Vivek Wadhwa is an Indian-American entrepreneur and academic who writes frequently, and often brashly, on the topic of innovation. I've always found his observations to be thought-provoking. His latest piece in the Washington Post is particularly so:
His article challenges an observation by well-known venture capitalist Vinod Khosla (of Khosla Ventures) on some of Khosla's comments at NASSCOM (see video). Here is the introductory portion of Wadhwa's article [all use of bold text in this post is mine - it's used for emphasis]:
“People under 35 are the people who make change happen,” said venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, “People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.”
Khosla, who believes that old entrepreneurs can’t innovate because they keep “falling back on old habits,” said this at the NASSCOM Product Enclave in Bangalore, on Nov. 9.He isn’t alone in his views.
Silicon Valley VCs talk openly about their bias toward young entrepreneurs. Some argue that Internet entrepreneurs peak at the age of 25.
Khosla and those who think like him are wrong.
This topic is of great interest to me - not so much the question of age of entrepreneurs, but the question of what it takes to build companies that have exemplary long-term success. So, I'll use Wadhwa's article as a pivot to explore a few related aspects and then cite specific examples from the history of companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple and Sun Microsystems to make my case that long-term success takes a lot more than youth or ideas - it requires a level of experience and discipline that understands how to translate ideas into sustainable and lasting success.
1) Wadhwa's observations
Wadhwa cites various studies and data sets that make his case - i.e., older people are not only more likely to start new companies than younger people, they are more likely to be part of successful companies. One of the research papers he cites from his own team is this one: "Education and Tech Entrepreneurship". Here is the abstract of that study:
The popular image of American tech entrepreneurs is that they come from elite universities: Some graduate and start companies in their garages; others drop out of college to start their business careers. The dot-com boom reinforced the image of technology CEOs being young and brash. But, even though Bill Gates and Steve Jobs founded two of the world's most successful companies, they are not representative of technology and engineering company founders. Indeed, a larger proportion of tech founders are middle-aged, well-educated in business or technical disciplines, with degrees from a wide assortment of schools. Twice as many U.S.-born tech entrepreneurs start ventures in their fifties as do those in their early twenties, as this paper will show.
We surveyed 652 U.S.-born chief executive officers and heads of product development in 502 engineering and technology companies established from 1995 through 2005. These companies, identified from an existing dataset of corporate records in Dun & Bradstreet's Million Dollar Database, have more than $1 million in sales, twenty or more employees, and company branches with fifty or more employees.
We observed that, like immigrant tech founders, U.S.-born engineering and technology company founders tend to be well-educated. There are, however, significant differences in the types of degrees these entrepreneurs obtain and the time they take to start a company after they graduate. They also tend to be more mobile and are much older than is commonly believed.
I recommend clicking through to read Wadhwa's entire article and the cited studies and also bookmarking his blog. Perhaps Khosla was trying to be provocative but his youth-centric view of entrepreneurship success, in my view, is mistaken. Let me add some dimensions to Wadhwa's article to explain why. I'll use the technology sector as a proxy for my observations given this has been a key part of Khosla's background in Silicon Valley.
2) The Role of Acquisitions and Idea Evolution
As we rightly applaud the successes of innovative companies, it's sometimes easy to overlook the fact that many of them often:
- Evolved to adopt ideas that their founders did not pursue or support initially (context: founders are usually given the most credit for the company's success) - and made these ideas a fundamental success factor in their business, and/or
- Purchased products from other companies or purchased other companies outright and made those products or companies a major foundation for their growth and success through successful transformation
Neither of these factors, of course, imply that a parent company was not innovative - all it says is that some of the core ideas that a company's success rests on might have originated elsewhere. Let me elaborate using a few prominent examples from Silicon Valley.
A. Google
Search advertizing pretty much dominates Google's massive revenue stream - the revenue that funds Google's idea factory. Yet, Google's young co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were initially opposed to search advertizing being a part of Google's business. When they eventually adopted search advertizing in their business model, the technology was based in part on a product from another company. Acquisitions have been a significant part of Google's growth.
As Randall Stross writes in his book "Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know":
Google's growth has not been held back by pride: when it has failed in its efforts to gain new markets that it desires, it will spend the large sums needed to acquire the companies that possess what it seeks. YouTube essentially owned the online video market, and cost Google $1.65 billion to acquire in 2006. DoubleClick essentially owned the dominating advertising network that places banner advertising on Web sites, and cost Google $3.1 billion to acquire in 2008.
The sense of historical predestination is illusory, however, an artifact of hindsight. Google's power derives from its financial base, which was built upon an accidental discovery, two years after the company's founding, that plain text advertisements on its search results pages produce enormous profits. Neither Larry Page nor Sergey Brin, the company's cofounders, who met as graduate students in computer science at Stanford University, predicted - nor did anyone else - that those unobtrusive ads would form the foundation of a business that within seven years would be accorded by investors a historic high valuation, in early November 2007, of $225 billion.
[...]
Google's dependence upon text ads is especially remarkable given that advertising was entirely absent in the original business plans of the founders. When the Google search engine was first made available to the public, visitors noticed superior search results, but they also noticed the service was entirely free of commercial messages...
Brin and Page were hostile to the very notion of permitting advertising on a search site. In an April 1998 academic paper prepared when they were still students, they criticized "advertising funded search engines," which they believed would be "inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." They argued that for a search engine to remain immune from the temptation of biased results, it would have to remain immune from the temptation of biased results, it would have to remain "in the academic realm."
Even after Google moved from its first home, a Stanford dorm, to a rented garage off campus, Brin and Page moved cautiously in permitting advertising on their site. They decided to introduce advertisements as an experiment, restricting the format to three very short lines of text and a Web address, which were placed on the right margin of the search results page and displayed only if the advertisement was directly relevant to the search term.
Scott Karp in Publishing 2.0 has written about how Google got more entrenched in the search ad business:
Google’s search advertising model didn’t spring forth fully formed. It was iterated, and many of the key concepts were borrowed — something many people don’t realize. But a few key market-defying decisions, and one stunning insight, made it all work. Here is a brief history to inspire, taken from John Battelle’s The Search (required reading for anyone who wants to innovate anything on the web):
In late 1999, Google began testing a program to sell ads on a CMP [CPM] basis, the dominant ad model of the time.
But instead of using banner ads, the dominant ad format of the time, Google decided to sell only unobtrusive text ads. And they decided to target those ads based on search terms, and to keep the ads separate from the main search results.
Advertising first appeared on Google.com in January 2000 — text ads were sold by a sales rep on a CPM basis. (Yes, that’s right, there was no pay-per-click, no self-serve, no bidding.)
“It didn’t generate much money.” – Sergey Brin
In what would turn out to be a massive irony, based on its initial lack of success with advertising, Google had planned to give its inventory over to DoubleClick, the largest banner ad business of the time.
But then the bubble burst in Spring 2000, and the online ad banner market crashed.
In the wake of the bust, Google introduced a self-serve model for buying text ads — they got the idea from GoTo.com, although they did not then adopt GoTo’s pay-per-click model.
Karp notes that Google's innovation was in making a modification to GoTo's model. GoTo became Overture and Overture sued Google over patent infringement. Overture was subsequently bought by Yahoo and became the foundation for Yahoo's search advertising. Eventually Google settled the lawsuit by issuing 2.7 million shares to Yahoo. (A more detailed discussion of the evolution of the search advertizing model can be found in this business case "Overture and Google: Internet Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising Auctions", written by Andrew Ellam with Marco Ottaviani).
B. Microsoft
Microsoft's success has in part been due to their dominance of the PC OS market, and in Office applications. Acquisitions or smart adaptation of NIH technology (or perhaps, PFE) has, in part, been instrumental to their success.
For instance, let's take Microsoft's entry into the PC OS market, where their first PC OS product (MS-DOS) was derived from a product licensed from Seattle Computer Products (SCP). Here's some history from Tim Paterson, the original inventor of this product at SCP (his blog is here):
Known variously as Seattle Computer 86-DOS, IBM Personal Computer DOS, and Zenith Z-DOS, MS-DOS was developed by Seattle Computer Products for its 8086-based computer system. The MS-DOS history is intertwined with the general development of software for 8086-based computers.
In May 1979, Seattle Computer made the first prototype of its 8086 microprocessor card for the S-100 bus. There were brief discussions with Digital Research about using one of Seattle Computer's prototypes to aid in developing CP/M-86, which was to be ready "soon." Although Seattle Computer was considering using CP/M-86 when it became available (expected no later than the end of 1979), there were only two working prototypes of the 8086 processor card, and it was felt that both were needed in house. Therefore, there wasn't one free for Digital Research.
Microsoft had already started a strong 8086 software-development program. The firm was ready to try the 8086 version of Stand-Alone Disk BASIC, which is a version of its BASIC interpreter with a built-in operating system. During the last two weeks of May 1979, this BASIC was made completely functional using the hardware that Seattle Computer provided for Microsoft. Seattle Computer Products displayed the complete package (8086 running disk BASIC) in New York the first week of June at the 1979 National Computer Conference. (This was the first-ever public display of an 8086 BASIC and of an 8086 processor card for the S-100 bus.)
Seattle Computer shipped its first 8086 cards in November 1979, with Stand-Alone Disk BASIC as the only software to run on it. The months rolled by, and CP/M-86 was nowhere in sight. Finally, in April 1980, Seattle decided to create its own DOS. This decision resulted just as much from concern about CP/M's shortcomings as from the urgent need for a general-purpose operating system.
The first versions of the operating system, called QDOS 0.10, were shipped in August 1980. QDOS stood for Quick and Dirty Operating System because it was thrown together in such a hurry (two man-months), but it worked surprisingly well. It had all the basic utilities for assembly-language development except an editor. One week later, Seattle Computer had created an operating system with an editor, an absurdity known as EDLIN (editor of lines). A primitive line-oriented system, it was supposed to last less than six months. (Unfortunately, it has lasted much longer than that as part MS-DOS.)
In the last few days of 1980, a new version of the DOS was released, now known as 86-DOS version 0.3. Seattle Computer passed this new version on to Microsoft, which had bought non-exclusive rights to market 86-DOS and had one customer for it at the time. Also about this time, Digital Research released the first copies of CP/M-86. In April 1981, Seattle Computer Products released 86-DOS version 1.00, which was very similar to the versions of MS-DOS that are widely distributed today.
In July 1981, Microsoft bought all rights to the DOS from Seattle Computer, and the name MS-DOS was adopted. Shortly afterward, IBM announced the Personal Computer, using as its operating system what was essentially Seattle Computer's 86-DOS 1.14. Microsoft has been continuously improving the DOS, providing version 1.24 to IBM (as IBM's version 1.1) with MS-DOS version 1.25 as the general release to all MS-DOS customers in March 1982. Now version 2.0, released in February 1983, has just been announced with IBM's new XT computer
Microsoft has of course substantially improved their OS since then, but the seeds of their success lay in part on their QDOS acquisition.
How about Internet Explorer? As Wikipedia notes:
Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web....
[...]
Fifteen years after Mosaic's introduction, the most popular contemporary browsers, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, retain many of the characteristics of the original Mosaic graphical user interface (GUI) and interactive experience.
Netscape Navigator was later developed by James H. Clark and many of the original Mosaic authors; however, it intentionally shared no code with Mosaic. Netscape Navigator's code descendant is Mozilla. [9]
[...]
Spyglass licensed the technology and trademarks from NCSA for producing their own web browser but never used any of the NCSA Mosaic source code. [14] Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer. [15] After a later auditing dispute, Microsoft paid Spyglass $8 million. [16][15] The 1995 user guide The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML, specifically states in a section called Coming Attractions, that Explorer "will be based on the Mosaic program" (p. 331). Versions of Internet Explorer before version 7 stated "Based on NCSA Mosaic" in the About box. Internet Explorer 7 was audited by Microsoft [citation needed] to ensure that it contained no Mosaic code, and thus no longer credits Spyglass or Mosaic.
Let's add one more example - Microsoft Powerpoint. Here is some history from inventor Robert Gaskins:
I joined Forethought when it was a year-old startup that had stalled out and was looking to do a re-start around some new business plan, the focus of which soon turned out to be my PowerPoint idea. I had responsibility for our product strategy, all development, product marketing, publications, and manufacturing. Within a month I had written the original PowerPoint description, the first of a succession of product marketing documents refining the PowerPoint product definition. A couple of months later I was able to recruit Dennis Austin (from Gavilan and before that Burroughs) to head the software design and development for PowerPoint. About eighteen months later we attracted Tom Rudkin (from VisiOn and before that Intel) to head the work on a future Windows version of what was being designed and implemented first for Macintosh. We raised about $3 million in new money for the re-start from top-tier venture capital investors led by New Enterprise Associates (Dick Kramlich and Tom McConnell) and Lamoreaux Partners (Phil Lamoreaux), plus Abingworth plc (U.K.) and the very first venture investment ever made by Apple Computer’s strategic investment group (Dan Eilers). An outside board member was Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and chairman of 3Com.
While we developed Powerpoint, our company operations were simultaneously built up by contract publishing and selling of software belonging to other developers, so that we were ready and able to sell and ship over $1 million worth of PowerPoint on the day of its initial release—unprecedented for a Macintosh application. Three months later, PowerPoint history was sharply changed by an offer from Bill Gates to buy PowerPoint and to turn Forethought into Microsoft’s Graphics Business Unit, to be located in Silicon Valley. The offer was orchestrated by Jeff Raikes, who had managed to convince Bill that presentations would become a major application category and that just adding a feature to format Word outlines on overheads (Bill’s first thought, according to Jeff) would not be competitive. We accepted the offer and became Microsoft’s first significant acquisition. The price was $14 million in cash, which returned $12 million to our investors in under three years. I and all the rest of the PowerPoint people, plus many of our other Forethought employees, became Microsoft employees, just a year or so after the Microsoft IPO.
Microsoft has made numerous other acquisitions that have enabled its success, while also developing a slew of innovative ideas in-house. Founder Bill Gates found a way to meld home-grown innovation with ideas from the outside to make Microsoft an enormously successful company. In doing so, Microsoft left a large number of potential competitors in the dust, many no doubt having great ideas that they could never transform to successful businesses.
C. Apple
For everything that's rightly been said about the genius of Steve Jobs, it's not as well known that he wasn't necessarily the brains behind some of Apple's most innovative ideas. For example:
The thousands of applications available on iTunes have become a defining feature for Apple and have earned developers billions of dollars.
Jobs, however, initially opposed the idea of offering third-party apps.
Art Levinson, a member of Apple's board, recalled phoning Jobs "half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps." Isaacson writes that Jobs "at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers."
More:
Jobs’ death prompted a flurry of hagiographic tributes, and in some ways, Isaacson’s book serves as a necessary corrective. Jobs was a genius, and what he accomplished at Apple will be remembered for decades to come. But the book neatly pierces the myth that he was the font of all the company’s great ideas. In fact, it’s best when it recounts his many mistakes and near-mistakes: His time at NeXT, the company he founded after being pushed out from Apple, was a comedy of autocratic excess. (He spent an inordinate amount of time choosing the color of the paint for machines in his factories—machines that later sat idle.) He was also on the wrong side of some of the most pivotal decisions Apple has made over the last decade. He didn’t want to make a Windows version of the iPod and iTunes; when all of his lieutenants fought him on it, he eventually conceded they were right, though grudgingly: “Screw it. I’m sick of listening to you assholes. Go do whatever the hell you want.” He was also against adding apps to the iPhone, and it took him a long time to see that Pixar’s greatest asset was its filmmakers. (He’d initially been interested in making a mass-market version of its software.)
Apple is one of the most innovative companies on the planet and obviously Steve Jobs had a lot to do with it. This doesn't mean that some of the best ideas that define Apple came from him.
3) Defining Success and the Role of Experience
The definition of entrepreneurial success can be subjective.
- To some people, taking their company public or selling it to another company would be considered success, regardless of whether their ideas succeed in the longer term
- To others, success is having their ideas being popularized regardless of whether they get any financial returns in the process
- Another common definition of success is sustained performance that lasts for an extended period of time - since it's much easier to generate new ideas and much harder to build a sustainable company with those ideas
Jim Collins has explored the long-term success angle in his thought-provoking book "From Good to Great". The determinants of long-term success are often discipline is strategy, execution and organization, as outlined in this presentation. For example, there are numerous examples of companies that are the first to invent something new or to come up with a new idea - only to see a competitor become the market leader in that space. Even in the case of mid-to-large sized companies, there are plenty of cases where companies stumble badly, go bankrupt or become weak and get acquired. Let us pick Sun Microsystems as an example since part of Vinod Khosla's accomplished career is his co-founding Sun Microsystems and being its CEO before he became a VC. Sun was a superstar in the roaring 90s, but after the collapse of the dot-com bubble Sun basically went nowhere but down. In the article "The downfall of Sun Microsystems", Jon Brodkin observed that "Dot-com bust, failure to embrace x86 processors ended Sun’s life as an independent company", culminating in Oracle's acquisition of Sun recently. This does not mean Sun wasn't a highly innovative company - it was. However, should a company's ability to sustain its innovation and growth be a key parameter for success? Some would argue the answer is yes. If the answer is yes, then it is discipline and experience that provides the basis for that sustainability - it's easier to successfully run a company for a few years than it is to successfully run and grow a mid-to-large sized company for decades. Smaller companies, especially startups are more usually the seeds of new innovation and net job creators - yet, growth requires a level of experience in understanding the various traits that are required for growth and scale.
The bottom line: sustained growth generally requires discipline and experience and these almost always come with years on the job (i.e., age).
P.S. Another way to see why this is true is to think about the many companies that hire experienced professionals to drive their next great innovation to market leadership. What youth brings more often than not is a fresh and unfiltered set of ideas, but it usually takes experience/age to translate those ideas into successful sustainable businesses. As for discipline, most companies that have continued to grow for decades since their incipient days have a well-defined sense of discipline around how they manage their business, as Jim Collins has shown. Google is an entrepreneurial and innovative company but has frustrated some employees with a committee-based decision making process, a method that is often associated with large, more bureaucratic organizations. Although Steve Jobs was usually the "lone" decision maker at Apple, as this article notes, Apple has needed its own decision-making structure to filter out what works from what doesn't and thereby become disciplined in its focus and execution.
4) Exploiting Luck and Opportunity
In many ways, the reason I think Khosla's quip about ideas and age is off the mark is because ideas are literally a dime a dozen. I rarely meet someone (regardless of age) who doesn't have new ideas about something or the other - this is part of human nature. What doesn't naturally come to many people is the ability to translate ideas into lasting change. Often times, it takes a combination of luck or opportunity and the ability to exploit the opportunity - this can make the difference between mere ideas and lasting change. Successful entrepreneurship is not just about ideas and risk taking - it is about having the judgment and experience to be disciplined in pursuit of ideas and risk.
Jim Collins and Morten Hansen established a framework to research this subject in their book "Great by Choice". Here are some of their findings:
With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen studied companies that rose to greatness—beating their industry indexes by a minimum of ten times over fifteen years—in environments characterized by big forces and rapid shifts that leaders could not predict or control. The research team then contrasted these “10X companies” to a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to achieve greatness in similarly extreme environments.
The new findings
The study results were full of provocative surprises. Such as:
- The best leaders were not more risk taking, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons; they were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.
- Innovation by itself turns out not to be the trump card in a chaotic and uncertain world; more important is the ability to scale innovation, to blend creativity with discipline.
- Following the belief that leading in a “fast world” always requires “fast decisions” and “fast action” is a good way to get killed.
- The great companies changed less in reaction to a radically changing world than the comparison companies.
The authors challenge conventional wisdom with thought-provoking, sticky, and supremely practical concepts. They include: 10Xers; the 20 Mile March; Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs; Leading above the Death Line; Zoom Out, Then Zoom In; and the SMaC Recipe.
Finally, in the last chapter, Collins and Hansen present their most provocative and original analysis: defining, quantifying, and studying the role of luck. The great companies and the leaders who built them were not luckier than the comparisons, but they did get a higher Return on Luck.
In a separate op-ed in the NYT titled "What's Luck Got To Do With It?" Collins and Hansen wrote:
But how on Earth could we go about quantifying something as elusive as “luck”? The breakthrough came in seeing luck as an event, not as some indefinable aura. We defined a “luck event” as one that meets three tests. First, some significant aspect of the event occurs largely or entirely independent of the actions of the enterprise’s main actors. Second, the event has a potentially significant consequence — good or bad. And, third, it has some element of unpredictability.
We systematically found 230 significant luck events across the history of our study’s subjects. We considered good luck, bad luck, the timing of luck and the size of “luck spikes.” Adding up the evidence, we found that the 10X cases weren’t generally “luckier” than the comparison cases. (We compared the 10X companies with a control group of companies that failed to become great in the same extreme environments.)
The 10X cases and the control group both had luck, good and bad, in comparable amounts, so the evidence leads us to conclude that luck doesn’t cause 10X success. The crucial question is not, “Are you lucky?” but “Do you get a high return on luck?”
Return on luck: We call it ROL.
SO why did Bill Gates become a 10Xer, building a great software company in the personal computer revolution? Through one lens, you might see Mr. Gates as incredibly lucky. He just happened to have been born into an upper-middle-class American family that had the resources to send him to a private school. His family happened to enroll him at Lakeside School in Seattle, which had a Teletype connection to a computer upon which he could learn to program — something that was unusual for schools in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
He also just happened to have been born at the right time, coming of age as the advancement of microelectronics made the PC inevitable. Had he been born 10 years later, or even just five years later, he would have missed the moment.
[...]Lakeside may have been one of the first schools to have a computer that students could use during those years, but it wasn’t the only such school.
Mr. Gates may have been a math and computer whiz kid at a top college that had computers in 1975, but he wasn’t the only math and computer whiz kid at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, M.I.T., Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, U.C.L.A., the University of Chicago, Georgia Tech, Cornell, Dartmouth, Southern Cal, Columbia, Northwestern, Penn, Michigan or any number of other top colleges with comparable or even better computer resources.
Mr. Gates wasn’t the only person who knew how to program in Basic; the language was developed a decade earlier by Dartmouth professors, and it was widely known by 1975, used in academics and industry. And what about all the master’s and Ph.D. students in electrical engineering and computer science who had even more computer expertise than Mr. Gates on the day the Popular Electronics article appeared? Any could have decided to abandon their studies and start a personal computer software company. And computer experts already working in industry and academia could have done the same.
But how many of them changed their life plans — and cut their sleep to near zero, essentially inhaling food so as not to let eating interfere with work — to throw themselves into writing Basic for the Altair? How many defied their parents, dropped out of college and moved to Albuquerque to work with the Altair? How many had Basic for the Altair written, debugged and ready to ship before anyone else?
Thousands of people could have done the same thing that Mr. Gates did, at the same time. But they didn’t.
The difference between Mr. Gates and similarly advantaged people is not luck. Mr. Gates went further, taking a confluence of lucky circumstances and creating a huge return on his luck. And this is the important difference.
Luck, good and bad, happens to everyone, whether we like it or not. But when we look at the 10Xers, we see people like Mr. Gates who recognize luck and seize it, leaders who grab luck events and make much more of them.
This ability to achieve a high ROL at pivotal moments has a huge multiplicative effect for 10Xers. They zoom out to recognize when a luck event has happened and to consider whether they should let it disrupt their plans. Imagine if Mr. Gates had said to Paul Allen after seeing the Popular Electronics article: “Well, Paul, I’m kind of focused on my studies here at Harvard right now. Let’s wait a few years, and then I’ll be ready to start.”
When we examined less successful companies, we saw a generally poor overall return on luck. Some of the comparison cases had extraordinary sequences of good luck yet showed a spectacular ability to fritter that luck away. When the time came to execute on their good fortune, they stumbled. They didn’t fail for lack of good luck. They failed for lack of superb execution.
[...]There’s an interesting asymmetry between good and bad luck. A single stroke of good luck, no matter how big, cannot by itself make a great company. But a single stroke of extremely bad luck, or an extended sequence of bad-luck events that creates a catastrophic outcome, can terminate the quest.
The 10Xers exercise productive paranoia, combined with empirical creativity and fanatic discipline, to create huge margins of safety. If you stay in the game long enough, good luck tends to return, but if you get knocked out, you’ll never have the chance to be lucky again. Luck favors the persistent, but you can persist only if you survive.
5) Conclusion
In conclusion, I would argue that translating ideas into change is not about being young. Young people might certainly have more ideas and tend to challenge established paradigms more often - and are an essential factor in helping develop new innovations. However, creating lasting change requires discipline in risk-taking and the ability to convert innovation into practical success. That type of discipline usually comes with experience - which usually comes with age.
I believe that anyone can start a business at any legal age. As long as this person has the courage to start and continue a business, he can't go wrong.
Posted by: Starting a New Business | 12/05/2011 at 02:57 AM