In the 2007 kids’ movie Ratatouille the mordant food critic Anton Ego says, “The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.” Every entrepreneur should be in furious agreement, because few things in life are tougher than trying to create a new company. Mostly, entrepreneurs are madly optimistic people – and we have to be, because pretty much everything will turn out to be against us in one way or another as we head down the road towards our distant but cherished goal. How does an otherwise normal person end up being an entrepreneur and, once the madness strikes, how do we sustain our effort in the face of reality slapping us across the face on a too-regular basis? Read the rest of this entry »