Last weekend I met two of my friends, who are entrepreneurs and have their own start-ups. Each of them was in corporate jobs for over 10 years and has taken this leap in the last 2-3 years. We had good chat about their life as an entrepreneur, their journey from corporate world to being a founder of a technology start up and challenges that an entrepreneur will face. During these discussions they shared a couple of challenges which they face.

While big corporates have departments and experts for the diverse range of skills that the business demands, entrepreneurs have no such luxury. Making sense of the fine print in contracts and agreements, dealing with compliances are examples of competencies that many techie entrepreneurs are not equipped with. They improvise on such skills as they go. They become part of all the departments. They have to lend their thought space for wide range of issues, be it engineering, sales, or even legal.  Most of the times hiring people with such niche skills is not feasible, but sometimes the realization to hire them dawns only with a bitter experience.

Time to market determines the success factor in start-up. Similar ideas are being thought out by many people in the world at the same time. The one that brings it out to the market has the advantage. A stable development team is a key factor for faster time to market. The challenge is to find and retain people with right technical skills.  On the day of the critical delivery to the customer, a fresher that my friend had hired for his start up thought it is appropriate to send a chat message telling he can’t continue any more as the MNC is offering an astronomical sum – suddenly escalating the situation to a crisis. If filtering through hundreds of résumés and selecting a good candidate is tough, retaining this talent and not losing them to the fat pay cheques of the corporates is next to impossible.

While thinking about couple of issues they mentioned, it suddenly occurred to me that there are many ways in which I can help such start-ups. I thought why don’t I use some of my free time to actually help my friends out? I called up one of them and offered to him to specifically work with him to do 2-3 specific activities for his venture. He happily welcomed it. I clarified to him it is volunteer work and all I wanted was for him to succeed. In turn I would get the experience of working for a start-up. It felt really good.

There are lots of people working in big corporations with immense skills in niche areas who are contemplating either to start up a venture or work in a start-up. There are many who feel their potential is yet to be realized in their companies. There are people who are exploring how they can do more interesting things in their careers.

If you are any one of these – Why not connect with a start-up founder and offer to volunteer for these guys? Why not lend your skills to help solve some specific problem for them? How about making a software module work? How about fixing a couple of defects or perhaps guiding them on certain legal matter?  If you are interested, why not update your LinkedIn profile offering your skills and see how many heads you turn?

It could be an opportunity to polish those skills that you have not used in a while. You have great chances of networking with some “doers” of the industry. It will be a great chance to learn.  Your contributions will be the show case of your competencies in your résumé.  In short, it will not just be a valuable help for the founders, you will be doing yourself a big favour.

(Views are personal)

This article was first posted on LInkedIn

Image Courtesy:
Smudge 9000 (Flickr)