My wife was reading me a letter sent by a headmaster at a tony Chicago private school. In the letter, the headmaster “rent his garments”. He apologized that Cyrus McCormick had a slave. He went further. He gave credit to the slave for the reaper.
This is white guilt too far. Typical of where the left-wing is these days. My kids went to that school, but in today’s climate, they wouldn’t be there.
Anyone that has built a business knows how hard it is. The idea is pretty easy. Even getting a patent is a simple process. There are literally millions of patents on the books that are worthless because the person that filed them couldn’t do anything with them. Ideas are cheap. As a matter of fact, I tell people that if you think you are the only one in the world with that idea, you are living in a dream world. Great entrepreneurs are the ones that can take that idea and build a company. Very few people can do that which is why at least 50% of all venture capital backed startups fail.
People that build businesses often have people that help them. They have employees. But, the credit goes to the founder. Who built Apple? Sure, it was a lot of great employees but Steve Jobs was the straw that stirred the drink. Without him, Apple doesn’t exist. Same with Bill Gates and Microsoft. Same with Henry Ford and Ford Motor company. If building a business was easy, everyone would do it.
Heck, people have trouble building very small mom and pop businesses let alone a huge company like International Harvester.
We need to start giving credit to the builders. Marc Andreesen didn’t write a post on “it’s time to ideate”. He said, “It’s time to build.” It was President Obama who famously said, “You didn’t build that.” Guess which ethos prevails these days?
I slightly disagree. You need a good idea. When I was looking for funding around 1997, I was pushing what are now three companies, each of with had a very successful IPO or buyout. At that time it was all the rage to invest in tshirt companies (FogDog and Starbelly come to mind) and dog food services.
The hard part of getting going was wedging the idea into the investment environment. So LinkedIn was my business partner's room-mates company. He got nowhere with it because it wasn't Tshirts or dog food. I got nowhere with my payments company after around 50 VC presentations. The ideas were unique and really solid, and no one else was doing that at the time.
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Operations are counter-intuitive. eBay had terrible customer service (actually much improved lately) but still has a lame interface. Facebook customer service is pathetic and even hostile. Twitter customer service is out of it mind bad. Yet, people keep going back to them.
I think it boils down to, can the business still operate with really bad customer service and follow up? Because if FB provided reasonable customer service, they would be losing money like crazy.
One of the reasons I stopped taking any requests to secure financing, or invest myself, in startups was because so many thought they deserved to be compensated for the idea and I was stunned at their ignorance. I said your compensation will be remarkable if and when you implement it into successfully creating revenue, then profits, but if you don't do that, you're no different than a child with an active imagination.😄🙄🤨😲
I have told many that leadership is more important than an idea.