The Sun’ll come out…

Wednesday, November 15, 2006 at 08:53am by Evan Prieskop in Start-Ups

Here’s a question for you established entrepreneurs: if starting capital were not an issue, would you be doing the same thing right now?

This is a fantasy scenario. If someone had, the day before you committed yourself to your current venture, offered you a blank check and said, “Do anything you want with it, as long as it is a business,” what would you be doing differently?

For me, it is tempting offer a flippant, “oh nothing,” and insist that my current venture, a free music school for underprivileged children in Honduras, is everything I could ever want. I might smile and intimate that being better funded would be nice, but is merely a matter of scale.

That would almost be true—almost, but not quite.

Given an additional twenty, or forty, or sixty thousand dollars, I would probably be doing the exact same thing, but bigger. Given a real cart blanc, however, given hundreds of thousands, or millions, I would skip the middle step.

The purpose of the school, though most visibly to teach children how to play music, has always been about multiculturalism. It is about expanding horizons. It is about exposing world-wide tourists to Trinidad music, poor children to performance art, performance artists to educators, teachers to students, the rich to the underprivileged, and, incidentally, my pocketbook to a living wage.

I have bigger plans, bigger ideas, that I cannot afford to pursue right now. Every once in a while, I find it helpful to pause and recall that fact. I think my mental health benefits from remembering that no matter how hardscrabble and corporeal my current business is, it’s not all I have in me. I could do more. I can do more. And when the funding becomes available, I will do more.

How about you?

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