What does it take to start a business? Most entrepreneurs usually accumulate some real-world experience—a consultant, maybe, or working in a big company—before daring to strike out on their own.
Ronnen Harary begs to differ. Harary co-founded Spin Master, the company behind blockbuster brands like PAW Patrol and Bakugan, less than a year after graduating from college while still living at home with his mother in Canada. And in his new book, No Experience Necessary, released last week, he argues that the absence of the very qualities we tend to see as prerequisites for success—experience, wisdom, credentials—may actually be a competitive advantage for young entrepreneurs. So why, he asks, in the following exclusive excerpt, do we encourage aspiring entrepreneurs to wait until those very advantages have disappeared? —The Editors
A few months ago, while on vacation in South Africa, I hired a 21-year-old tennis pro to give me some lessons. On one of our breaks, he asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I was the CEO of Spin Master, the toy company that created PAW Patrol and Bakugan, he almost fell off his chair. “Bakugan?” he said. “I loved Bakugan. That was my favorite toy growing up.”
At our next lesson, he showed up with a box containing his whole collection of Bakugan. He had about 30 of them, and as he went through them, telling me stories about each one, he got emotional. It hit me that he knew Bakugan better than I did. He grew up playing with them for hours on end, fantasizing about how these characters grew to a hundred feet in size. My business partners and I had brought Bakugan into the world, but for this kid, for a few magical years, Bakugan had become his world.
Everyone who dreams up a bold new idea and goes into business hopes to have that kind of impact on the world. Yes, you want to achieve a measure of financial success, but more than that, you want your vision to be seized and embraced by the public. That’s why the journey from start-up to success is the main subject of half the how-to business books in your average bookstore.
