It’s like action adventure movies such as Die Hard 4. You know how it’s going to end. Think of the stories we all know so well – YouTube, Facebook and MySpace – and how they all began. An ordinary man, stranded in the middle of the desert without money, power, water or food, triumphs with brilliant market insight and scrappiness out of some garage. Like Michael Dell in his dorm room, Jobs and Wozniak, or Hewlett and Packard before them – heralded as rebels who overcame insurmountable odds to triumph over evil empires.
Right! As John Stossel from ABC news is famous for saying, “Give me a break!”
Pino Audia and Chris Rider, two researchers from the Haas School of Business at UCLA Berkley, have debunked the myth of groundbreaking innovation from the “garage,” an image that evokes visions of the lone individual who relies primarily on his extraordinary talents to ultimate victory. But the amazing reality is that many of these founders gained their experiences from failing – from making bad decisions and learning from those mistakes – in corporate America.
A separate study of venture capital-backed companies found that 91% were somehow related to the founder’s previous job experience. I would submit that entrepreneurial triumph has less to do with lonely and maverick creations and are actually more relationship-centric in their identification of fundamental market pains and the value creation to address them.
Sorry to disappoint and demystify the perception that entrepreneurs are rebels without a cause rather than recently departed corporate intrapreneurs. In the Atlanta technology market, during the boom of the late 1990s and early 2000, “B2B” was often referred to as “Back-to-Bell South” when some spark of genius in an undercapitalized start-up venture didn’t work and many of the founders went back to their regular jobs.
Did you know that both of the YouTube founders – Steve Chen and Chad Hurley – cut their teeth at PayPal? In fact, Hurley is the son-in-law of James Clark, my former CEO at Silicon Graphics (SGI) and the founder of Netscape. Top tier Silicon Valley VC firms were calling them, offering money, council and connections within months of their launch.
As for Jobs and Wozniak, although there was a garage, a lesser-known fact is that Jobs was the #40 employee at Atari and, before that, at HP. “What I learned there was a blueprint we used for Apple,” he told a journalist in 2003. Wozniak was an engineer at HP and he gave them the first shot at his microcomputer idea, which they rejected. Talk about a bad call.
This reality shouldn’t discourage. In fact, it should serve as a fundamental motivator to leverage the craving for excitement of these goliath successes. Your project can emerge from a methodical discussion of market opportunities. I know that may not be as exciting as the garage, but it will be even more exciting if you build the garage out of sticks you gathered in the desert with your bare hands – like Tom Hanks crafting together a raft to escape his deserted island in Castaway.
So often, we are mesmerized by “rags to riches” stories of perseverance and persistence because they satisfy our hunger for excitement. After all, Christopher Columbus simply wanted to prove that he could reach India by sailing West, but no one believed his absurd assertion that the earth was actually round. His own sailors were horrified that their ships would fall of the earth – so much so, that his own crew was pushed to the brink of mutiny, right?
I hate to tell you, this. But that version, according to James Loewen, a historical sociologist, is a myth. In Columbus’ day, most people knew that the world was in fact round. Columbus’ three ships sailed in harmony with no recorded disputes. And Columbus actually set sail to find gold. Although he ended-up discovering the New World, a very big deal indeed, it wasn’t in chase of an ideal for humanity.
Stories have an evolutionary character about them. They often emphasize individuals rather than the teams and organizational infrastructure that make them successful. We celebrate flashes of insight over fundamental improvements. We exaggerate insurmountable hurdles, not peer-level support and shoulders to lean on.
In the years to come, stories of Facebook and YouTube – and the many others we have yet to hear about – will become even more grandiose than they are today. But in the end, companies are not often born in garages – and entrepreneurs are seldom islands. Companies are born within companies. And successful entrepreneurs are those who are extremely savvy and develop a knack for identifying, building, and nurturing strategic relationships to elevate their ideas into products and products into companies. They leverage those relationships to identify critical stakeholders: customers, suppliers, investors, employees, and influential market makers.
© 2008 The Nour Group, Inc.
David Nour is one of the foremost thought leaders on the quantifiable value of business relationships. A native of Iran, David came to the U.S. with a suitcase, $100 cash, limited family ties and no fluency in English! Fast forward 25 years and he has built an impressive career of entrepreneurial success, both within large corporations and early stage ventures. David is the author of Relationship Economics (Wiley, 2008) and the Entrepreneur’s Guide to Raising Capital
(Praeger, 2009), a senior management advisor, and a featured speaker for corporate, association and academic forums, where he shares his knowledge and experience as a leading change agent and visionary for Relationship Economics® - the art and science of relationships. To learn more, please visit: Relationship Economics or call 404-419-2115.