True Believers Why Founders Fall in Love with Their Ideas
"Following our path is in effect a kind of going off the path, through open country. . . Out there in the silence we must build a hearth, gather the twigs, and strike the flint for the fire ourselves."
—David Whyte, The Heart Aroused
The stories of commitment are as different as the founders who tell them:
■ Lynn Ivey heard the fear in her father’s voice and realized her mother was slipping into the abyss of Alzheimer’s disease.
“I knew at that moment that my career at Bank of America no longer mattered,” she says. “What mattered was my family.” That moment led her to leave her bank job as a regional sales executive to care for her mother and, later, to build The Ivey, an adult daycare center devoted to ailing seniors and their caregivers.
■ For years, Mark Williams passionately pushed the boundaries of technology, learning, and design. Long before Apple’s
IPhone revolutionized the use of mobile devices, the Duke University neuroscientist hacked into his medical students’ iPods and loaded them with hundreds of anatomy pictures and phrases. The students raved about learning anatomy terms while waiting for coffee, riding the bus, or doing loads of laundry. Mark knew he was on to something, so he launched Modality, a developer of premium learning applications for the iPhone and iPad. “I was so caught up in the beauty of the idea and the possibilities around it,” he recalls,
“I was not thinking rationally.”
■ J. C. Faulkner left a senior leadership job at one of America’s largest banks to build a different kind of mortgage company and to create a better place to work. “I had come to grips with the fact that all the money I’d saved over a twelve-year career would be gone in six months,” he recalls. “When I told the bank that I was leaving to start my own company, I offered to stick around for thirty days to help with the transition. They walked me out the next day—with a box in my hand.”
■ And then there’s Mark Kahn, who tagged along with his boss to a French casino and hit upon a once-in-a-lifetime winning streak. At the $72,000 mark, he turned to his boss and said he was done. “That’s smart,” his boss said. “You should quit while you’re ahead.” “No,” he replied, “I’m quitting my job. I’ve got my seed money, and I’m doing my startup.” He has since founded two ventures, including TRAFFIQ, a leading online advertising platform listed as number fifty on Inc. magazine’s 2010 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies.
Startups come in all shapes and sizes. Aspiring founders will attempt just about any idea, product, or business model under the sun. If it can be conceived, some dreamer has probably tried it.
Founders take the startup plunge for a dizzying array of reasons: to be free, to change the world, to launch a can’t-miss product, to make buckets of money, to follow in Dad’s footsteps, or to spend more time with the kids. The list goes on and on, limited only by the fact that a surprising number of entrepreneurs can’t fully explain why they do it. They just know that it’s something they have to do.
Underneath it all—beneath the endless variation, the unexpected turns, and the wide range of motivations—a powerful force drives everything forward.
It is the force of passion.
When I first began to study entrepreneurship, I would never have predicted I’d be writing a book about entrepreneurial passion. I’ve always thought of passion as a given in the startup world—a basic ingredient, like salt in food, so common that it would not be a factor in differentiating success from failure. Besides, the topic already gets its 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.
But there is no getting around it. Every great venture I’ve studied has propelled itself forward with an unshakeable sense of commitment, a kind of rapturous belief among core founders. The reason is clear. The startup path is not for the faint of heart. Ask successful entrepreneurs to reflect back on their journey, and an unequivocal response comes back: I knew it would be hard, but I had no idea it would be this hard. In the words of technology blogger Dave McClure, “You are going to be embarrassed, ashamed, labeled as an idiot, shunned, ridiculed, and occasionally driven from the village with pitchforks. Get used to it.”1
On such a demanding journey, qualities that breed confidence and resilience, qualities such as passion, courage, hope, commitment, faith, are like oxygen to entrepreneurs, sustaining them through the long hours, the stress, and the inevitable adversity and doubt that are a natural part of the startup process. But just as oxygen cannot protect a person from all forms of danger, passion cannot eliminate risk from the startup equation. In fact, I have found that passion is just as plentiful among failing entrepreneurs as among those destined to succeed.
As I studied entrepreneurial success factors, I couldn’t help but notice the high rates of new business failure, and I became intrigued By the seemingly basic reasons most startups don’t make it. The more closely I observed the early choices of would-be business owners, the more clearly I could see the powerful, central role of human emotion. I saw people obsessed with questionable business ideas. I saw founders egged on by friends, family, and motivational speakers. I saw entrepreneurs throwing themselves over the startup cliff without parachutes, sometimes without the merest idea of what they were getting into. I saw impulsive decisions, rigidly held beliefs, wishful thinking, and strategies of hope.
In time, I understood that passion fuels both startup success and failure—not exactly an actionable formula you can take to the bank. In the chapters ahead, you will learn how to cut through this apparent contradiction and dramatically elevate your odds of entrepreneurial success. But the first step is to understand what happens within and around a person who approaches the new venture roller coaster. Why is the startup path so compelling to so many? And what causes new entrepreneurs to become emotionally attached to their new creations, to literally fall in love with their ideas?
