What drives you to success?
Entrepreneurship can be a complicated business.
To succeed requires a combination of resourcefulness, courage, talent and luck in proportions that are impossible to predict. For some, the inherent unpredictability means that the whole enterprise is more art than science, where the risk of failure can be mitigated but not avoided.
If that’s your take on entrepreneurship, you’re certainly not wrong: the vast majority of startups don’t pay their founders a dime.
However, this view is not entirely correct either.
Not all founders are equally likely to fail, and a number of them manage to succeed with a consistency that defies our understanding of the risks inherent in entrepreneurship. The common denominator between founders and CEOs who seemingly cannot fail is that they view starting a company as a process to be perfected. To them, entrepreneurship is simply about building companies, and adopting this mindset is one of the most transformative ideas for any leader.
Join us below as we explore three particularly powerful variations of this approach to entrepreneurship, all with proven results.
Founders Who Turn Purpose and Frustration into Success
For some, entrepreneurship is an adventure that you embark on when nothing has gone as planned.
For others, becoming a founder is the culmination of decades of preparation and introspection that leave no choice but to forge a path on their own. You’ll hear leaders in this category naturally talk about determination, passion, and perseverance even against the most formidable odds, and this is where we find leaders who may stumble but are not likely to fall as they march toward success.
“In the beginning, I didn’t have a website, producers, clients or anything else you need to run this type of business.“, noted Aubre Winters-Casiano, founder of the training platform Sweat Sessions, in our recent discussion about how to turn incompetence into success.
“All I had was a “why,” and that why fueled the courage and perseverance I needed to grow Sweat Sessions into the international online community and studio it is today.”, Aubre reflected on what kept her going during the most challenging times of her leadership journey.
Know your ‘Why’ This seems to be a CEO’s superpower, an aspect that Simon Sinek has wonderfully developed in his book Start With Why.
Entrepreneurship is not a hard job that cannot be resisted without a clear goal. On the contrary, most successful entrepreneurs fall in love with their craft long before they get there. However, a clear goal is what allows founders to get back up every time they are knocked down. It is precisely this type of resilience that increases the chances of success, no matter where you start.
Few people know the transformative power of determination and resilience as intimately as Alyssa McKay, who rose from a life spent in foster care to a career as co-founder of streetwear brand Beyond Lost and lifestyle creator with millions of followers.
“It was all rather surreal.“, Alyssa noted as we traced the path she took to get to where she is today.I never had a Plan B for entrepreneurship. I know that what covered my rent last month may not allow me to pay a dime more next week, and my way of showing security is to constantly push myself by taking risks and investing in myself and my business.” , Alyssa explained.
If you’re having trouble defining your goal, you might as well rely on frustration.
“I was incredibly frustrated with the state of the medical field,” recalled Dr. Mitesh Rao, CEO of health data ecosystem OMNY Health, when we discussed what inspired him to get started.
“I searched everywhere for a pre-existing solution to the fragmented state of health data. At some point, I realized that I had to take action myself, and that the best way to do this was to leave medicine altogether and become an entrepreneur.”, Mitesh continued to think.
While the results can be extraordinary, there is nothing magical about determination, passion, or frustration. On the contrary, when founders rely on these three factors, they tip the scales in their favor.
Just as luck favors those who are prepared, success favors those who do not know how to give up. The same goes for those who simply cannot shake the feeling that there is a problem that concerns them and is waiting to be solved.
Founders Who Just Can’t Let Go of a Good Problem
There are two kinds of people when it comes to problems: those who know how to avoid them and those who can’t help but try to solve them.
Mathematicians are known for their love of good problems, even if it means collectively devoting centuries to finding a solution.
There is an uncanny similarity between founders who seem almost destined to succeed and mathematicians who cannot give up on a problem until it is solved. To begin with, both begin by asking questions that others ignore.
“How come we can buy fresh food for our dogs, but everything for babies comes in cans?”, Ben Lewis, co-founder of Little Spoon, found himself asking out loud more often than he would have liked.
“I wasn’t a baby food expert by any means, but the question kept nagging at me. Eventually, my co-founder and I succumbed to the need to find an answer, and we realized there was no reason why parents couldn’t buy fresh baby food. It just wasn’t being done, so we decided to do it.“, Ben reflected on the company’s early days.
For founders driven by an insatiable need to find an answer, entrepreneurship is the only logical conclusion. Here we find something that goes beyond purpose or passion; certainty of direction.
Leaders who feel certain about their direction can be true forces of nature, with success being a foregone conclusion even if achieving it means going back to the drawing board until the equations align.
Elise Burns, founder of veterinary recruitment agency Evette, is a great example of how belief can lead to success.
“I have to admit that I wasn’t even an animal lover before I started with Evette“, Elise confessed during our discussion about how her path to leadership began with identifying a problem rather than a deep passion for the industry.
“What drove me into this life was my inability to free myself from solving an obvious problem that others were ignoring. How come the veterinary industry didn’t have a human-centered hiring process while the human side didn’t,” Elise explained as we dug deeper into what made her decide to take the plunge with Evette.
The reason why building a company around a problem is a particularly effective approach is that it focuses the efforts of the founding team while inviting them to try new approaches until the initial urge to get started is satisfied.
“We had already pitched three or four different versions of our basic idea, but nothing really happened.,” recalled Brendan Kamm, CEO of corporate thank you and gifting platform Thnks, as our conversation focused on his insights into why they were ultimately able to take off.
“We wouldn’t be here without our willingness to adapt until we found a solution to what we knew was a problem for others: the lack of truly personal forms of remote gratitude. I never could have guessed that our product-market fit would pan out the way it did, but I knew that as long as the problem persisted, we had to keep trying.” added Brendan.
Founders and funders who build companies as companies
We tend to overestimate the importance of individuals and underestimate the importance of the team that supports them.
Even Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos needed their teams to get there, and there’s a fascinating group of founders and venture capitalists who know how to leverage that fact to their advantage.
“It can be incredibly difficult to get a business off the ground, even if the timing is right and the business model is impeccable.,” said Kevin Leneway, CTO of Pioneer Square Labs, which has raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding for a number of startups in its portfolio, in our discussion about how his firm formalized the business of building successful companies.
“Most startups fail to realize their potential because they don’t have the right team to support them. That’s why we’ve set up a startup studio that de-risks entrepreneurship by combining great ideas with funding, operators, and technical talent to get the business on the right track.“, Kevin explained.
PSL’s approach is also to equip its newcomers with the right tools, even when that means having to build them themselves, as they recently did with JACoB AI – an open-source AI agent that streamlines the software creation process.
Adam Sharkawy, co-founder and managing partner of Material Impact, also believes in the power of optimizing the business creation process.
“We build businesses in a very codified way.” , Adam explained.
“We have a full ecosystem of core teams ready to deploy to any company in our portfolio, with clear goals and exit points when their skills are no longer needed. Each engagement helps both founders and specialist teams learn how to build companies more effectively,“Adam noted as we discussed the positive feedback loops that emerge from Material Impact’s approach.
What PSL, Material Impact and their peers have understood is that there are outsized benefits to be gained from treating business creation as a business in its own right.
Founders and VCs who have internalized this approach leave less room for chance after each iteration, making each project less of a gamble and more of a trial.
For those still searching for their path to entrepreneurship, it is reassuring to know that practice and commitment can replace determination and a passion for problem solving.