12 Characteristics of Successful Internet Entrepreneurs.
As long as there have been successful Internet entrepreneurs,
there have been attempts to nail down what makes them successful. Whether it's
a fellow entrepreneur looking for an edge or an interested layperson who is
simply curious to know more, no shortage of people are dying to know how
the Internet's business visionaries reached the top. These business success
stories aren't the result of a secret formula; rather, each entrepreneur
possesses a number of characteristics unique to their pursuits. Here's a
rundown of 12 of these traits, the entrepreneurs who have them and the
companies they helped create.
The Trait: Determination. The
Entrepreneur: Steve
Jobs. The
Company: Apple/NeXt/Pixar.
Perhaps no Internet entrepreneur has exhibited more determination
than late Steve Jobs. In his now famous speech at Stanford
University's 2005 commencement, Jobs explained how he was thrown out of
Apple in the mid 1980s by the board of directors. 'At age 30, I was
out,' Jobs recalls - 'and very publicly out.' The life of an
entrepreneur is rarely free from anxiety, but nothing compares to being ousted
from the company you founded and watching others run it once it becomes a
household name. The book 'iCon' reveals that Jobs apparently
contemplated suicide following the crisis. While lesser businessmen would have
crumbled, Jobs took his fall from grace as a challenge, starting two
independently successful companies from scratch (NeXt and Pixar) and eventually
returning to rescue Apple from the brink of failure, spearheading its current
digital music and media-driven renaissance. Without the determination to remain
in Silicon Valley , Jobs may never have returned to prominence or led Apple to the
market dominance it enjoys today.
The Trait: Innovation. The
Entrepreneurs: Sergey
Brin and Larry Page. The Company: Google.
In John Battelle's book "The Search: How Google and Its
Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business", readers learn that Google
co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were not money-chasing businessmen, but
hackers who truly wanted to build the best search technology in the world.
Neither of them had any clue what practical applications any of their work
would have when they maxed out their personal credit cards to buy servers and
computer parts; they simply knew they were onto something and felt a burning
desire to bring superior technology into being. Indeed, virtually every
dominant search engine of the mid to late 1990s (Lycos, Alta Vista and Yahoo! to name
a few) passed up the chance to buy Google before its breakout as the Internet
juggernaut. It wasn't until the launch of Google AdWords that the company found
any substantial or enduring way to capitalize on its mega-popular search
engine, and that was just fine with Page
and Brin. While they certainly wanted to get paid, innovation was always at the
forefront and led to them getting their enormous payday.
The Trait: Frugality. The
Entrepreneur: Aaron
Patzer. The
Company: Mint.
One of the biggest misconceptions about Internet business success
is that you can't build a "real" company without fancy office space,
mahogany furniture and slick corporate attire. Laying waste to this myth is
Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint.com and tireless advocate of frugality.
Conceived as a way to painlessly connect consumers with money-saving deals and
offer useful insight into their financial lives, Mint.com was itself a model of
frugality, growing little by little and taking outside investment only when
necessary to expand. This is a sharp contrast from many late 90s Internet
businesses, which seemed to regard the business as an excuse for burning other
people's money rather than a vehicle for producing its own. Patzer's frugality
paid off when Mint was acquired by Intuit in 2009 for $170 million.
The Trait: Experimentation. The
Entrepreneur: Mark
Zuckerberg. The Company: Facebook.
Even successful entrepreneurs often find themselves settling into
comfort zones and developing tunnel vision about their products or services.
Rather than continuously striving to tweak and improve, they grow content with
what works now, almost setting it on a pedestal that one fears to fiddle with
in any major way. Perhaps no Internet businessman has spit in the face of this
attitude more than Mark Zuckerberg. Despite Facebook's status as a social
networking giant, Zuckerberg and Co. have never shied away from changing the
user interface (sometimes in the face of protests) or shaking things up in the
efforte to break new ground. Though not all of his changes have been
successful, a surprising majority of them have stood the test of time and
boosted Facebook's following.
The
Trait: Eccentricity. The
Entrepreneur: Tim
Ferris. The
Company: FourHourWorkWeek.com.
Read the biography of virtually any successful entrepreneur and
you'll find that they might not act quite like the general population. This
trait is known as eccentricity, and few contemporary Web entrepreneurs
exemplify it more than Timothy Ferris. In his perennial best seller "The
Four Hour Work Week," Ferris advocates cultivating a radically new mindset
about work. Rather than seeing work as something to be begrudgingly endured for
the sake of weekends and holidays, Ferris recommends molding work to the life
you wish to live. Primarily, this consists of building systems to produce
wealth without ongoing struggle and using the 80/20 principle to identify where
your efforts produce the most and least results. Properly executed, such
actions enable one to travel and live as one pleases while keeping work in its
place. Ferris has utilized these eccentric behaviors to escape the 9-5 grind
forever, both via book sales and his own online businesses. His story is a
needed reminder that different outcomes require different behavior. Put another
way, what got you here won't get you there.
The Trait: Simplicity. The
Entrepreneurs: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. The Company: YouTube
Engineers have an old saying that drives the field to this day:
KISS, or "keep it simple, stupid." YouTube founders Chad Hurley,
Steve Chen and Jawed Karim understood this better than most when they created a
site that existed to do nothing more than let the average Joe upload his own
videos. Without any delusions of grandeur or pretense about changing the world
(which it has arguably done anyway), YouTube rose to Internet stardom by simply
creating a cool, useful service that people would enjoy using daily. The fact
that YouTube links are shared over IM, text, and Facebook all day long is a
testament to the value of simplicity in business, and explains why Google
snapped up the video sharing site for over $1 billion in 2007.
The Trait: Consumer-focused. The
Entrepreneur: Paul
Graham. The
Company: Viaweb
No one has written more about Internet business success than
Paul Graham, co-founder of seed capital firm Y Combinator. Before he invested
in startups, Graham built and sold his own: Viaweb. It was during that time
that Graham learned (and applied) the lesson he now preaches to new
entrepreneurs: make stuff people want. Unlike so many far-fetched companies of
the time, in 1995 Viaweb was focused on a single goal: enabling non-tech savvy
individuals to build and run their own online stores. By zeroing in on a need
for which there was very much obvious demand, Viaweb was virtually assured of
being successful so long as it came up with elegant solutions to sell. It did,
and was eventually acquired by Yahoo! in 1998 for around $45 million in stock.
As an investor at Y Combinator and essayist at PaulGraham.com, Graham now advocates making sure your idea has
demand before lifting a finger on development. Without this, he persuasively
claims, all the bold press releases and product launches in the world wont save
you.
The Trait: Iconoclastic. The
Entrepreneur: Niklas
Zennstrom. The Company: Kazaa/Skype/Joost
It might seem that iconoclastic is just another word for
eccentric, but they are not actually the same. Eccentricity is simply violating
behavioral norms. An iconoclast, however, generates conflict with his
eccentricity by disrupting and changing the way things are done within entire
industries or societies. In founding Kazaa and Skype, Swedish entrepreneur
Niklas Zennstrom exhibited iconoclastic behavior par excellence. Widespread use
of Kazaa's peer-to-peer technology helped put the nail in the coffin of tightly
controlled and centralized media downloading, while Skype (despite a recent
slowdown) stuck it to the telecoms by introducing P2P telephony. His latest
venture, Joost, is attempting to revolutionize online video in much the same
way. It hasn't always been easy for Zennstrom (who stayed out of the US for years to avoid lawsuits from record companies during Kazaa's
heyday) but in true iconoclastic fashion, he has never seen this as a reason to
stop or slow down.
The Trait: Ambition. The
Entrepreneur: Jeff
Bezos. The
Company: Amazon.com
The most talked-about Internet entrepreneurs have almost
superhuman ambition. Not content to merely have a nice little business, these
titans of Web industry set their sights on building epic enterprises that
become part of history itself. Surely Jeff Bezos displayed ambition in founding
Amazon.com, a Web portal that retails virtually any book, video game, or
consumer electronic a buyer could wish to find. It took awhile for Amazon to
become profitable with such a wide focus, but today it is one of the most
celebrated Internet companies, and with recent product launches like the Kindle
e-book reader, it figures to remain a dominant force for years to come.
The
Trait: Focus. The
Entrepreneur: Max
Levchin. The
Company: PayPal.
Even prosperous businesses can be dragged under by failure to
address their biggest problems head-on. When Max Levchin (above right) founded
PayPal, it would have been very easy for him to neglect the rampant fraud that
threatened to suffocate the company's profit margins, turning his attention
instead to how great it was that PayPal was growing at a phenomenal rate.
Instead, Levchin utilized the timeless entrepreneurial characteristic of focus,
making security priority number one at the fledgling online payment service.
Within a couple of years, according to Jessica Livingston's excellent book
Founders at Work, fraud was largely reigned in at PayPal and the company was
acquired by ebay for $1.5 billion in 2002. The lesson here is to confront
(rather than rationalize away) your company's biggest problems, no matter how
well the rest of the business may be doing.
The Trait: Opportunism. The
Entrepreneur: Tom
Anderson. The Company: MySpace
Some of the biggest Internet fortunes have their origins in shrewd
opportunism like that displayed by Tom Anderson. In founding MySpace, Anderson
saw a gap between what social networking users wished to do and what inferior
Web sites like Friendster allowed them to do, such as simplified photo
uploading, graphical customization and music sharing. Upon amassing over 500
million registered users, MySpace was
acquired by media empire News Corp. for $580 million (a figure that now appears
to be a bargain in light of what YouTube recieved and what has been offered for
competitor Facebook). While many have criticized MySpace for being too
"messy" or "unprofessional", Anderson 's
genius was in recognizing that this was irrelevant to his target audience of
teenagers, singles and musicians who simply wanted an outlet to set up their
pages however they wanted.
The Trait: Flexibility. The
Entrepreneur: Jimmy
Wales. The
Company: Wikipedia
Paul Graham put it well when he said that some goals (like winning
an Olympic medal) require unswavering dedication to a fixed plan while startups
are more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads. A
shining example of this trait - flexibility - is Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
As a completly member-driven, collaborative online encyclopedia, Wikipedia has
grown in a myriad directions, usually at the prompting of users rather than
sweeping declarations from Wales or his team. The result has been a robust and ever-improving
resource shaped by those who use it rather than those who wish to tell users
what they "should" use. New Internet entrepreneurs would do well to
learn a thing or two about flexibility from Wales , even if their business is not explicitly collaborative a la
Wikipedia.
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