Chris Guilleabeau speaks May 30 at MAH.
Your career path is dead. Save yourself. Such is the underlying premise of Chris Guillebeau’s new book The $100 Startup, a rallying cry to scrappy entrepreneurship.
Yes, job security and pensions have evaporated, but Guillebeau consoles us with the idea that we’re actually in charge. The subtitle says it all: Reinvent the Way You Make A Living, Do What You Love, and Create A New Future.
Guillebeau, who speaks at MAH on May 30 as part of the NextSpace–sponsored What’s Next lecture series, even gives us the formula: take a passion of yours, figure out where it converges with what other people want and find a way to give it to them in exchange for money. Oh, and start now. No need to wait for venture capital or the perfect showroom or whatever. Just get started.
Guilleabeau’s exhaustive research—he interviewed 1,500 entrepreneurs who started with little or no capital—allows him to illustrate these precepts, along with other lessons in what works and what doesn’t, with real-life examples of people who bootstrapped themselves into work they enjoy and that supports them. There’s the sales guy who got walked out of his office with a cardboard box and started a mattress company out of a mothballed car dealership based on extra inventory a friend needed to get rid of. There are the designers who, bored with their jobs, started making custom maps in their spare time and are now in business. Guillebeau gets down to the nitty-gritty of how other people did it and how we can too. All we have to do, he says, is start.
CHRIS GUILLEBEAU speaks Wednesday, May 30 at 7pm at the Museum of Art and History. Tickets $10 adv/$15 door/$4 students at www.whatsnextlectures.com.
