Startup Life 103: Love
March 2, 2009 by Joseph Ansanelli
Filed under Execution, Popular
Successful startups (or any other successful company or adventure) cause memory loss. Yes, memory loss. It’s fascinating how success tends to make all the late nights, struggles, frustrations, fears, anxiety and stress fade away. Yet the fact is that startup life is hard and not for the faint of heart.
Failure is the norm
Let’s face it, most startups fail. Not just 50% but probably more like 90 or even 99% fail. I remember reading somewhere from a reputable venture capital firm that they would get about 10,000 (yes ten thousand!) business plan submissions in a year. And would invest in 2 to 5. And of the investments, odds are that 1 out of 10 is successful. in a way that employees and founders make reasonable money as opposed to simply the investors. The math on that is 5 plans out of 10,000 get funded and 1 out of 10 of the 5 is a success. 5/10,000*.1=0.00005 or in other words a failure rate of 99.995%.
So as Tina Turner asked “What’s love go to do with it?”
Love
As part of thinking about success and happiness in all aspects of your startup life, it’s important to be sure that you love it. You have to love the challenge of building great teams, creating killer products, competing with other aggressive startups or corporate behemoths and figuring out how to make a sustaining and profitable company. And you need to be able to demonstrate a lot of grace under considerable pressure. Startups are an emotional roller coaster. In any given month, week or even day, the highs are high and the lows are low. As a CEO or founder, the stress level is very high as I was always thinking about the families of the team and what it would mean for them if we failed. As a member of the team, the expectations are high and the demands on your time can be overwhelming. So be sure you love all the positive aspects of startup life and can “forget” the tough parts.
Steve Jobs gave a great commencement speech at Stanford titled “You’ve got to find what you love”. You can watch it below or read the text here. He talked about how he was fired from Apple at the age of 30 and that his love for building products and companies kept him going. And it was that love that made it possible for him to stick it out and keep going even though he was totally embarrassed and felt like he had failed. He ended up acquiring a little known company from Pixar from George Lucas and turning it from a software company into the world’s largest animation studio later acquired by Disney. And he started Next, which in a strange turn of events, was acquired by Apple and he then ended up leading Apple’s renaissance. The idea is find what you love and do it. It’s not easy but you should never stop looking or settling.
Many of you are probably saying, “Well, sure that sounds nice but its easy once you’ve made a gazillion dollars like Steve”. And yes that’s true, success makes loving startup life a lot easier. And in these difficult if not harrowing economic times it’s even more challenging as many of us are simply concerned about keeping or finding a job, never mind whether they love it. And in the short term, “Maslow’s hierarcy of needs” takes precedent over everything. You have to have food and shelter.
However, in the long term you should never stop searching for what you love. And if working in a startup, make sure you love it. If you don’t love startup life, you might not be cut out for that kind of work. It’s a shame when people join a startup for the sole goal of the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Considering that most startups fail, it’s important to enjoy the “journey” which is often times the only destination.
Steve Jobs speech summarized it best when he said:
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
In summary, to be happy in all aspects of your startup life, keep in mind the ideas from previous posts about startup life as a marathon, the importance of leadership and this post about loving what you do.
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As always, well said! I agree completely. My business partner always says “you need to make sure that you can look back in five years – these things rarely succeed or fail all that quickly – and be satisfied with the time you spent if the only thing you got from it all were those five years of experience”. A more cynical person once said to me “what’s experience? it’s what you get when you don’t get anything else!”
Love is so critical. We spend a lot of time trying to weed out those for whom our startup is just a job. We love it too much to have people just there punching a clock. We warn people in advance, of course, but understanding what love really is is often something that is hard to translate into words.
elie – thanks again. glad you like it. let me know any other topics you would like covered as well… hope all is well with you. joseph
Joseph
Again, I’m really enjoying your posts and this series on start-ups.
Do you see yourself starting up another business any time soon? If so, do you mind me asking what industry / what problem would the business attempt to solve?
Micheal
Michael – thanks for the comments and glad you like it. drop me a note if you have any topics you would like to see covered. With respect to starting something new, I am looking for and working with a few early stage companies that are in need of some “mentor capital”. basically, an active board member that roles up their sleeves and helps out very actively in the early days to get a company off the ground and on the right trajectory. Best, joseph
Joseph, thanks for the reply!
With regards to providing some topics for you to potentially write about, I would be interested in getting your perspective on the following:
- I would really love to hear stories from your past endeavors. Sharing details like what worked, what didn’t. Looking back, what were good decisions and what were bad.
- You opinion on the trend for technology. Is the web mature and things moving to mobile now? Were is the “puck” moving to in 1, 2, 5 years.
- Maybe a pro’s vs con’s of targeting enterprise customers vs personal consumers. You’re expertise from Vontu and Trio Development would be of huge value
What’s good about enterprise customers vs. consumers and which, if you had to choice, would you rather have has your customer? The slow, massive enterprise customer with generating higher margins and have fewer customers or personal customers where you have lower margins but a larger # of customers.
Just some thoughts. If I had to rank them, hearing personal stories from your past start-ups would easily be my # 1 request
Micheal
I forgot to mention in my above post, if you were to invest in a startup today – what would be a quick laundry list of things you would look for in consideration to invest.
Nothing detailed. Just a “top 10″ listing what you require to be in place and want to see happening at a start-up before investment. Certainly topics from your “startup life” series would probably be included, such as: the founders unwavering love/desire to see the business succeed.
all good ideas. thanks for the thoughts and i’ve added a bunch to my draft list of topics. thanks.
Joseph,
In 1995, from my basement, alone I started a successful private equity raise of $250 million to start up a new company. Opening its doors for business in January 1997, within five years it became the largest private company in the US in its industry, and achieved publicly recorded valuations well over $650 million… a success by any Wharton measure. By the time I left I counted 550+ days on the road over 6 years, no vacations without being paged or working on the computer, work 24/7, 52 weeks per year including holidays, customer and prospect calls in the evenings and weekends, a blending of work and family life all the time, and stress that brought on more health issues than anyone would ask for in their forties. Memory loss, late nights, struggles, frustrations, fears, anxiety and stress do tend to fade away, and yes, startup life is hard and not for the faint of heart – but one can never recover lost family life. The children grow and they are never six, ten, or twelve again. One can never go back and attend the basketball, lay or soccer game they missed when doing a deal in San Francisco. Only when looks back years later and is truly honest can one see that it might have only a delusion and rationalization when we said to ourselves that we were doing what “we had to do for the family”. Was it? I’m not sure? Right now I sure wish my “memory loss” about what I missed along the way concerning the harm I caused my children and wife by being a start-up entrepreneur was a bit more permanent.
Joseph,
I’ve been reading your blog, and I have to say that this one really struck a nerve. I agree completely that to survive the stresses and strains of a start-up you have to love it. I would add a couple of things. First, a start-up should probably be viewed as more like a marathon than a sprint. You’ve got to pace yourself. Maybe that’s obvious, but it’s easy to forget. Also on a related note, even if you love something, too much of a good thing can have bad consequences. In positions where the work load tends to scale up as the company grows (that’s most positions) it is critically important to hire ahead of the need. If you don’t you can get overwhelmed and even if you love to swim, trying to swim in a tsunami isn’t much fun for anyone.
Hard learned lessons . . .
Charlie – glad you like it and thanks for the comments. could not agree more and love the fact that you too compare startup life to a marathon (without having seen the other post on the same topic!). and yes, hiring and having the right team are critical to be able to scale which is a great result of being successful. makes all the difference in being able to avoid the tsunami…