An entrepreneur who has just started a business in “his garage,” hoping to build a multibillion-dollar company, doesn’t like isolating himself from society. And although it may feel lonely in a garage, there is still an internet connection, and posting on LinkedIn a few times a week may help him feel connected.
Many of them, however, are not as hungry for connection as they are for preparing a network of several thousand people for D-Day. That is the day when the business scales, or the startup gets acquired by a big company, and the entrepreneur finally writes the long-awaited post for his community.
But announcing to the world that your business has just been sold for several million dollars may not be the most impressive thing to do. Simply because that is just information. Pay attention: there is no message in it. And so, starting a business in a garage becomes the perfect narrative to begin the LinkedIn post with, or to hope that a journalist might one day turn into a headline.
That is the magical sentence that starts with: “When, years ago, I started this business in my garage…” Of course, this narrative is not the strongest one. There is an even better message when the garage didn’t even belong to you. Then the note goes like this: “When, years ago, I started this business in my father’s garage…”
The garage narrative was never about poverty. It was about freedom.
I consider myself someone with an entrepreneurial mindset. I am always onto something. And I like taking such entrepreneurial notes while sitting in a café. But you know what I don’t like about modern specialty cafés? Many of them look like drugstores. Or laboratories. That is the worst possible environment for enjoying coffee, as opposed to having a nice cup in a very cozy space. But cozy seems to be considered weak, and specialty coffee apparently requires a highly minimalist setting.
And so, when I notice these things, I almost always generate dozens of ideas for a great and cozy specialty coffee shop. I have a lot of notes on my iPad, and even more in my head, but they could never become reality. You know why? Because I do not have a garage. And neither does my father. I wish we did.
One day, I decided to take more decisive steps. LinkedIn entrepreneurs say, “Just do it, man.” And so I picked up the phone and called a real estate agency here in Paris. There was a very small boutique near my apartment, and if I could rent it at a reasonable price, I might have started the coffee shop of my dreams.
The agent mentioned a very high price, then let me know that I would need to leave a six-month deposit. That would be more than €15,000, and you don’t even have a café yet. And I started thinking: “If I had a garage, I might have solved a problem worth more than €15,000.” But you understand that you cannot seriously think about starting a real, physical business if you do not have at least €15,000, and you also do not have a garage.
The tradition of starting a success story with a humble picture of a garage began with the successful tycoons of Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs started Apple in his father’s garage with Steve Wozniak. And today’s entrepreneurs love Jobs. Me too, by the way.
Jobs is an inspiration to many, and I see a lot of people sharing stories from his life and getting inspired by them. I think there might even be people who deliberately start a business in a garage so that they can later have their own Apple Park.
The problem with many modern businesses is their fear of freedom.
One nuance, however, that many businesspeople fail to catch is Jobs’ personality, his preferences, and the lens through which he looked at life while sitting in that garage, although he spent far less time there than Wozniak did.
Steve Jobs mentioned many times that the reason Apple became Apple was not his garage. It was not even his ego. It was the people he surrounded himself with. He always gave credit to the people who tolerated his meticulous approach to everything and, often, his annoying micromanagement. These were people Jobs hired based on their promise and personality, not simply their education or conventional CVs.
He wasn’t impressed by candidates who had successfully climbed the corporate ladder. What would make him say, “This is the guy we need,” was their interest in the arts, their ability to sing, their skill at playing the piano or painting—to do whatever, but to be an interesting person first. That is what gave birth to the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad. Those were the kinds of people behind these products.
The problem with many modern businesses is their fear of freedom. Entrepreneurs who write long posts on social media about their ability to take risks may be terrified of hiring someone who doesn’t have a decade of work experience, an education from a prestigious university, and a 100% guarantee that they won’t suck if hired.
When Jobs and others in this category told the story of their garage-born ideas, they were trying to symbolize the freedom they had. The risks they could take. And the people they could hire. So, the garage narrative was never about painting a picture of poverty.
Trust me, because I know what it means not to have a garage. And I have also been experiencing what it means to look for a job in a market full of garage-born businesses that are afraid of freedom.