71–80 of 232 posts
This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success. The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff. 1. have a good team and hire right. you need jus…
What’s TAM?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is one of the things that drives me nuts about these "inspirational" stories where some millionaire/billionaire talks proudly about how their first business failed, their car was repo'd, bank foreclosed on them, etc... but I've never heard one talk about what they did between that and the successful business. Where did they sleep? How did they afford food?
Varies but mostly you go get a job for a while.
So in the context of bootstrapping a company it’s helpful to have a legit fallback (way to suck it up and find an OK job) when things don’t pan out.
Edit: maybe this is obvious for CS/software folks but the extracurricular work I’m involved with is not exactly tech related, though my day job is coding
This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success. The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff. 1. have a good team and hire right. you need jus…
Was your first successful business one of your first ones? What if it had taken you until your 6th try to get a winner? Would you have stuck it out?
This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success. The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff. 1. have a good team and hire right. you need jus…
Honestly it just looks to me like the lottery you won is not "having a successful business", but "having the luxury and connections to try and fail 5-7 times with one success" Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.
I only ever found one foolproof system to win the lottery, and it allowed me to win on every single ticket. I owned a retail store that sold lottery tickets. The retailer gets a small commission on every sale, and one on any ticket cashed in at the store.
Often this is "two and twenty" (aka 2% annual carry, plus 20% of the gains). Pretty awesome skimming.
This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success. The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff. 1. have a good team and hire right. you need jus…
It is clear that given the dimensions of skill and luck, the most success will come from having both. If you lack either skill or luck, you will automatically be at a disadvantage compared to those who have both. This implies that the most prominent success stories are the result of luck as much as of anything else. However that isn’t very often mentioned in those stories.
This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success. The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff. 1. have a good team and hire right. you need jus…
You won the lottery in the sense that you went to college, live in a well-off english speaking country and as such, can burn through 5-7 failures. I'm sure you're smart and hard working, and I don't believe in shaming gringos as if being born rich (e.g. having access to a toilet and clean water) was their own fault. You deserve to be happy with what you have. But will never get to be preachy about it without some one…
Every idea for a business isn't equal. A good idea, combined with good leadership, and good execution, will 'beat the odds' the majority of the time.
Honestly, that this is all there is to the post, and that it was a tweet, just adds to the rediculous of the statement. Just spewing unfounded opinions with no evidence onto a platform that encourages short easily digestible posts.
This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success. The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff. 1. have a good team and hire right. you need jus…
You are precisely demonstrating the original post, no? You had 2 of 9 businesses succeed. You are demonstrating roughly 1:5 odds of rolling a successful business. With 1:5 odds if we reroll you doing 10 businesses over and over, 10% of you never succeed . About 1/3 of you win once, 1/3 of you win twice, and 20% of you win 3 times. The versions of you that won 3 times are not any different than the versions of you who…
If you do everything badly (i.e. come up with bad business ides, cannot implement even those bad ideas, are bad at hiring, managing money, paying taxes etc.) then your success rate will be 0%, not 20%.
The issue here isn't about how hard starting a business is. It's obviously hard enough that many (most?) people who try will fail.
The issue is: can you do things better? Is doing things better lead to higher probability of success?
The "it's all luck" people say that you can't. There is no better or worse way. It's just luck. Therefore any advice is useless.
The opposite point of view is: yes. There are better and worse ways of doing things. And if you know what they are then you can tell other people. And that advice will help them to achieve success. But not guarantee.