Why We Do What We Do
The startup world is pretty sexy right now. There are a lot of high-profile people in it and more are entering into it every day. This is being led by the fact that the media and the public are looking up to a bunch of these startup CEOs as leaders. We think about Elon Musk and what he’s doing with Tesla and Hyperloop. We think about Mark Zuckerberg and what he has done with Facebook. These people have become heroes and people want to emulate them for a variety of different reasons.
And that’s OK.
There are also a lot of people who want to enter the startup world because it sounds cool, and the culture sounds amazing. Then there are the people like us who have been doing this work for years now with different drivers.
At GAN, we’ve been up to this for seven years now, and we really have two specific drivers that lead us to do what we do. We want startups to:
- build powerful businesses;
- create a meaningful impact; and,
- most importantly, we want them to do both of those things from wherever they call home.
We love the idea of creating powerful businesses. There is a great report out of the Kauffman Foundation that shows the only net new jobs that have been created over the past 10 years have come from tech companies who are between one and five years old. That means companies that have been around for five or more years haven’t created any net new jobs for the past 10 years! Another way to look at it is that, outside of the tech world, no companies have created net new jobs.
Fortunately, the tech industry — specifically the companies that are one to five years old — are the ones that are creating powerful businesses, and jobs.
At the same time, we want meaningful impact to happen and we know that you can have a great business with a ton of jobs, but not create meaningful impact. Both things need to happen. A startup needs to create meaningful impact and focus on creating a company that’s going to be around for the next 20+ years.
Are you one of those people entering the startup world? Our hope is you make sure you are creating a really good culture at your company so that people want to come to work and feel more human because they work with you. This also means making sure your customers are getting valuable products and getting the products and services they need to operate their businesses and live their lives better because of you.
Finally, for the entire GAN community, it’s not just about building an amazing business and creating meaningful impact. We truly believe in the importance of being able to do those things from wherever you call home. We know that startups can build powerful businesses and create meaningful impact everywhere. We’re seeing it in places like Lincoln, Nebraska; Los Angeles, California; Des Moines, Iowa; Cairo, Egypt; Wellington, New Zealand; Buenos Aires, Argentina. All of these places that are not typical locations like Silicon Valley or San Francisco or New York or Boston or London. We love the idea of people building these businesses in places where they themselves live and where they can build lasting communities and lasting legacies.
That’s why we do what we do.
