The myth of the serial entrepreneur
swombat.com
swombat.com
I often debate on going back to start company six, and many saturdays my circle of friends hold "startup circle" where we pitch ideas and push a couple small projects forward and debate on quitting our real jobs and going back to building another company.
I would say the best realization of this article is that entrepreneur is a state of mind. A willingness to create from nothing in the face of extreem adversity. I have been a developer for close to 30 years now also and it's very much like that first couple of hours when you stare at the blank screen thinking about the 100,000's of lines of code needed to build whatever system it is you're about to build. Except it's more addicting then that because the scale is so much larger and your "vision" collides with "reality" and becomes something you can influence but often you end up along for the ride.
I personally would bet it's the same reason professional bull rider's ride bulls. Most of us look at them like they're insane but they have this zen approach to managing risk and the randomness of the bull trying to kill them. And when they beat the other guy the "high" must be quite insane.
Entrepreneurs suffer from the same sort of bold blindness. I have spoken with many people over the years who ask me "how can you do that, how do you get out of bed every day and just push forward" and I tell them I just like the challenge. To them they see me risking my family, my house, my car and my career to do something that scares them to death. To me I see the opportunity to express something that burns in the core of my soul and make something from nothing on a scale that should scare me but really just excites me!
I think the saying "40 years of work in 4 years" is a bit unfair, the reality is if you love what you do and are passionate about it you can work like this in a company that already exists or a mid-term C round start-up and have a lot of fun and potentially be well rewarded. That part is just the workaholic that might give an entrepreneur slight edge and a chance to ride the bull just a bit longer then the next guy.
I agree with this. I came across the following definition of an entrepreneur, which I also really liked: "[the] definition of an entrepreneur is someone who makes things happen despite not controlling the resources necessary to achieve them."
But there is an element of uniqueness to dive into the entrepreneurship game at all. Plenty of people have ideas and do nothing at all with them. If you don't actually dive into it, quit your job, and work at it, it's impossible to build a business. Most people (the vast majority) don't have the balls to do that.
Hard work and taking that risk are necessary but insufficient conditions for entreprenurial success. You also need luck. But that doesn't discount the amount of risk taken or the amount of work put into it, and most people can't stomach that.
As bedris quoted: "[the] definition of an entrepreneur is someone who makes things happen despite not controlling the resources necessary to achieve them."
It's not always about rich people having fun.. most of the time it's about people following their passion and pushing every limit to make stuff happen.
And most of the time it's about complete and utter failure and learning from that so you do better the next time. :-)
You're an entrepreneur, not an infantryman. Don't kid yourself, nobody's preventing you from going and making something.
Luck and timing often play a big role in setting up a business. I think there are some people who saw an opportunity through being in the right place at the right time and created a business out of it. Often these evolve into being what people call lifestyle businesses. In my mind these people don't fit into the 'compress 40 years of work into 4 years' camp and are non-serial entrepreneurs.
To me, the mark of a serial entrepreneur is someone who has started a business up, got it to the point where it's been successful, and then having had the option of staying on very comfortably with either a lifestyle business, working in a bigger company, or early-retirement has decided that they want the buzz and excitement of a startup again.
A good serial entrepreneur is by extension of that someone who can do this more than once successfully. To create a single business that works out can often involve a lot of luck/timing; to do it 3 or 4 times is something else.
Confidence from repeated success - do not underestimate pressures from family and self doubt in their contribution to start up cave ins.
Doing it 3 or 4 times is in fact much easier, which is why so many entrepreneurs who are successful the first time go on to have further success. It's much easier to raise money with a track record, you have connections with skilled people on both the technical and financial side, and you have your own experience to avoid pitfalls and give you confidence. If entrepreneurship is a marathon, it's a marathon where every mile gets easier and easier as you run.
In such an economic race, it's no wonder there is a growing disparity between the leaders and the rest of the pack.
Each example given is an person who is currently well-known for being an entrepreneur. By definition, they haven't moved on to something else.
There's a tonne of people who've succeeded as an entrepreneur and then gone onto something else; venture capital (in fact most VCs partners are ex-entrepreneurs), politics or philanthropy, for example.
The point is that these people are now known for something other than entrepreneurship, so they don't spring to mind as examples of one-time-entrepreneurs.
/rant
Bill Gates I've addressed in my article. If Bill Gates had been kicked out of MS in, say, 1985, he would most likely have done what Steve Jobs did, and started another business.
As for Pierre Omidyar, he has started something called Civil Beat, an online news service, as well as Omidyar Network, which is an investment firm, which would put him halfway between the typical case and a Morten Lund case.
Ben Horowitz: Opsware and then VC. A Morten Lund character.
Bill Gates: already addressed in both the article and another comment
Silvio Berlusconi: I don't know much about his business history, but a quick glance at his Wikipedia page shows he started multiple businesses. Definitely not a one-business-and-retire type.
Michael Bloomberg: Ok, that one may be an example.
Niklas Zennström: Skype, Kazaa, Joltid, Joost, and now a VC. Serial to the max.
Also, Gates went on to set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is arguably a different kind of startup.
And that's the thing. The ones that become mega-famous are typically the ones who have been around for an extended period of time - either through having spent the time building a single successful company (Bill Gates, Zuckerberg etc), or people who become well known for starting up multiple companies. If Bill Gates had retired 4 years after starting up Microsoft, how many people would even know his name now?
Rather than trying to identify people who've famously walked away after a few years and comparing them to the number of famous people who didn't, a far better measure would be to find random 20 entrepreneurs who have only been doing it for a couple of years and see how many of them are still doing it, either with the same company, or with a new company, in 10 years time.
It's a mistake to argue that the entrepreneurs you read and hear about must be representative of all entrepreneurs. It's quite likely that the ones most likely to become serial entrepreneurs will remain visible, and the ones who stop after a successful exit are less likely to remain in the field.
The golden rule applies to to entrepreneurs too. Karma is a bitch and worth paying attention to in life as in business.
There's no doubt YC is a second startup, but it's still sort of a unique case or meta-startup that serves pg's prior stated interest, as quoted in the essay, in not fully facing the risks and schleps of a normal startup. I believe I remember pg writing somewhere that he didn't want to repeat the giant risk of a normal startup, and he saw YC as a way of taking a diversified portfolio approach to startup involvement, of smoothing out the risk (and schleps) of a startup.
So, I don't think the essay is precise in simply characterizing pg as saying he shied away from doing another startup until he changed his mind and did one anyway. Instead, he came up with a kind of startup that he could get into that didn't require changing his mind about his approach. (At least, that's how I understood it.)
Ultimately all entrepreneurs come from the same cloth of success driven business (value) invention. Some want to follow the hollywood IPO story. Some want to bootstrap. It's all a matter of preference beyond those details and to some it's not about being defined as a "serial entrepreneur". Personally I wouldn't sell my company just to start another until I met my professional goals.
In tech, it's possible to iterate indefinitely until reaching such size that it no longer requires a completely new company to be motivated to go on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
which suggests to me that debating over labels like "true entrepreneur" (or not) or "serial entrepreneur" (or not) is a waste of time.
The same discussion also smacks of a sort of elitism that I associate with the idiots to run around talking about what metal bands are or aren't "tr00 kvlt". None of this strikes me as very productive.
If I'm successful on my first venture, there is no doubt I'll try again with something new.