These mistakes I hope to avoid in my next entrepreneurial endeavor

I’m a serial failure entrepreneur. I guess I can’t even call myself an entrepreneur.

Here’s what I failed at in the past fifteen years. By “failure” I mean not creating value for investors. Some were spectacular failures, that caused damage to others and my family; others meant abandoning, ungracefully, what I started or had barely started.

Here are some of my failures:

• Working for my father’s meat production business
• A burger restaurant
• A youth fitness center in Silicon Valley
• An app for afterschool activities and its various pivots (a social platform for youth activities)
• A goal setting/tracking app

Every story is a world of its own. Different investors, markets, and mistakes. Different takeaways.

But there are some recurring themes I will try to address before I venture into entrepreneurship again:

• Do not rely on your entrepreneurial venture to be your source of income even if you’re able to raise external capital
• Similarly, do not put all eggs in one basket. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that you shouldn’t have Plan B because you’re immediately allowing for the possibility of your Plan A failing and so you’re failing already. Bullshit. There are many different situations under which you can start building a business. Sometimes the all-or-nothing…