Do most here believe one must take in order to succeed and one persons gain is balanced by another’s loss (zero-sum) or vice versa? I’m new to the entrepreneurial scene and sometimes have this feeling not to share certain entrepreneurial concepts or ideas with others because I feel that they may out produce me, or “steal” a potential opportunity, leaving less for me. I don’t know why I think like this but I’m guessing it’s a bad mindset.
Are entrepreneurs generally non-zero-sum or zero-sum people?
byu/Successful_Touch_377 inEntrepreneur
Posted by Successful_Touch_377
23 Comments
Hard to say given it depends on industry, competitors etc. I would lean non zero-sum overall because most peoples goals are to get like 0.001% of a market.
I think it depends on what level you look at it.
At a company level you are going to be in a zero sum game with direct competitors.
However thier may be room for partnerships if two companies are in same space but different strengths and weaknesses.
Some people might think they are in a zero sum game with employees and suppliers. You want to get most out of them for as little as possible. However I think that would be a shortsighted view.
This is definitely not how entrepreneurs think.
I imagine, even thieves, who actually steal from people don’t look at it as a negative some game , but I know business people don’t look at it as a zero or negative sum game
It is absolutely not a 0-sum game. There are VERY few 0-sum games, and I would venture to say few to none of us play in them (war as an example).
I’m more your dim-sum type.
You never want to give away too much. It’s a competition. When you’re rich it’s fine, but when you’re poor keep your business secrets to yourself.
I am creating value for my clients, they are willing to pay for it as a very valuable service. How is that zero sum?
This is hugely variable and dependent on a host of factors. Consider a small town with only 1 restaurant. Lets say you open up another restaurant serving a similar menu. You’ve set yourself up to be a direct competitor to the other restaurant and with only limited customers to support them this might be tending to zero-sum. Any diners you get will take away a potential from the other.
Consider another situation where you create an entirely new product or service, never been done before. Here you’ve created the whole market and demand from the ground up. It didnt exist before you came along. Lets say the product is patent protected. There will never be any competition and any gain has basically materialized out of thin air. This would tend to non-zero-sum.
non!!
builders 🙂
my company repatriates $ to canada and grows businesses from 0 and from medium to large.
generally the wall street game is zero sum, but if you bring incremental value you can avoid this.
Giving to others is the most powerful way of building an entrepreneurial business.
This is for 5 reasons:
1. When you give, you open up. When you open up to someone, you get to listen to them and learn something
2. Giving is a great pre-sales technique that helps you and the potential client qualify each other.
3. You learn more by giving than by being silent
4. Over time – people will come to you for your expertise (don’t give away everything for free!)
5. Over time – people will give back to you
Let’s do an example:
I help 45-60 year old men turn their expertise into entrepreneurship
Here’s a gift from me. You’d pay a pitch coach/consultant $5000 for this
I will help you define a razor-focused offer based on your love and expertise, for customers with money.
If you’re serious about taking your expertise to the next level – you’d be a fool not to accept this gift.
DM me.
No way. Wealth is created and is infinite. There is no finite pie. If you are profiting at another’s expense, you’re just an asshole.
Being super abrasive about your competition at the small business scale is wasted energy that should be spent making your client experience better. The idea of gate keeping information because you think your lawn care business has a trade secret is laughable. There is more market share in any given industry to get you to millions before you run into a zero-sum scenario. You are not Coca-Cola.
I collaborate and send leads to my “competitors”, and it has worked well for me long term.
Successful entrepreneurs want to solve a customer problem profitably. So they want the customer to get value and the entrepreunuer to get value. So you need to apply that to your definitions of the terms you posited.
Non zero sum.
Only the first time entrepreneurs are generally looking at the world from a zero sum perspective and get uncomfortable with competition.
Over time you start to embrace competition and it becomes that fun part of your job as the founder to keep iterating and improving the product for those who need it.
After an even longer time and through iterations, you have products that are so distinct from each other that there’s generally a clear segmentation of your audiences even though you may have started with overlapping segments.
TBH, I think you’re forcing an analogy / concept / something you’ve been reading into something where it doesn’t necessarily apply.
Ideas and concepts are like a-holes, everyone has them. And there’s usually 1,000 people out there who’ve thought of something similar. It’s the ability to execute (and quickly) that matters. You just have to weigh the risk of the person you’re telling being someone who can help you vs being a pointless or risky convo.
I’m usually the person who can really help someone and it’s definitely a pet peeve to have to deal with an irrational fear about me stealing their idea, especially when what they’re talking about isn’t anything new.
I’ve never heard of this but it sounds dumb
If someone’s loss was equal to another persons gain we’d still be selling stone spears for a few bags of flint
Zero sum would imply GDP can’t move. GDP can and does move which demonstrates that the sun isn’t 0.
Mutual partnerships are generally the best way to operate especially in a B2B sense. In my eyes a wantrepeneur just sees it as a way to leach money off of existing markets. True entrepreneurs aim to generate value and collect a small portion of said value as profit.
It’s a positive sum game. We help each other grow in the bigger picture.
I like to compare this concept to actors moving out to LA hoping to make it big. Does it happen? Sure. Often? No.
I don’t know the numbers but I imagine it’s a tiny fraction of a percentage of the people who go try to become famous actually succeed.
Have people stole other people’s ideas in the past and profited/patented them before? Sure. Does it happen often? No.
Mostly this kind of thing happened WAY back in the day where the actual invention itself did the selling, whoever created it didn’t matter as much.
Now, it’s much more abou execution. So no, no one is going to steal the dropshipping niche that you think only you know about /s
Zero sum people do much better on Wall Street or in sports or something where it’s unavoidable.
Entrepreneurs, at least myself, and all of the ones I’ve met personally, and most of the famous ones I can think of even, are the exact opposite.
How can you actually be a zero-sum thinker as an entrepreneur?
I suppose obviously there are shitty entrepreneurs who are better suited to scams like the infamous gurus all over social media or people who start businesses that basically just rip people off. I’ve seen basically all of those kinds of people either stay stuck in the lower levels or outright fail.
Thinking deeply I guess guys like the ones who invented telemarketing and bought the rights to say they were calling on behalf of the police when really they paid some police department $10,000 to use their name to go collect $100,000 in donations were basically thinking zero sum. So I guess they exist but they usually get infamous documentaries made about them at least and they seem to be pretty rare.
The reason, I posit, is that when you’re trying to think of a new business, usually you’re thinking like this:
“What problem(s) can I solve for X group of people that would make them happy enough to pay me an amount of money that would make me happy?”
That’s the only way I know of to start an entrepreneurial journey. If that is your origin mindset, then how do you even get to a zero sum game? The entire point was to help people be happier in order to be happier yourself, which is already not zero sum thinking.
How weird it would be to try to start a business thinking “whom can I take everything from to make myself happy and ensure my customers are miserable?”
Hell, you could even argue cigarette companies didn’t start that way, and might not be now. They still try to make the things taste good and deliver vakue to make their customers happy and distressed in the brief moments, even if their products are bad in the long run, they actually still try to give their clients some value in exchange for their money. Arguably, if cigarettes provided absolutely zero value and didn’t make people happy at all, they would’ve already dropped off or never even taken off in the first place.
I suppose I could just be a weirdo; does anyone else have any good and very successful businesses that they can point to as an example of one strated as zero sum that isn’t finance related?
I think it is totally normal to feel that way, and then work on releasing that mindset. No one can produce exactly what you can, and there is more than enough space out there for all of us. I think a key piece to leveling up as an entrepreneur is to stop caring what others are thinking/doing/feeling and turning inwards to what really lights us up and what is important to us.
I’m hearing that you are more driven by a “fear of losing” than you are driven by the “joy of winning”. I did not get a job once and I assume it’s because I answered the previous way. In a game where you love winning. You also love seeing others win. With a fear of losing you are no fun to play with and can be cut throat and emotional. But with winning. Everyone is happy when everyone is winning. It’s not a competition and there is plenty to go around.
No, Japan’s camera/auto industry are perfect counterarguments to this concept. I notice paranoia around “ideas” for a lot of younger entrepreneurs and it’s mainly based on inexperience. I am not saying you should spill the beans or give a secret formula away or not be careful around who you share information with. However, you’re going to close a lot of doors if you’re just going to be a hermit and think you can do this all by yourself. The most successful entrepreneurs are the ones that know how to collaborate, delegate, and orchestrate, simple as that.
Entreprenuership is non-zero sum game by definition.
You are creating a value out of thin air to add something to economy.