Many words spilled this week about founders’ motivation to start companies, mostly by people who aren’t founders.
I start companies because I want to control my destiny. The corporate world is as insane as feudal Europe sometimes, and some of us don’t want to be someone’s court jester or kiss a brass ring. I don’t know if it’s a noble motivation but I do know that I’d rather achieve that level of independence alongside team members I appreciate and who enjoy that same sensation (co-founders and employees) and that if you’re lucky, like I am with TrueAccord, it aligns with a business that actually makes a social difference and will be huge.
Given the above, it’s clear that exit calculations at Seed or D make little sense because an exit is never the goal. I don’t think of companies as solely a mechanism for transfer of wealth. Naturally, it’s easier for me to write this after I’ve had an exit.
It’s also clear that the title “serial entrepreneur” is as silly as “serially failing to achieve independence”. You don’t get married hoping to get divorced in two years, or at least I hope you don’t. You get married for the happily ever after.
Company founding also isn’t, for me, about being right once and going the angel investor to VC route. My company isn’t a pet project to show that I can qualify for the next level in the distributed corporate world that a part of Silicon Valley has become.
There’s nothing wrong with the above approaches. They’re just not my thing. I respect other people and their choices and frankly, many of them are smarter than starting and scaling a company because they are less painful. I’m the one who’ll be chugging away ten years from now, running a three thousands person company worth a significant amount, fighting unhealthy routines and putting out ever larger fires and whatever else you need to do at that scale (hopefully not playing golf. I dislike golf). That’s just my thing.
I agree with you on many points, but not on the “It’s also clear that the title “serial entrepreneur” is as silly as “serially failing to achieve independence”.” First of all, if I cannot leave my current startup, I feel I’m missing out on part of the independence. Second, unlike in marriage, the relation between me and my startup is not symmetric or reciprocal. The startup provides me, and cofounders and (to a lesser extent) employees with an opportunity to work on something that is ours. But if I leave the startup (in an orderly fashion) to pursue another venture, the startup will keep providing for those I left behind, and it will not be let down by my leaving.
Of course it’s reciprocal. Definitely not like in marriage, I agree, but the whole premise of the post is about building my own thing and sticking with it, not being able to flee at a moment’s notice. That you have in a 9-5 job, much more so in fact.