If you haven’t seen the ABC television show, Shark Tank, don’t do it unless you’d like to see your common sense eroded. It’s like hashish for the entrepreneur’s soul.
Here’s how the show goes: an entrepreneur walks between double-rows of aquariums (with sharks, of course) into a room with five very wealthy investors. The entrepreneurs do a little dog-and-pony show to demonstrate their company and then the investors either tell them how their business is junk or they start haggling to buy the biggest piece of the company possible for the least money possible. When an entrepreneur gets a deal he or she likes, “their dreams come true.”
Here’s what I hate about this hypocritical piece of reality TV: it shamelessly perpetuates the Cult of Entrepreneurialism. Check out the stats.
[list class="bullet-3"][li]After six episodes, the number of businesses that are NEW INVENTIONS: 12 (41%)[/li][li]The number of businesses that have NEVER-BEEN-DONE-BEFORE: 7 (24%)[/li][li]The number of businesses that REQUIRE BIG DISTRIBUTION DEALS: 7 (24%)[/li][li]Other businesses that I couldn’t easily classify: 2 (7%)[/li][li]The number of businesses that seem like true MICRO-BUSINESSES: 1 (4%)[/li][/list]
If we’re to believe Shark Tank, most worthwhile businesses are companies based on new inventions, companies based on totally new ideas or companies that require big distribution deals in order to succeed. What a bunch of crap! Most successful micro-businesses are based on humdrum business concepts that the entrepreneur modifies with a compelling spin. I could only find ONE of those among the 29 Shark Tank businesses. A Perfect Pear (http://www.aperfectpear.com) was bootstrapped into existence eight years ago by a Napa Valley woman with a passion for pears. She created several pear-based jams and recipes and sold them, growing a little at a time, to specialty stores around the country. To their credit, the “Sharks” went nuts for her honest-to-goodness micro-business and they got themselves in one hell of a bidding war. Despite the fact that the show is loaded with inventors trying to invent the next velcro, the Sharks know micro-biz value when they see it.
To make their hypocrisy complete, and to lend even more credibility to my rant, all but one of the five billionaire investors on the show is a bootstrapping micro-businessperson that began their own meteoric success without a dime of investment capital. The fifth guy also bootstrapped, but he did infomercials and there’s no way he did that without some dough.
The show -- which sucked me in BIG-TIME and ate many of my brain cells -- also perpetuates the deeply flawed notion that entrepreneurs need investment capital to succeed. The Cult of Entrepreneurialism preaches that raising investment capital is the end-game of a good business, instead of making profit. These entrepreneurs and investors both dance about in a pageant of faux-business, neither of them creating any value in the world with their dog-and-pony antics, pretending that somehow that’s what entrepreneurialism is all about.
How about this for TV: showcase honest entrepreneurs, just like the five billionaires used to be, and let us witness the heroism of building a tiny, everyday business on a shoestring budget. That’s the entrepreneurial dream. Not raising investment capital.
