Secrets to STARTUP SUCCESS

EARLY FOUNDATIONS

Your preparation for entrepreneurship begins on the day you are born, if not before. Starting a business is an intensely personal en­deavor. You bring to it the total package of who you are—your per­sonality, preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. These characteristics are largely developed at an early age, shaping whether or not you will be predisposed to the entrepreneurial leap.

Dan Bricklin, who transformed the computer industry with his invention of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, says his entre­preneurial backbone was formed as a kid in Philadelphia, where his father ran a printing business. As a boy, he spent his afternoons helping at the plant and his evenings listening to business chatter around the dinner table. “I suppose you could say the entrepreneurial instinct was in my genes,” he says. “My family’s unspoken dedication to the busi­ness gave me a healthy respect for the paradox of running your own business—the contradictory feelings of freedom and responsibility that define the experience of setting out on your own.”2

Our early years not only inform whether we will leap at a startup opportunity, but why we might do so and what kind of founder we will most likely become. Dan Bricklin credits his religious instruction at a Jewish day school with seeding many of his founding values and skills: his early creative drive; his desire to make the world a better place; and his leadership skills learned by guiding services in synagogue and mentoring other students.

J. C. Faulkner, who built Decision One Mortgage from a blank sheet of paper in 1996 into a company valued at $100 million over four years, says, “I have a memory of when I was in the third grade. When it was time to pick teams, the other kids would look to me and ask ‘J. C., who will be the captains today?’ They would ask me to settle arguments and make rulings about whether balls were in - or out-of­bounds. I remember one of the teachers asking me how I came to be the one who ‘ran’ the game, and I said I didn’t know. It seemed like it had always been that way.” Looking back, he recognizes that he had a knack for figuring out what motivated people, and a strong sense of fairness. Thirty years later, these qualities drove his growing ambition to leave his senior leadership role with First Union Corporation and create a new kind of company, one that attracted and unleashed the best possible talent. His venture, Decision One Mortgage, quickly de­veloped a national reputation as a great place to work with a high per­formance culture.

For most entrepreneurs, time logged working for others signifi­cantly shapes their startup aspirations. In a Fall 2005 article in the Cal­ifornia Management Review, professor of organizational behavior Pino G. Audia and his graduate student, Christopher I. Rider, noted how early work experience incubates and prepares future founders. “Al­though some individuals become successful entrepreneurs without re­lated prior experience, they are the exception, not the rule. Entrepreneurs are often organizational products.”3 While working for other people, we develop expertise, serve customers, observe great and awful leaders, and watch untapped opportunities come and go. We ap­preciate the steady income and soak up the lessons, while our startup ambitions simmer in a semi-conscious stew of hopes and what-ifs.

While studying neuroscience as an undergraduate at Davidson College in the early 1980s, Mark Williams took a summer job to help one of his professors build interactive teaching tools. Their goal was to help students “see” how neural impulses (e. g., auditory or visual signals) traveled through the brain. Using one of the earliest Macin­tosh computers, Mark worked in a dark basement for months, painstakingly building images. “These were very simple, very crude animations,” he says. “We had a 16 color card, and I would zoom these images up and literally move pixels around to create additional colors and make something that looked remotely realistic. I think at the end of the summer we had, maybe, ten seconds of animation that we could control. It was an interesting idea, and we were very passionate about it, but in 1983 we were way ahead of the technology available to us.” That summer job was Mark’s first taste of how technology could bring together his passions for art, learning, and neuroscience—seeds that eventually gave rise to Modality, his Durham, North Carolina-based mobile learning technology company.