The Braver journal
How I found my missing ingredient
On a chilly weekday morning of September 2004, when I was a Cégep student, I took off in my car as I did every morning. But on that morning, instead of heading to the Cégep, I decided to take a step away from the routine of daily life. I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with my life and that morning it was at its peak. I felt like I wanted to get far away. However, since I was young, out of money and clumsy, rather than going on one of those spontaneous trips to the end of the world, I hit the road and alarmed my family and friends much more than I expected.
Mathieu D'Amours
But from this very awkward road trip, I came back as an "entrepreneur". Something happened, I don't know what, but when I came back, I was no longer cautious. Not cautious enough, as you might reasonably say. I quit Cégep and threw myself into a tech startup that aimed to improve education by integrating a web platform into high school environments.
But as anyone who knew me at the time could expect, my approach was quite clumsy. I began by giving way too much thought to a solution, identifying and describing it in much detail, and then held on to it as hard as I could as I built it. Then I looked for a way to commercialize it. I'll spare you the details, but apart from getting to know a lot of things about the technology, it has not done much good. I went back to the Cégep, a bit disillusioned, but this time determined to pursue a career as a physics researcher.
Six years later, in 2011, after investing a year in a master's degree in neuroscience at Laval University, the entrepreneur in me that's clearly not cautious enough took me out of my studies again. And this time more intensely. A number of problems that were obviously lacking in the work of the researchers convinced me that I had to address them. And so I stopped my studies again to slip into my self-proclaimed entrepreneurial boots.
Despite the fact that this time around my approach was more sophisticated and organized, it nevertheless was full of shortcomings. A major mistake was the blatant lack of humility.
An entrepreneurial approach often begins with an idea for a solution to a problem. More specifically, the solution is often the one that fills us with optimism; enough to let go of what we're doing and dive into the void. In addition to this starting point, the world of entrepreneurship is filled with examples of people who have succeeded by specifically persevering in the face of difficulties and of all those who told them that their solution was not going to work. In this context, it is only natural to rely on our wits, reflect hard on our solution, and then build it as quickly as possible with the resources at hand. And this is where the lack of humility comes in. Who are we to know what people are really looking for? I didn't pay attention to that at the time. I lacked humility, because I thought I knew what people wanted. I thought that's what I would want if I were them. That's all.
Seven years later, in 2018, along with my wonderful life partner Marie-Lou, I was back on the entrepreneurial adventure. And this time, I wasn't alone; I was with someone who had enough humility and caution to show me how much I lacked.
And now, the Lean Startup, Design Thinking and UX Strategy approaches are taking on a new meaning to me. Only now am I really realizing how irrational it would be for us to go 120% into software development if we hadn't first confirmed that our idea for a solution was solving an real problem. And that potential customers were real potential customers. That real humans wanted to be our users. And that even though this cautious process did not by itself create tangible value, it did allow us to orient future efforts and resources in a direction where they could create real value.
This humility also created something invaluable: a corporate culture in which the people that we want to engage are not our targets, but rather our starting points.