An Excessively Simplified Professional Narrative
Over recent years, an excessively binary narrative has been built around the professional world. Entrepreneurship is associated with dynamism, freedom, impact, and modernity, while the corporate world is reduced to bureaucracy, slowness, and conformism. It is a convenient framework—easy to explain and easy to consume—but deeply oversimplified.
“Entrepreneurship is not a morally superior way of working, nor is the corporate world a necessary evil to be escaped from as soon as possible.”
These are different contexts, with different logics and different demands—demands that not everyone has to want, or even be able, to assume. Acknowledging this should not be experienced as a renunciation, but rather as a mature professional decision.
Having an Idea Is Not Entrepreneurship
One of the most common mistakes is confusing the starting point with the journey. Having an idea is just that: a beginning. It is not proof of viability, impact, or real opportunity—let alone of execution capability.
Entrepreneurship begins when an idea stops being an attractive hypothesis and is confronted with uncomfortable questions: whether the problem truly exists, who it affects, with what intensity, in what specific context, and above all, what solutions already exist and why they are not solving the problem sufficiently well. All these questions must be addressed rigorously. That is precisely why, some time ago, I proposed an analysis framework—the Innovation analysis: Back & Forth Methodology©—which is particularly useful for navigating this path without self-deception and for avoiding the confusion between potential and viability.
Intuition is valuable, but it does not replace analysis. Confusing the two is one of the main sources of later frustration.
Dynamism Is Not the Absence of Method
Another major self-deception in entrepreneurial discourse is equating dynamism with informality and method with rigidity, as if structuring thinking were incompatible with moving fast. It is not. In fact, the opposite is often true.
A lack of method is frequently disguised behind well-intentioned concepts—“let’s try things out,” “we’ll pivot,” “we’ll see what the market says”—which in practice defer critical decisions into the future without having done the minimum work of understanding beforehand. The market always ends up saying something, but it usually does so later, and at an added cost that can be significant.
Method does not eliminate uncertainty, but it does prevent permanent improvisation. And building a venture on improvisation is neither bravery nor flexibility; it is a refusal to truly understand what one is doing.
The Corporate World Is Not Just Bureaucracy
Reducing traditional companies to slow, dehumanized machines is a caricature that may serve to justify certain decisions, but it is intellectually dishonest from a professional standpoint. Large organizations exist because they have learned—more or less successfully—to solve complex problems: coordinating people, managing risk, allocating scarce resources, scaling operations, and ensuring continuity over time.
Entrepreneurship does not free anyone from these challenges. It simply forces you to confront the same tensions with less structure, less margin for error, and a weaker safety net. Idealizing entrepreneurship as a pure space in contrast to a corrupt corporate world is often a sign that neither of the two has been properly understood.
Entrepreneurship Is, Sooner or Later, About Building a Company
This is one of the hardest points to accept: if an entrepreneurial project works, it ends up developing structures very similar to those of any company. Processes appear, roles are defined, implicit hierarchies emerge, uncomfortable decisions must be made, financial controls are introduced, priorities exclude alternatives, and renunciations arise that were not part of the original narrative.
The difference does not lie in the existence of these structures, but in their scale and in the moment they appear. Those who embark on entrepreneurship hoping to remain permanently in a light, creative, early-stage phase do not really want to build something that lasts. They want to indefinitely extend the beginning.
The Analysis That Should Be Done First (and Not Delegated to Investors)
Before starting a venture, there is a path that should be reasonably well covered: market analysis, real solution viability, deep understanding of existing alternatives, an honest estimation of market size, and especially of the share that can realistically be captured.
It is not the most visible or inspiring work, but it prevents a significant number of failures that are later attributed to “bad luck” or “timing.” Relying on investors to carry out this analysis is not a strategy; it is a delegation of (ir)responsibility that is usually made too late and under criteria that do not always align with those of the project itself.
Not Entrepreneurship as an Emotional Reaction
Starting a venture as a reaction to corporate fatigue is a weak foundation for a decision of this magnitude. Not because the discomfort is illegitimate, but because entrepreneurship does not automatically resolve it.
The only solid reason to pursue entrepreneurship is having identified something that can be solved better, more efficiently, faster, or with greater value than existing solutions—and having a reasonable, evidence-based (not wishful) hypothesis that part of that value can be captured. Everything else is escape, not a project.
De-Idealizing Is Not Discouraging
This text does not aim to glorify entrepreneurship nor to defend the corporate world. Its purpose is to place both within a more realistic, less epic, and more professional frame. For some, removing the epic means deflating the soufflé; for others, it is precisely what allows projects to be stripped down and the unnecessary loss of time and money to be avoided—especially when that money is no longer only one’s own.
Not everyone has to become an entrepreneur, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The problem is not choosing not to do so, but choosing to do it driven by a narrative that confuses dynamism with a lack of rigor and freedom with the absence of structure.
