Member-only story
What Dozens of Business Failures Taught Me About Why We Fail to Make Money Online
It’s pretty simple but no one talks about it because it’s not nice to hear.
The belief that you have a great idea is not worth cuckoo spit. Ideas are ten a penny while the ability to execute counts for a great deal more.
Felix Dennis
One of the most important pieces of information I learned about business came from an interview with Suli Ali.
Ali was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who built TinyCo, a video game publisher he sold for $100 million in 2016.
Part of the origin of his difficulties in building his company was, in his words, that “the people we had weren’t the best”.
That was a rare moment of business hardship transparency, a statement that remains so controversial that no one speaks about the fact that it is controversial in the first place.
Indeed, conventional business advice is built on an egalitarian conception of human nature.
No one is ever going to write a book or tell you that the reason why your business failed is that you weren’t good enough and that why others’ succeeded is that they were better than you.
