Courtesy of www.theconverseculture.com
Our planet’s startup climate is being rapidly and radically reshaped.
An aspiring entrepreneur can launch a global brand from his or her basement at a fraction of what it cost only a few years ago. Business ideas admired as highly innovative two decades ago seem stale, even laughable, today.
Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of talk and hype about old assumptions and models that no longer apply, and, in most cases, I agree.
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I was listening to American Public Media’s “Marketplace” radio program as I drove home recently, and I caught an intriguing story about the international market for American-grown wheat.
The story starts with a profile of a wheat farmer from Washington state:
NARRATOR: The tractor gets a tune-up as Randy Suess gets ready to plant his soft-white wheat. He’s a third-generation farmer with about 1,300 acres of rolling hills south of Spokane, Wash. It’s a long way from Cairo. But the relationship is closer than you might think.
“It’s not that I’m so smart. It’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
Albert Einstein
Pete Souza / The White House
When stories first began to pour out about the U.S. killing of Osama Bin Laden, one detail immediately struck me as especially remarkable: that President Obama and his intelligence and national security teams had known of Bin Laden’s whereabouts since August, 2010, and had navigated a patient, steady path that resulted in getting their man eight months later. And this phase of the manhunt came after a decade-long process of painstaking intelligence gathering efforts, full of promising but ultimately dud leads, near misses, empty caves and dead-end alleys.
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My book, 6 Secrets to Startup Success, is now available through major booksellers. I’m proud of the finished product, excited about early feedback, and looking forward to your additional reactions and comments.
Publishing a book is an imperfect process of fits and starts, revisions and iterations. Thoughts become words. Words grow into pages and sections and chapters and, finally, a finished book. Time flies by. The final few months, especially, feel like the blink of an eye.
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Last Friday, I enjoyed spending time on the phone with Guy Kawasaki, author of the just-released book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. Many years ago, Guy helped Apple Computer enchant the world as the company’s Chief Evangelist. He has since founded Garage Ventures, a VC firm, and is more recently the co-founder and driving force behind Alltop.com, the digital magazine rack. In between and around all of that other stuff, he has written, published, and successfully launched 10 highly influential books. Other than that, as I told him in our interview, he’s clearly a slacker : ) …
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I have often suggested to starry-eyed startup founders that they spend less time thinking about selling their future company and more time acquiring and understanding customers. Don’t be distracted by distant rainbows and pots of gold. Focus instead on fighting through the fog right in front of you. As Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator, puts it, “The way to succeed in a startup is to focus on the goal of getting lots of users, and keep walking swiftly toward it while investors and acquirers scurry alongside trying to wave money in your face.”
(Wall Street Journal, March 5-6, 2011, p. B1)
But it’s hard for founding teams not to get excited about Amir Efrati’s piece on Google’s growing thirst for acquisitions in this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal. Efrati notes that Google spent $1.8 billion on 48 startups last year (up from a paltry $92 million on 10 deals in 2009) and quotes Google’s VP of corporate development, David Lawee, as saying the company will “continue to be aggressive.”
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The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.
Edward R. Murrow, 1964
On the face of it, you’d think startups and small businesses would be bastions of open, healthy communication, full of people who have sworn off the secret obsessions and toxic climates of the big corporations they left behind.
It should be easy to have direct, no-nonsense conversations in an early-stage venture. Right? No bureaucratic red tape to stifle candid dialogue or common-sense problem solving.
The reality is not so simple.
Case in point: An early-stage startup I advised a few years ago — a venture with only fifteen employees — where the firm’s COO listened to my private conference room conversations through the wall of his adjacent office by putting his ear to a cup against the wall (you can’t make this stuff up).
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I’m excited that that our team is closing in on the release of the Entrepreneur Core Characteristics Profile (ECCP), an empirically developed assessment tool that provides feedback on eleven personality characteristics associated with entrepreneurial success. I’ll be writing more about the tool and the eleven qualities it measures in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, I want to highlight a handful of traits that, while critical to entrepreneurial success, can also endanger your startup effort if present at extreme levels, or if applied without full awareness.
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Early phase businesses can be treacherous. Of the millions of startups that are launched each year in the U.S., most fail or stall out within a few years. Too many of those that survive are led by fatigued and stressed-out entrepreneurs who struggle to break even and have no real shot at finding additional funding or an acquiring partner.
But a few make it to the next level.
Here’s to one who did: Modality, developer of premium health care apps for Apple mobile devices, founded in 2006 by Mark Williams, Ph.D., was acquired by Epocrates in November. This deal is a great strategic fit for both parties, and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving founder and team.
I know Modality’s story well because they have been a client of mine for several years, and because I held an ownership stake in the firm. Among founders I have known and advised, Mark Williams brings the most powerful combination of intelligence, resilience, and humility I have ever seen. In early 2009, I asked Mark to chronicle some of the thrills, challenges, and tensions he experienced while navigating through the gritty reality of getting a business safely off the ground. Here are a few excerpts:
Another reason I am pulling for Modality — and now Epocrates — is that I have featured Mark and his startup story as a core case in my upcoming book, 6 Secrets to Startup Success, about the two sides of entrepreneurial passion.
When I first began to study entrepreneurship, I would never have predicted I would focus on the topic of entrepreneurial passion. Passion seemed like a given in the startup world. It’s a basic ingredient—like salt in food—so common that it would not be a factor in differentiating success from failure. Besides, passion already gets more than its fair share of air time among the great Motivational Media—the hype-driven websites, magazines, books, and videos that have made you-can-do-it success stories into a kind of cult religion for wanna-be entrepreneurs.
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"Every person who wants to start the 'next big thing' should read Bradberry’s book before taking the leap forward."
Guy Kawasaki, Founder, Alltop.com and author of Enchantment
