporting them 📈
I believe that one of the reasons a privately educated person is 8x more likely to be a startup founder than a state educated founder is because they generally get more help.
From an SSV pov, the only time these objections matter is if a) they’re real and b) there’s competition for the same resource: if I had one day left on earth, would I spend it helping an entrepreneur that would succeed without me or someone that needed me but was less likely to succeed? On this day I will remind myself of what a marvelous problem that is to have.