Entrepreneurship: brick & mortar or tech?

I’ve tried both and failed at both.

Lately, I’ve been feeling the itch to go back to entrepreneurship. The signs are not there. The scars from my past failures are hurting. I’m broke. My family is suffering. I don’t have any resources to try something risky.

But the itch is there… Something happened in recent weeks and I want to start a business. Again. Actually, nothing happened in recent weeks. I just started itching… It’s like a virus I guess.

When I think of brick & mortar, I think of the opposite — Zuckerberg’s metaverse. There is nothing I despise more than Facebook’s (oh, sorry — Meta’s) metaverse project. I’m not a grumpy old man. I’m pretty tech-savvy. But the metaverse hype — it’s fucking annoying. Instead of seeing people enjoy the real world, against the backdrop of ever-increasing screen time, we have a tech billionaire who’s excited about putting a headset on everyone’s head.

I want to see kids and adults move. Move! For real! Travel, run, walk, hike, swim; visit countries, cities, museums, zoos, and concerts. By all means, let technology help arrange these activities. But I’m talking Realverse, not metaverse.

On the other hand, brick & mortar is hard, very hard. It’s a very long-term game. It can take decades to build a business. It’s not that I am looking for a shortcut to becoming a billionaire, but I’m not sure I want to spend the next twenty-thirty years building an operationally heavy business that can still fail. And…