4 ms·

Blessed Are the “Boring,” for They Create the Billion Dollar Startups

28 points by replicatorblog 10y ago

AndrewKemendo 10y ago
Who cares about making billions if it's something you aren't motivated about? It takes a long time to make a $BN company, it's not like you can just get in and flip it so you better believe in what you're doing. You won't find meaning in dollar accumulation - you will find meaning applying dollars and time to something you believe in.
- TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
  > You won't find meaning in dollar accumulation This is true, but it also downplays how important money is. There are millions of people in the US alone living in poverty, struggling to pay their bills. For them, dollar accumulation _is_ life.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    Yes I used to be one. But we aren't talking about them are we? This article is not advice for someone who dropped out of high school, has two kids, an oxy habit and a minimum wage job.
  - dllthomas 10y ago
    Most of those millions of people probably also shouldn't be making trade-offs optimizing for billion dollar startups.
- NikolaeVarius 10y ago
  Who cares if you're building something you're motivated about but doesn't make money? You can't survive by eating code.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    No doubt about that. You'll find a way if you have the motivation. Even if you have to do other stuff until it gets going.
    - milesvp 10y ago
      Motivation is not the same as passion. Scott Adams famously talks about his stint in bank lending, and that you should never lend money to passionate people. https://www.fastcompany.com/3030518/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-on-why-big-goals-are-for-losers https://www.fastcompany.com/3030518/dilbert-creator-scott-ad... I agree that motivated people find a way, but my experience is that passion is a luxury, and people who indulge in luxuries, almost by definition, aren't willing to do "whatever it takes"(tm).
- replicatorblog 10y ago
  I think the point is that your true passion may lay outside the market or problem area. In the case of Waste Management/BlockBuster/Extended Stay America the founder seemed to enjoy taking local businesses and figuring out ways to get efficiency at national scale. There is no throughline between trash, videos, and depressing hotels, but there is in the business process that undergirds them.
  - gpawl 10y ago
    That's the much-derided "MBA" concept.
    - replicatorblog 10y ago
      MailChimp is on the other side of the spectrum. A purely creative team took on the grubby problems of email list management and spam filter evasion and used the profits to fund one of the most creative businesses in tech.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    Yea that's what business schools are supposed to be about - creating "management people."
akanet 10y ago
I completely agree, so much so that I claim that "boring" is a positive and necessary attribute for any small solo business started by a software entrepreneur. I gave a talk at Dropbox about the necessities of being boring if you want to start a small business without quitting your day job: https://youtu.be/J8UwcyYT3z0 https://youtu.be/J8UwcyYT3z0.
- themoat 10y ago
  That was great. It really spoke to me, and I really love what you said about the American Dream. Such a good way to frame it for me.
skdotdan 10y ago
Am I the only one who finds very interesting many B2B startups that are supposed to be "boring"?
- replicatorblog 10y ago
  Not at all! But these stories don't get nearly the amount of media coverage even trivial consumer startups can earn. For instance, Veeva, Service Now, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, and Workday are five of the top ten tech IPOs from the last 5 years. They get a fraction of the coverage even mediocre consumer IPOs (e.g. GoPro/FitBit) got.
ianamartin 10y ago
I agree with this as well. Many good comments so far. It's something I constantly struggle with. My one passion for my whole life has been classical music. Before I got into software, I played violin for a living. Not a great living, but enough to scrape by. That's still my passion. I'm passionate about computers in and of themselves, and I enjoy the mental challenges that come from tackling the tasks that I get paid to work on day-to-day. What keeps me motivated in my job now is the same thing that gets me excited about classical music: you create very special and very deep personal connections with your coworkers (or co-performers) and your clients (or audience). This is one reason I am always much happier with in-house teams serving internal clients rather than creating products for masses of people I'll never meet. I can't imagine being happy at a company like google or facebook. But put me in a medium-sized business where I'm building tools for people I see and work with every day? I'm super happy. Thrilled that I'm touching people's lives with my work who I have a real human relationship with. I have a problem when it comes to pursuing side projects with an aim towards maybe turning them into a business: the one thing I'm passionate about for its own sake has little available market. I probably think of 5 different things a day that would be awesome for classical musicians. But when it comes down to it, classical musicians are generally not wealthy. They have very little disposable income, most of them are up to their eyeballs in debt because instruments are very expensive, and they are not technically savvy. Aiming a business at that market would be stupid. They can't afford it, and they won't understand it. But it's what I care about. So what. It's a bad business choice. And I just have to accept that. In the 11 years since I quit playing violin for a living and started my career in technology, I've come up with exactly one idea that has the broad appeal to all non-profits across the country. And I sometimes work on that. But, boy: it's boring. The thing I'm working on right now is a totally practical itch that needs scratching, and it's for my family. My family is really big. If you count up all of the people descended just from my grandparents on my dad's side, we're talking about upwards of 1,200 human beings. Not all of whom are still alive, obviously. We've lost a couple dozen here and there. And many are quite old. My dad will be 98 in a couple of weeks. And he still jogs 5 miles a day. He's probably in better shape than my neckbeard ass is. I hope I got his family's side of the genes. His only remaining sibling is 105, and she lives alone and takes care of herself. His mother was 102 when she passed when I was a kid. So if the 1,200 number seems crazy coming from my grandparents, I'd like you to remember that that's all the people born and married into a family where my grandma was born in 1882. That's a lot of time to generate a lot of kids. And I'm only in my late-30s. So you know, possibly a lot more to come along. :) We have an enormous amount of family pride and stick-together-ness. We love being who we are and knowing that we're sort of everywhere. But it's really hard to keep everyone up to date. I want us to have a totally private, secure, ad-free, social environment to share family news with each other, plan our reunions, figure out who is living where and when we might be near enough to one another to meet up. I'd like for us to be able to do this without having to mess with the constantly changing facebook privacy jiggery pokery. We don't want to be making the sadly frequent funeral plans in a place where things could get public because someone clicks the wrong button. It needs to be dead simple to use. My dad loves facebook and is on it constantly, as are many of the older people in my family who are still with us. I want to build something for them that's a default-private place for all of us, and with end-to-end encryption. Here's an example case where this would have been amazing. I moved to NYC almost 2 years ago. I didn't know anyone here at all except for the 5 people in the startup I was working for. NYC can be a lonely place, what with all the people around here. Months later, I got a call from one of my cousins many states away, and she said, "I heard a rumor that you're in Brooklyn now. You, know, my son lives about a mile from you. You remember him from when you were kids? He's about your age. You should get together." Fast forward a couple weeks and he comes over for dinner. And he has two women with him. And he says, "Oh hey. These two are also our cousins and live nearby. We got ourselves a whole fucking crew of Martins here now. Time to take over the city." And we are a tight-nit crew today. It was a wonderful thing. I'd like to facilitate more of that for my family. So the plan here isn't to build a business that intentionally competes with facebook or tries to take it on at scale. The idea is to build a better experience for one specific use case family social connections. Provide some tools that help event planning for things like weddings, funerals, and reunions. Some special tools for family tree exploration, wiki pages for people who have passed away, etc. It's very purpose driven towards allowing families to stay in touch. And I figure I can't be the only person, nor we the only family, in the world who would like something like this. I think this safe, secure environment would be worth a dollar a month to enough people that I could eventually build a niche business out of it. I won't ever get hundreds of millions of users. And I don't want to. I'd be thrilled knowing that 50 thousand people in the world are using this to stay closer to the people they treasure. And I'd happily work on that every day until I die. Sorry, that turned into a much longer post than I intended it to. The main thing I'd say to people who want to pursue their passions as a business is to do some deep thinking about what motivates your passion. It took me a long time to understand that while, yes I am passionate about the actual music that gets written and performed in the classical genre, there's something deeper that motivates that passion. And it's something that when recognized can be applied passionately to a number of different endeavors. It can be a life-altering experience to come to the realization that what you think you are passionate about is really a surface level symptom of what's really driving you as a person. You may find yourself doing something relatively boring in your spare time. Like, another social network. Yawn. But you might also find yourself on fire for this boring work because it is deeply and personally meaningful to you.
mindhash 10y ago
I think this is pretty much true in building a great career. Willing to do the boring stuff that others are not. Sometimes you end up making things pretty interesting

Who cares about making billions if it's something you aren't motivated about? It takes a long time to make a $BN company, it's not like you can just get in and flip it so you better believe in what you're doing. You won't find meaning in dollar accumulation - you will find meaning applying dollars and time to something you believe in.

TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
> You won't find meaning in dollar accumulation This is true, but it also downplays how important money is. There are millions of people in the US alone living in poverty, struggling to pay their bills. For them, dollar accumulation _is_ life.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  Yes I used to be one. But we aren't talking about them are we? This article is not advice for someone who dropped out of high school, has two kids, an oxy habit and a minimum wage job.
- dllthomas 10y ago
  Most of those millions of people probably also shouldn't be making trade-offs optimizing for billion dollar startups.
NikolaeVarius 10y ago
Who cares if you're building something you're motivated about but doesn't make money? You can't survive by eating code.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  No doubt about that. You'll find a way if you have the motivation. Even if you have to do other stuff until it gets going.
  - milesvp 10y ago
    Motivation is not the same as passion. Scott Adams famously talks about his stint in bank lending, and that you should never lend money to passionate people. https://www.fastcompany.com/3030518/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-on-why-big-goals-are-for-losers https://www.fastcompany.com/3030518/dilbert-creator-scott-ad... I agree that motivated people find a way, but my experience is that passion is a luxury, and people who indulge in luxuries, almost by definition, aren't willing to do "whatever it takes"(tm).
replicatorblog 10y ago
I think the point is that your true passion may lay outside the market or problem area. In the case of Waste Management/BlockBuster/Extended Stay America the founder seemed to enjoy taking local businesses and figuring out ways to get efficiency at national scale. There is no throughline between trash, videos, and depressing hotels, but there is in the business process that undergirds them.
- gpawl 10y ago
  That's the much-derided "MBA" concept.
  - replicatorblog 10y ago
    MailChimp is on the other side of the spectrum. A purely creative team took on the grubby problems of email list management and spam filter evasion and used the profits to fund one of the most creative businesses in tech.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  Yea that's what business schools are supposed to be about - creating "management people."

akanet 10y ago

I completely agree, so much so that I claim that "boring" is a positive and necessary attribute for any small solo business started by a software entrepreneur. I gave a talk at Dropbox about the necessities of being boring if you want to start a small business without quitting your day job: https://youtu.be/J8UwcyYT3z0 https://youtu.be/J8UwcyYT3z0.

themoat 10y ago
That was great. It really spoke to me, and I really love what you said about the American Dream. Such a good way to frame it for me.

skdotdan 10y ago

Am I the only one who finds very interesting many B2B startups that are supposed to be "boring"?

replicatorblog 10y ago
Not at all! But these stories don't get nearly the amount of media coverage even trivial consumer startups can earn. For instance, Veeva, Service Now, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, and Workday are five of the top ten tech IPOs from the last 5 years. They get a fraction of the coverage even mediocre consumer IPOs (e.g. GoPro/FitBit) got.

ianamartin 10y ago

I agree with this as well. Many good comments so far. It's something I constantly struggle with. My one passion for my whole life has been classical music. Before I got into software, I played violin for a living. Not a great living, but enough to scrape by. That's still my passion. I'm passionate about computers in and of themselves, and I enjoy the mental challenges that come from tackling the tasks that I get paid to work on day-to-day. What keeps me motivated in my job now is the same thing that gets me excited about classical music: you create very special and very deep personal connections with your coworkers (or co-performers) and your clients (or audience). This is one reason I am always much happier with in-house teams serving internal clients rather than creating products for masses of people I'll never meet. I can't imagine being happy at a company like google or facebook. But put me in a medium-sized business where I'm building tools for people I see and work with every day? I'm super happy. Thrilled that I'm touching people's lives with my work who I have a real human relationship with. I have a problem when it comes to pursuing side projects with an aim towards maybe turning them into a business: the one thing I'm passionate about for its own sake has little available market. I probably think of 5 different things a day that would be awesome for classical musicians. But when it comes down to it, classical musicians are generally not wealthy. They have very little disposable income, most of them are up to their eyeballs in debt because instruments are very expensive, and they are not technically savvy. Aiming a business at that market would be stupid. They can't afford it, and they won't understand it. But it's what I care about. So what. It's a bad business choice. And I just have to accept that. In the 11 years since I quit playing violin for a living and started my career in technology, I've come up with exactly one idea that has the broad appeal to all non-profits across the country. And I sometimes work on that. But, boy: it's boring. The thing I'm working on right now is a totally practical itch that needs scratching, and it's for my family. My family is really big. If you count up all of the people descended just from my grandparents on my dad's side, we're talking about upwards of 1,200 human beings. Not all of whom are still alive, obviously. We've lost a couple dozen here and there. And many are quite old. My dad will be 98 in a couple of weeks. And he still jogs 5 miles a day. He's probably in better shape than my neckbeard ass is. I hope I got his family's side of the genes. His only remaining sibling is 105, and she lives alone and takes care of herself. His mother was 102 when she passed when I was a kid. So if the 1,200 number seems crazy coming from my grandparents, I'd like you to remember that that's all the people born and married into a family where my grandma was born in 1882. That's a lot of time to generate a lot of kids. And I'm only in my late-30s. So you know, possibly a lot more to come along. :) We have an enormous amount of family pride and stick-together-ness. We love being who we are and knowing that we're sort of everywhere. But it's really hard to keep everyone up to date. I want us to have a totally private, secure, ad-free, social environment to share family news with each other, plan our reunions, figure out who is living where and when we might be near enough to one another to meet up. I'd like for us to be able to do this without having to mess with the constantly changing facebook privacy jiggery pokery. We don't want to be making the sadly frequent funeral plans in a place where things could get public because someone clicks the wrong button. It needs to be dead simple to use. My dad loves facebook and is on it constantly, as are many of the older people in my family who are still with us. I want to build something for them that's a default-private place for all of us, and with end-to-end encryption. Here's an example case where this would have been amazing. I moved to NYC almost 2 years ago. I didn't know anyone here at all except for the 5 people in the startup I was working for. NYC can be a lonely place, what with all the people around here. Months later, I got a call from one of my cousins many states away, and she said, "I heard a rumor that you're in Brooklyn now. You, know, my son lives about a mile from you. You remember him from when you were kids? He's about your age. You should get together." Fast forward a couple weeks and he comes over for dinner. And he has two women with him. And he says, "Oh hey. These two are also our cousins and live nearby. We got ourselves a whole fucking crew of Martins here now. Time to take over the city." And we are a tight-nit crew today. It was a wonderful thing. I'd like to facilitate more of that for my family. So the plan here isn't to build a business that intentionally competes with facebook or tries to take it on at scale. The idea is to build a better experience for one specific use case family social connections. Provide some tools that help event planning for things like weddings, funerals, and reunions. Some special tools for family tree exploration, wiki pages for people who have passed away, etc. It's very purpose driven towards allowing families to stay in touch. And I figure I can't be the only person, nor we the only family, in the world who would like something like this. I think this safe, secure environment would be worth a dollar a month to enough people that I could eventually build a niche business out of it. I won't ever get hundreds of millions of users. And I don't want to. I'd be thrilled knowing that 50 thousand people in the world are using this to stay closer to the people they treasure. And I'd happily work on that every day until I die. Sorry, that turned into a much longer post than I intended it to. The main thing I'd say to people who want to pursue their passions as a business is to do some deep thinking about what motivates your passion. It took me a long time to understand that while, yes I am passionate about the actual music that gets written and performed in the classical genre, there's something deeper that motivates that passion. And it's something that when recognized can be applied passionately to a number of different endeavors. It can be a life-altering experience to come to the realization that what you think you are passionate about is really a surface level symptom of what's really driving you as a person. You may find yourself doing something relatively boring in your spare time. Like, another social network. Yawn. But you might also find yourself on fire for this boring work because it is deeply and personally meaningful to you.

mindhash 10y ago

I think this is pretty much true in building a great career. Willing to do the boring stuff that others are not. Sometimes you end up making things pretty interesting