My parents were entrepreneurs, the unaccomplished kind residing in the white space of survivor bias, never appearing in HBR articles and McKinsey case studies. The bloody corpse of their business and their likes fertilize the ground upon which your empires of prosperity now stand.
Like all entrepreneurs they have an ability to spot and visualize the opportunity to solve a problem in the market machine, identify their unique competitive advantage during some juncture of time, at some junction of space, and put their plans to action. In their case the opportunity was to arbitrage on gaps of information, language, and trust between global brands and cheaper manufacturers in the developing world. They were ahead of their time in spotting that prospect, opportune in their selection of the marketplace, but clumsy in their execution, and ultimately calamitous in their lack of vision.
Hindsight threw into stark relief the importance of focus, persistence, and above all else, not going into business with your spouse.
I remember my childhood home littered with samples from their next big thing: pharmaceuticals, decorative medieval arms, candy, tiles, and some piece of valve used in fire hydrants, which was oddly specific.
The pharmaceutical business they forfeited for a chance to live overseas; the decorations and tiles and – relatedly for a brief time – real-estate business they gave up after my mother had an affair with her business partner; the valve thing was never nurtured into a real niche. It wasn’t the lack of business that doomed them. It was the lack of a clear, consistent vision of where their business should be, how it fit into the landscape. Without it, they fell easily to the fear of missing out, distracted by the desire to strike gold quick. They jumped reactively from one opportunity to the next. Had they stuck with any one of those businesses, after 30 years they’d have made something of themselves, if not with scales then with knowledge alone.
Even 30 years of failure can coalesce into diamond.
All of that is to say, I have some stake in the subject matter. The entrepreneurial spirit is etched deep in me as the scars of its failings. The drama surrounding Theranos and Fyre Festival has led to a bit of soul searching for me.
When the duelling Fyre Festival documentaries came out, a colleague and I had an eerily similar reaction of covering up our face to suppress the cringe. We WORKED THERE. Different group of people, different packaging, different scale, different language, but the same story. A few weeks before that I had read Carreyou’s book Bad Blood and was sending snips of employee testimonials and commentary to him too. Once you see the pattern, it’s everywhere. I have known several people like these in my life and I have worked with many of them. I’ve been like them myself, at times.
Some people call it the “fake it till you make it” school of life. For the founders I know, at least, I don’t think they set out to fake anything. All great deeds begin with an earnest vision to do something cooler, better. That’s what attract smart people to join start-ups: the audacity and the ambition to change the world.
But it’s what happens next that separates slag from steel.
Imagining a product or service is one thing. I have seen the best founders then plot out laboriously each step to produce the outcome that is true to their aspirations and loyal to their mission. Sure, there are tweaks, stumbles, pivots along the way. But in moments of trade-offs, there is a backbone upon which to anchor their decisions, and that backbone is laid out for all to see.
My first job out of college was with an ed-tech company that tried to ‘disrupt’ the antiquated education model. We shared the same slogan as every other ed-tech start-up around the corner. What made us different was embracing innovation, trust, quality, rigour in every fibre of the business – from the artistry and ingenuity invested into our products, to the devotion to accuracy, all at the expense of short-term profits. The result – a world-class product, and a company built to last.
And then there are those like Theranos, Fyre, and my latest place of work.
Enamoured with their vision and the adulation it received, these narcissist founders inhabit the fruits of their work even before the tree is sown. They stand on stages with outsized ego dangled between their legs, heads above clouds, overpromising to the market, to investors, to their employees, and to themselves. Suddenly their vision outpaced their capacity for execution.
This is usually where the bubble bursts. But some maverick hustlers are able to sustain themselves, lie after lie, deal after deal. Giving credit where credit is due, both Billy McFarland, Elizabeth Holmes, and my current boss has that uncanny ability to warp reality and shatter the filter of feasibility and sensibility which usually products people from frauds. It’s the same trait cult leaders possess.
My boss once famously said, after I had accused him of lying: “this is salesmanship, Peter, you’re supposed to be good at this.”
But goal, people, tools, a plan mingled together does not a company make. There is art and hard work and presence in running a company. that’s the difference between vision and mission. A vision is seen, talked about, displayed, put on the wall, coloured in a brochure. A mission is lived. A good founder can ground herself and give attention to getting things done the right way.
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