There is an insidious virus that has wormed its way into the hive mind of entrepreneurial culture.
Founders are tirelessly lambasted with the idea that having no life, getting no sleep, eating ramen every day in a garage while your Dad yells at you to turn your flow state playlist down, is the path to startup glory.
We are told that the price of success is pain.
This is false.
The price of society’s collective view of success may be a combination of pain, hard work, and luck.
Society, however, doesn’t get to choose what success looks like.
You do.
Before raising money, building a proforma, assembling a team, or creating your MVP, you have to decide what your vision of success is. Failure is imminent for anyone who doesn’t know how to identify victory.
Businesses are not started just because. Every founder has a vision and reason for sacrificing huge amounts of time and money to build something that may or may not end up working out.
What scares me is that many founders are not aware of their reasons. This always leads to a cycle of decision-making that pulls the company apart in the chaos of unprioritized startup culture.
Your internal motivation should inform how you make an operational plan, who you hire, your risk tolerance, and will even inform your business’s culture. Well-defined motivation is a necessity.
Fortunately, there are not too many options.
The object of starting a business can be broken down into four categories, each representing the founder’s motivation. These are never mutually exclusive. The reason someone starts a business usually looks something like this:
I believe that every founder, before or after launching, should make a similar chart. Here is how each category is defined:
Money
Purely money-motivated founders are not rare but are rarely successful.
This is probably the most obvious of the four. Generally, people have reasons for starting besides making money.
If this is your goal, it’s fine. Self-awareness is needed when embarking on any startup journey. I do not think that the pursuit of wealth through entrepreneurship is immoral or not worthwhile.
It certainly has its advantages.
The pursuit of money through entrepreneurship is easy to define. Founders know exactly when they are succeeding and when they are not. It tends to be ruthless, toxic, draining, exciting, logical, and data-driven.
When paired with an unmovable moral foundation, founders can create long-lasting powerhouses of their industry.
Without a structure of uncompromising rules, this kind of business implodes. It is the kind that ruins reputations and makes headlines. Fyre Festival and Theranos are some of the most impactful examples of money-motivated startups spectacularly ripping themselves apart.
If this is your path it is so incredibly important that all those who are involved (co-founder, employee, or investor) are on the same page.
Most importantly, employees should be aware of how they make hiring and firing decisions.
For most, the journey is just too hard for money to be the only thing keeping a business-focused. It can be part of the equation and almost always is. There is a missing piece however when money is the only thing pushing the plane down the runway.
Freedom
“How we spend our day is, of course, how we spend our lives”. – Annie Dillard
Freedom is the main reason why I love entrepreneurship. I believe that the modern world has given us an indescribable valuable gift. Any person, properly motivated, can build a life doing what they love to do. It takes work, but the chance to succeed in making a living doing what you love has never been this high.
This is a fairly new phenomenon.
A few hundred years ago, if your Dads a farmer, guess what? You’re a farmer. Oh, you hate farming? Screw you, doesn’t matter, if you want to survive to the average lifespan of 38, you better grab a plow and start planting.
Now we can strike out on our own. We can start a blog or an Etsy page, we can make soap or teach guitar or walk dogs or become a lawyer.
The freedom that entrepreneurship provides is often such a huge motivator for a founder to cling to. Knowing that success will mean your time will be your own lights a fire under thousands of folks daily.
It is why books like “The 4-Hour Work Week” rocket to the top of the best-seller list.
People do not want to spend their lives trading time for money. So they build businesses instead. I love it
Impact
Looking at the world, seeing a problem, and then doing something about it, is the foundation of entrepreneurship.
Founders looking for impact are solving a problem for the sake of getting the problem solved. I love this mindset, although it does have it’s issues.
Primarily, impact-focused companies have a bit of a catch 22 to deal with. An imperative question needs to be asked:
How much profit balances the perfect impact ratio?
If you spend too much on the problem, you will die out. If you wait too long to address the impact side of your company, the problem may take longer, or never be solved. This conundrum plagues impact founders daily, mainly because there is no clear answer.
Some companies have tried to remedy this issue by tying their impact directly to sales performance.
Tom’s Shoes is a great example of this. They implemented a one-for-one campaign that donated a pair of shoes for every pair sold. This allowed them to tie impact cost to sales performance, ensuring they would never get overextended on one side or the other.
I like this solution, but it is not available for every business, especially ones that are not product-based.
Recognition
Entrepreneurship has become a cool profession (in a way).
I hate that.
I hate it because founders are starting businesses for the sake of being an entrepreneur, having a startup, or getting a better LinkedIn title. This is dangerous.
Primarily because the mental health stats for entrepreneurs should scare the grind right out of you. Here is just a taste:
Founders are:
– 2X more likely to suffer from depression
– 6X more likely to suffer from ADHD
– 3X more likely to suffer from substance abuse
– 10X more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder
– 2X more likely to have psychiatric hospitalization
– 2X more likely to have suicidal thoughts
Entrepreneurship is stressful. It’s a hard thing to do. Without the proper motivation, founders crumble.
I am honestly not sure how to address the problem. Serial content-generating entrepreneurs often represent a lifestyle that for most people, just kind of sucks. Gary Vaynerchuk is the greatest modern example of this.
If you want to become ridiculously famous and wealthy from entrepreneurship, the sacrifice is going to be intense. It’s possible, but in my opinion rarely with it.
You will work your fingers to the bone and probably still not make it.
In the freedom section, I mentioned a quote from Annie Dillard, and I think it applies well here too. When launching, do not think about the peak moments, the big exit, the paycheck, the bossing people around, ext. Even if you make it, that stuff will be a tiny portion of how you spend your day.
Think about your day as a founder, five years from now.
Are you doing what you want? Do you enjoy your day?
The point here is to communicate that the price for success in the big-time founder world may not be worth recognition and or money alone.
Making it big is never worth sacrificing a life in which you enjoy your day.
Recognition may be an important part of that for you, but I doubt it really makes up a significant percentage.
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I have talked to a lot of angel investors this past year. Most of them are investing because they miss the startup journey and want to taste the excitement again.
They made it to the end, then craved the journey.
My sister has a framed quote on her wall:
“Remember the days when our life now, is what we wished for then.”
I love that quote and think about it often. I think with life in general, but especially with entrepreneurship, we look to the destination and salivate, hungering for the end. However, when most founders finally get there, they look back on the journey with such fondness. They long for the time when the future was uncertain and the stakes were high.
Through this, I have become increasingly convinced that defining the goal at the beginning, helps us appreciate the journey to get there all the more.
If you are still here, thanks for reading this far.
Best of luck out there,
JP
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