#thebigdisrupter

[raven-reviews]

Recapturing the Narrative by Paul Markun

One driving force behind my writing my first novel, The Big Disrupter, came from a surprise I had as an entrepreneur. I thought, like many others, that entrepreneurs got to do it their way. As their own boss they set the goals, their hours and their daily actions.

Not really. My own experience, both as an owner and as part of the leadership of small companies, was the opposite. Yes, you got to choose the name of the company. And your title. But very quickly after that, if you were successful, your customers own you. Your employees cause you all the angst and joy of kids and family. The engineering and wildfire pace of emerging technology restarts your focus monthly. Your banker and your competitors have tremendous influence over what you do. You don't sleep much. You aren’t in control of your narrative at all.

  I left my last software company (I didn’t start the company but was early in the door) on a Friday afternoon and began writing my first novel Monday morning at six a.m. If there was a character annoying me, I changed her. If something appeared impossible, I invented a smarter, stronger way. If the pace was slow–suddenly a new thread began with a twisted villain. What a thrill! The ideas bubbling up went to paper not to committee.

In my writing I used the backdrop of young entrepreneurs starting a company as the context of their journey. I lived that world, thriving with the dreamers, enraged by the takers, and battling for funding and revenue and brand success. I had lived in a mountain town among extreme athletes and skiers, so that part also came naturally. Still, there were many experts to interview and much research to conduct. It took three complete rewrites and two and a half years for me to complete the book. Three times my experienced ‘thriller editor’ returned the printed manuscript with ripped out chapters, slashed business detail, and extraneous characters rubbed out.

In the end, there is a moral to the story. Here in Silicon Valley I see a few generous entrepreneurs giving back tremendously and I blog and tweet about them. But many others take the U.S.’s fertile and stable pro-business ecosystem for granted. The ‘smartest guys and gals in the room’ sometimes think they are automatically due their billions. My heroes think bigger than that. 

Like the learning curve in business, I hope my writing improves with experience. My mother, along with raising four kids, and working as a speechwriter in Washington, D.C. for decades, also wrote eleven books of children’s fiction. I have a long way to go but many sources of inspiration.

To read more about this author and his latest book, The Big Disrupter, click HERE.