""Nior dhun Dia doras riamhnar oscail Se ceann eile"
(God never closes one door without opening another)
— Irish Saying
I have often written about the importance of Resilience in entrepreneurship. As they say, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. This is easy to say in the abstract, but when you are going through massive set backs or failure, it is hard to feel that anything good will come of it. I certainly did not welcome the catastrophic yard sale of one of my most promising deals back in 2001. In one short year, this company went from being a potential $2B IPO (making 20x for us) to an $180m smoking hole in the ground. That said, I learned more about venture investing on that one disaster than I did on my previous 8 deals.
One of the most moving speeches I have read/heard has been Steven Jobs Stanford University Commencement speech last year titled "You’ve got to find what you love". It is a must read for any up and coming entrepreneur. In it, he describes how fortunate he was to experience three normally traumatic set backs which all contributed to his stellar success. These were his dropping out of college, his very public firing from Apple and his bout with cancer. I won’t ruin the punchline…but take a look.
It’s a good speech. See my post on resilience:
http://ben.casnocha.com/2006/05/if_you_can_get_.html
Matt, that’s a great point, and some say that there is a scientific basis for placing emphasis on the importance of persistence in entrepreneurship.
Namely, some would argue that the expected outcome of any given venture is the product of randomness more than that of positive actions by the founders and the management team.
From that perspective, it might be a good idea for founders to persist in diversifying their private equity interests because, empirically speaking, you just never know when precisely the dice are gonna roll the way you want them to.
Good observation. We often tell our CEO’s to fail their ideas quickly to get to the ones that work on as little capital as possible. This is a way to “diversify” their approach. You never know which approach will work best.
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TITLE: “You’ve got to find what you love” – Steve Jobs
URL: http://www.startupohio.com/startup_ohio/2006/05/youve_got_to_fi.html
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BLOG NAME: Start-Up Ohio
DATE: 05/27/2006 08:21:09 PM
In his post Resilience: Steve Jobs on the Power of Failure, Matt McCall offers his thoughts on Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech titled given last year. I have stumbled across this speech a few times over the past year and