During my Ph.D. at TU Delft in The Netherlands, I performed (for one night only) stand-up comedy during an amateur night at a comedy club in Amsterdam. At the time, I had a lot of anxiety about approaching attractive women [think Raj from the Big Bang theory]. My theory was that the experience of doing stand-up would help to develop my confidence and sense of humour. Now I’m married to a beautiful woman with whom I have four kids.

Preparing for my debut was my way of me working out my personal issues. It was also cheaper than therapy. Performing stand-up is very different from presenting a research paper or making a sales pitch. When you are presenting your research, you will generally be providing an outline of your talk, detail your findings, and make a conclusion. If you attempted to do the same thing in stand up your routine would be boring. Some research and sales pitches are boring too, but that’s a separate issue.

The key to stand up is knowing your audience. Successful comedians offer a unique blend of character, energy, and script. There’s a very simple rule in stand-up: “if they don’t laugh, you’re not funny.” – That’s harsh but true. The same is true with your business, if it’s not making money, it will fail. You must be honest with yourself in this regard. In the case of stand up, your routine may not play well with a certain crowd, but it’s your job as a comic to know your audience.

My favourite comedian of all time is Patrice O’Neill – Elephant in the Room is a masterpiece. Now his humour is not for everyone, but that’s the point. There’s no such thing as ‘objectively funny.’ While I certainly don’t subscribe to all of O’Neill’s world views, there’s no denying that his perspective is his own. Great comedians are great because they are willing to take risks, and push boundaries. You watch them because they may fail, even if you want them to succeed. Similarly, great businesses have taken great risks and become wildly successful in the process. Knowing your tolerance for risk is very important here. Generally speaking the older you are the more risk-averse you are likely to be.

I prepared for about 6 months to perform 7 minutes of comedy. It takes a lot of effort to look spontaneous and I had great difficulty presenting in a non-linear way. On the night of the performance, I came down with a bad sore throat and I learned that day that my supervisor heard about my performance from one of the other Ph.D. candidates and planned to attend!

Seven minutes may not seem like a long time, but trust me when you’re on stage, mic in hand it can feel like an eternity. I got through my routine and I got a few laughs. What I thought was my best punchline bombed completely. I remember thinking on the train ride home that my career was over and I was a complete loser. However, after some reflection, I realized that while I am no hero, no one that I knew in my circle of friends would have the audacity to go through with that. Regardless, of whether anyone in the audience thought I was funny, I was the one on the stage. I learned a lot from that experience, lecturing for me is a lot easier as a result, and now and then I try to throw a ‘one-liner’ to my students.

Stand-up is hard because there’s no hiding. If people don’t like you, they don’t like you personally. It’s not like research where you are explicitly removing your personal opinion and presenting your findings, which hopefully is supported by your scholarly inquiry into the literature on the topic.

Starting a business is a lot like stand up, at least in the beginning stages. It will be closely tied to who you are as a person. If you fail, you’re the one responsible for that. You have to define your audience or target market, you can’t be sure that things will work out so you have to test it out. Often you will fail. Hopefully find what works for you, but even if you don’t you will learn a lot in the process.

I can’t recall all the details of my standup routine but I ended my performance with a famous Dutch saying – “Be yourself, that’s strange enough.” I thought it would play well with the crowd – it didn’t, but the idiom is a useful one. You can spend a lot of time being something you’re not in business because you think it will lead you to ‘success’, but if it’s not who you are, it will not be fulfilling. You need to know that because, despite the hype, entrepreneurship can be lonely at times. You will make mistakes, but one of the good thing about going to university is you learn at the very least not to repeat other people’s mistakes. Just don’t forget that you also need to make your own mistakes too – This will later be affectionately be referred to as your ‘experience’ and that is where profit is to be found!