Why most ultra-successful entrepreneurs started their companies
“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.” – Mark Zuckerberg
Great entrepreneurs rarely if ever set out to make money. There’s a common stereotype about ultra-successful people. People think they’re greedy and power hungry. To the contrary, most people who make billions do it by helping millions of people.
Uber allows people to get rides. It prevents drunk driving. It also helps people with suspended licenses and people who don’t own cars. Facebook allows people to connect with distant friends and old relatives. It allows us to connect with the world around us.
Brian Chesky spoke about the early days of Airbnb at Y-Combinator’s Startup School. He mentioned how one of their first users told him Airbnb saved their lives. It was a couple that was struggling to make rent. Renting out a room with Airbnb allowed them to make enough money to keep their home.
Brian Chesky spoke about the early days of Airbnb at Y-Combinator’s Startup School. He mentioned how one of their first users told him Airbnb saved their lives. It was a couple that was struggling to make rent. Renting out a room with Airbnb allowed them to make enough money to keep their home.
Brian Chesky spoke about the early days of Airbnb at Y-Combinator’s Startup School. He mentioned how one of their first users told him Airbnb saved their lives. It was a couple that was struggling to make rent. Renting out a room with Airbnb allowed them to make enough money to keep their home.
The purpose of business is to solve problems. Money is like the gas that allow a business to continue running.
Elon Musk is a billionaire. When people see him roll out new products they assume his goal is making money. Why would anyone money-motivated take on challenges like electric luxury cars or home batteries? There are plenty ways someone like Elon could make money that wouldn’t be as challenging.
Those projects are not money-motivated ventures as much as “monetized social missions”. Elon Musk is driving an initiative to prevent climate change. He’s taking on the monopolies that have protected the status quo for a long time.
The track record of cause-driven entrepreneurs reaching ultra-high levels of success says a lot. Good karma seems to play a major role in catapulting little guys to big things. Likely because social media making is making everything transparent to everyone. It may soon become impossible to succeed without a positive social mission.
Critical questions to ask yourself:
1. What’s your positive social mission that can change the world?
2. What’s a problem that you have a personal connection to that also affects others?
3. Who is the one customer that will love your product?
4. Why will they love it?
5. How can you deliver an amazing experience to them every time?
You need definite and specific answers to these questions. They need to be your primary motives from the beginning.
“My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley.” – Mark Zuckerberg
Creative Monopoly — How companies that started in garages have scaled to world dominance
According to Peter Thiel, Author of “Zero To One”, co-founder of Paypal, and an early investor in Facebook. The conventional business wisdom that encourages entrepreneurs to go for big markets is wrong. There’s always been an assumption that a bigger market means more money. This idea is sending startups to dive head first into a losing battle. Why? Going after big markets forces you to compete with large companies for the attention of millions. This strategy is both challenging and expensive.
The strategy Peter recommends is bringing a breakthrough innovation to a smaller niche market. Once you own a small market you can scale up by innovating within similar markets. For example; Google, is a search engine, that’s also an advertising company. It’s also a tech conglomerate that makes mobile software, web browsers, and self-driving cars.
One of the main ideas of Peter Thiel’s work is that competition is for losers. You don’t want to be in a competitive market. In hyper-competitive markets, companies race to the bottom by cutting prices to compete. You need to be in a market where you have little to no competition. These situations let you control price allowing you to have high profits for years. There are two ways to do this:
- Create a new market by creating a completely new and unique product.
- Make something that has an existing global market, but create a better version.
How obscure start-ups create products that make billions out of nowhere
- They solve the creators problem better than any of the current alternatives. Normal people solving their own problems is how these stories usually start. If you’re a normal person and you fix your own problem, you may have also solved a problem for millions of others (or 300 million in the case of Drew Houston).
- The creator has a personal connection to the product, the problem it solves, and the people it solves the problem for. This way, the creator can understand the dynamics of the user experience better than anyone else. This allows them to optimize the product for it’s users in a way that the market wants.