Blake Jennelle has blog

This is the first post in a five-part series on missioneurs, a new community of startup and social entrepreneurs.

The premise is that startup entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs need each other. Alone, too many of their great ideas are struggling and failing. Together, they can fill in each other’s blind spots, build stronger companies and make greater change.

A new post in this series will be published every day this week. Blog subscribers will receive them one day early by email or RSS.

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Great startups and non-profits are dying needlessly, and it’s time for those of us who care to do something about it.

The obituaries look so familiar that they start to run together.

Here lies Anthillz, a tech startup that failed for lack of traction, inability to attract investors and too much time and money spent building the right tech team.

Here lies Great Intentions, a (barely) fictitious non-profit that died the non-profit version of this same death. It lost its foundation funding, laid off most of its staff, sought help in vain from its indifferent board – most of whom missed that board meeting, just like the ones before it – and forced its founders to look for other work because they couldn’t afford to pay themselves a salary, not even the peanuts they were making before.

If you’re a startup or social entrepreneur, one of these two stories should sound familiar. You probably hear versions of them again and again.

And even if you’ve never seen the other obituary – startups and social entrepreneurs often speak a very different language – you can probably relate to the pain.

Some of these failures are inevitable and healthy. Sometimes the world doesn’t want what it’s offered or a team fails to deliver it.

But many of these failures, far more than we realize, don’t need to happen at all. The better world they imagined is possible and the team is capable of building it.

Yet they fail. They fail and we all lose an opportunity to live in their better world.

Here’s the worst part about it, the thing that no one talks about: their failures are not really their fault.

Their failures are our fault. They are a natural consequence of the things we’ve taught them – and by “we” I mean those of us who talk about, write about and role model startup and social entrepreneurship.

It’s our fault because we have been teaching them how to be 50% entrepreneurs. And the 50% were not teaching is crippling them.

We’re not trying to do this, of course. We’re merely teaching them what we know.

The problem is that we’re only 50% entrepreneurs ourselves, missing half of the equation. We’re seeing the world through just one eye.

The good news is that both camps, startup entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs, are each seeing through a different eye. That’s why we speak such different languages.

That’s also why we have such a critical opportunity to work together. We can’t do great things with one eye closed, seeing only half the picture.

We can do great things together, each bringing one half of the whole picture and, over time, helping each other open our other eye.

Tomorrow, in part 2 of the series, we’ll describe exactly what’s missing in startup entrepreneurship and how social entrepreneurs can help. This second post is called “The one-eyed startup entrepreneur.”

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More articles in The Missioneur Series:

• Part #1 (you are here): Our startups and non-profits don’t have to die
• Part #2: The one-eyed startup entrepreneur
• Part #3: The one-eyed social entrepreneur
• Part #4: Missioneurs are entrepreneurs with both eyes open
• Part #5: Building the missioneurs community, together

Subscribe to the blog by email or RSS to receive an advance copy of each post in the series.