A sign of the times?

A few months ago I had written a hopeful (as in, full of hope) post about three different people who had talked to me about the startup dreams and plans (you can read it here). I followed up with those entrepreneur-hopefuls and found that everything has changed.

The first was a senior level manager in a small but thriving company who wanted to work on something more personally fulfilling (while making money of course) and had thought she'd landed on just the right thing. At that time she was trying to figure out whether she should quit her job to work on her idea right away or do it part-time. Fast forward to now. She's not only still in her old job, but because of the economy and cut-backs all around, she has to do more with less and hasn't had time to even think about her idea, a fact that bothers her to the point that she prefers not to dwell on it.

The second person was in a very large multi-national with a very useful app that she had helped develop and was trying to launch as a separate venture with her company's support. It is no surprise that the budgets right now don't have much slack for something new, especially if it is not core R&D, so it's back to business as usual.

Lastly the two young men with startup fever spent many weeks going through dozens of ideas, building mini-plans for each before rejecting them. One of them gave up and decided to opt for a dependable paycheck (he'd recently gotten married). The other looking for a like-minded partner found that all his friends who'd wanted to do something on their own had decided to go the corporate route. So, he's put his entrepreneurial dreams on ice too and is looking for a job, preferably in a small funded startup.

Is it the economy that caused them to forget their dreams? Of course, summer of 2009 is in economic doldrums with glimmers of improvement but nothing you can bet your business on. It is very hard to find the fuel to power startups: angel investors, early-stage VCs, early-adopter customers or consumers with healthy discretionary spending. But, it is not impossible. I do believe that an entrepreneur who's truly passionate will figure out a way to keep the idea alive, even if it's just a few hours on nights and weekends working on plans, doing market research, scouting for co-founders - something that will keep the venture simmering slowly on a side-burner and out of the deep-freeze. It's not easy (startups are never easy) and I recommend that entrepreneurs who want to survive these times to remember Steve Jobs' famous exhortation to 'stay hungry, stay foolish' - dreams die only if you let them.