The Entrepreneur
“Entrepreneur” is one of those words in English that I never seem to get right. Maybe it’s the fact that I am not a native speaker, or maybe it’s because it has so many vowels combined with that French accent. It’s a fascinating word that over time has started taking up more space in our day-to-day speech.
Way back when, it must have been one of those five-dollar-words that parents asked their kids about over dinner. I am guessing that most of the people reading this post and born before 2000 didn’t think about becoming an entrepreneur as a potential career. Most of us were directed to think of “secure jobs”: lawyers, accountants, engineers in a large corporation and the like.
I am not an entrepreneur myself. I don’t think I have it in me to be one, but I spent the past eight years working with many such individuals. During this time, I was also asked to provide career counseling to many people in the ecosystem. Not a small number of them posed the possibility of becoming entrepreneurs. This made me wonder whether this is a career choice you can consciously make, or whether it’s one of those paths that are born out of an internal drive.
What Does it Take to Be a Founder?
The democracy of technology enabled each of us to think of an idea and to realize it. The entrepreneurs of the past, like Henry Ford or Eli Whitney, had to both be incredibly innovative AND come up with large capital in order to start their businesses. The founders of most current age successful startups, in sharp contrast, can start with much less, and their access to capital is paved by the success of their predecessors.
While the bar may be lower, the emotional strain remains the same. Being an entrepreneur means you take upon yourself the responsibility for employing people, for ensuring their salary and well-being, for attracting investors and customers, for cashflow and for gracefully letting people go when things don’t work out as expected. Doing all that on your own, even as part of a founding team, is hard.
Entrepreneurship is lonely. Ask the founder who received a series of rejections from investors or had to deal with disagreements among her co-founding team. It also comes with a mind shift from being a team leader or senior at a corporation, or another startup, to being the main shareholder, decisionmaker and board member with fiduciary responsibility for the company. Suddenly, decisions like employee equity and budget allocation to the development of the product take on a different meaning altogether when you are in charge of the spending, the fundraising and the ultimate outcome of the entire company’s performance.
The Meaning of Success
If you collected the list of traits attributed to successful founders, you might think that being a founder implies being superhuman. The superlatives around founder characteristics range from goal-driven to storytellers, from humble to ambitious, from fearless to analytical, confident, empathetic… and the list goes on. The fact is, these are all great traits to have no matter what you end up doing in life. The association of this multitude of characteristics with founders, however, creates a confusing impression between “being successful” and “being a founder.”
But being a founder doesn’t equal success. After all, not all successful people are founders and not all founders are successful. What I mean by that is that simply reaching the exalted founder position may give you a sense of pride and power out of the true ownership of the business and the ability to chart your own course, but it may not necessarily make you wealthier or happier than you might have been in an alternative career path. In some cases, it may not even make you successful in your own eyes. Separately, there is a seductive power to the position of founder that can easily be abused and become destructive.
For the most part, success can be measured only in hindsight and that is true also in the case of technology startups. To get there — no matter how you measure it — you need perseverance. Practically, that means being dedicated to the goal you defined when you started the journey. It means repeating your story over and over to skeptical investors and potential employees. And it also means believing in the importance and value of your mission when few others do.
Founders need to be fluent communicators and storytellers. In the early days of a company, the founding team will need to do the sales, hiring and fundraising. All require the ability to verbally and emotionally connect to others through the story of the company and its values.
Great founders are not driven by fears, but by their desire and goals. They plan. And they spend a lot of their time identifying the people who can help them be the most effective at what they do. Any great founder knows that no founder can achieve greatness alone.
The Power Behind the Throne
Finding the right people and creating the right support ecosystem requires combining the insight of the “what” with the “who.” The What is: what are the needs for which we are hiring, will they be changing over time and will that change require us to change the individuals in a specific role.
The Who is: who is the right person, what is the relevant experience that she or he must bring, and what are the personal characteristics that we should be looking for. Great founders surround themselves with fabulous people that are exceptionally talented, capable and delivery oriented.
A founder needs to be supported by individuals with a suppressed ego and with an orientation for execution. These are people who thrive on hard work. They make things happen but seldom, if ever, receive front page accolades for their work and effort. They organize, push, set dates and timelines, pull together the team and raise red flags when things don’t go according to plan. Really great founders identify these types of people for key roles in their organization.
These “power behind the throne” roles are critical. Without them, there is no business. Success is just as much due to great supporting roles than to the founder’s role (and usually more so).
Who is Number One?
But I often see the frustrations and pain of people in support roles. They describe themselves as guests in the boardroom, subordinate to the founding team or the executive team, even if they belong to it themselves. They are unable to find a voice to argue for cost cuts or alert a derailed plan because they do not have a sense of ownership, and more often than not they feel underappreciated. In my own observation, these feelings are a reflection of the gap between the high level of responsibility they have and the low level of credit they often get for the things that go right.
It took me a long time and a lot of emotional agony to find my place in the working world. I was my father’s princess, always a top student and a very ambitious individual — and I still am. If you take all these ingredients and mix them together, you end up with someone who feels they should be number one, wherever they are. But as my journey in the workplace evolved and progressed, I discovered that I wasn’t as unique and special out there as I was for my dad. There were plenty of number one candidates, and some of them were better than me, better positioned than me or simply got there first. The reason didn’t matter.
As a result of the stress and emotional pain, I eventually started questioning how I define what it means to be “number one” and “number two.” I began to reflect on how society looks at success — and whether I agree. To paraphrase a conversation I had with Rami Kirshblum, one of our founders, success, like happiness, is ephemeral. Finding meaning in what we do is far more sustainable.
Through lots of thought and over time, I’ve redefined success around being the best that I can be wherever I am, and first and foremost being a number one in my own eyes. Finding ways to make my talent and voice unique, and making a meaningful contribution or affecting change.
Some people achieve success as founders. Others excel and succeed in different roles, and in different organizational structures. This is something I bear in mind when I am asked to provide career counseling. When people tell me they are considering becoming entrepreneurs, I would focus their probing efforts on whether they understand the implications of this choice and whether they would find meaning in carrying it forward.
When I was growing up, kids dreamt of becoming astronauts (or doctors or fashion designers). They grew up hearing about heroes like John Glenn, Neil Armstrong or Edwin Aldrin and dreamt about reaching the beyond or making great discoveries for mankind. In this day and age, to do great things for humanity can mean ridding the world of car accidents or helping families deal with loss or managing their personal finances. You can do it as a founder, or you can do it as the power behind the founder. Either way, if you find meaning in it, you’re a success.
(Thanks to Yuval Samet and Ron Gura for reading early versions of this post and for sharing ideas and references)
