4 ms·

What makes a successful founder? Succeeding. Reality doesn’t care about VC sentiment, KPIs, offices, number of employees, or any of that stuff. Did you create

• colechristensen 7y ago
  >Did you create a machine that extracts more money than it spends while providing more value than it extracts? But that's a KPI and not a very good one. Whatever you have you'll have your own conditions for accessing the quality of your business.
  • Swizec 7y ago
    Well the making more money than you spend part is pretty critical ... I’ll grant you that a business does not necessarily have to provide value to do so.
    • colechristensen 7y ago
      Many companies spend years spending much more money than they make building themselves up, or simply surviving during a downturn. This is in fact the whole idea of investing in a startup - that they will have more money to spend than they make. Amazon spent most of its existence spending nearly as much or more money than it made and it is something like the 4th most valuable company in the world.
      • Swizec 7y ago
        Yes it takes some pain before you’re successful.
      • Pandabob 7y ago
        Yes but didn't Amazon IPO in 1999 and most of the money they've spent into building the company has been actual revenue, not VC or debt money? Seems like that's markedly different from what companies like Uber have been doing in the past decade.
        • aledalgrande 7y ago
          Exactly, reinvesting all the profits into growth is not the same as making no money. Break even has already been achieved by Amazon.
      • redis_mlc 7y ago
        > Amazon spent most of its existence spending nearly as much or more money than it made Bezos, like many other founders, is allergic to paying taxes. So that is one of the reasons everything was spent on growth. Essentially he used the public to fund his company. (He was already a millionaire from working in finance.)
  • chirau 7y ago
    Is the end goal a KPI itself? In a literal sense, it is, in fact the the ultimate KPI but in a process sense, i wouldn't say it is. I think the end goal, in most but not all instances is profit, which is a reward for enterprise and risk. KPI are checkpoints IN the process. The end goal itself is not part of the process but is a result of the process. Which is why I hesitate to call it a KPI.
  • taneq 7y ago
    > and not a very good one. That’s such a Silicon Valley thing to say. Only there could a profitable business with a useful product be deemed “not very good”.
    • colechristensen 7y ago
      I didn't say anything remotely like that.
• themagician 7y ago
  Having a working business is just one way. Many successful people become successful with failing businesses, particularly when venture capital is involved. In fact, you can have many failed businesses, with many bankruptcies even, and still be successful. “Failing up” is a very real thing, and a valid strategy. Being successful requires you to convince others that society owes you something for who you are. A successful business is just one way to do that.
  • Swizec 7y ago
    > Many successful people become successful with failing businesses I agree, you can be a successful person with a failing business. But can you really be a successful founder without having a successful business?
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • themagician 7y ago
      Sure you can. Many founders of failed businesses do it over and over again. Some even go on to start their own VC firms. Being a successful founder means making your bosses happy. That means getting a return. That can be monetary, political, etc. Many founders, particularly in the SV area, sell businesses for huge amounts that never made a dime. They sell them at inflated prices and then the acquiring company closes up shop and writes it down or spits them back out for pennies on the dollar. They were never profitable. No value was created. Modern finance creates an unusual landscape. Charisma, storytelling, persistence… there are all traits that can result in a successful exit.
    • onion2k 7y ago
      Some founders walk away from failed businesses millions of dollars better off. If money is the metric you use, having a successful business isn't strictly necessary.
    • lmeyerov 7y ago
      Put that way, most successful founders are successful at exiting, not building businesses. Those are often related things, but not the same. An exiting founder's team size is proportional to their last funding. But for building a business, they'll go through funny math to tie that to show they won't implode ("no, we're not losing money for every customer, we're aiming for 3yr payback with strong disruption moat and stickiness for net-negative-churn..."). Both kinds can be successful, just a very diff operational mindset. The more I understood various silicon valley ecosystems (ex in sales/marketing/apps/...: "idea -> sales/marketing/discount/hype/first-to-market-driven sales -> race to acquisition by a monopoly who doesn't need the business to be profitable, to find a bigger investor, someone figures out a magical pivot, or else implode"), the more I see most SF->google/yahoo/fb/BigMonopolyCo acquisitions as likely failed businesses with somewhat burnt customers... and materially successful founders, teams, & especially investors. The numbers can be nuts (including > $1B acquisitions squarely in this camp.) I've learned to bucket advice from such founders as being primarily sensible within insider-y & exit-minded frameworks vs. optimizing for building big, meaningful, and sustainable things. The former solve political fights for monopolies and the latter can move societies, so both create value: To each their own.
• fdsa_fdas_0000 7y ago
  > Succeeding. Perfect. I can't tell you how much luck and right place / time comprises my career as a (middling but largely satisfied) entrepreneur. I decided that would be my path about a year and half out of college. Six months later I resigned to start a competitor to the company I was with. I was only able to because I found two willing partners and then had the stars align on a project big enough to bootstrap the company. Businesses I started later (the successful ones) also had a significant timing / luck element. If that first company didn't materialize? Maybe I would have decided it wasn't worth the effort. And that's a pretty wild thought given how much of my identity is tied up in the successful businesses I've built -- and how much that's shaped my life. I think the only reasonable prediction to make is the very obvious: You can't succeed if you don't try. Beyond that there's a massive amount of survivorship bias. There's nothing particularly wrong with that until you start giving unqualified advice to others -- or worse, start believing that advice yourself.
• lordnacho 7y ago
  Uber and WeWork don't seem to be working all that well according to your criterion. But their founders are undoubtedly successful. There's a gap between the business being successful and the founders being so.
  • L_226 7y ago
    Neumann is successful because he was able to exploit a certain weakness of capitalism that had not been patched.