Great! Glad to see we're back to anthropological alpha-maleness as a signifier of business fitness! That's TOTALLY THE SAME as savvy planning and competent, persevering execution. And it's worked really well for Wall Street, right? ...Liar's Poker, anyone?
Or, to put another way, he's taking "tough" and using that word to mean a whole bunch of other traits: resourcefulness, perseverance, endurance, motivation & ambition -- and smashing them all into the word "toughness". Echoing swombat & enjo in this thread, yes, toughness can help you get things done, but it isn't what lets you get things done. Nice but not sufficient.
...like the time my co-founder and I adopted a dog together, dropped out of law school, and quit a high paying banking job...
This sort of definition of "tough" seems a bit insulting to bouncers, cops and cage fighting champions. Like how the nerd definition of "risk" is an insult to soldiers, parachutists, and Evel Knievel.
I train BJJ and, less often but still regularly, MMA. We call it grit: when the going gets tough, a person's tendency to grit their teeth and keep going. When you get mounted, do you mentally give up and wait for the guy to submit you, or do you look for every opportunity to escape? When you take a knee to the stomach, do you double-over and try to get a break in the sparring session, or do you clinch with the guy and re-double your efforts to pin him against the cage?
I've seen many different people train over the years, and I think grit can be acquired. Hard training encourages it. But, on the other hand, I think some people start out grittier than others. I have some training partners who never really acquired much grit. Those without much grit in training tend not to have much grit off the matt.
This is a long way of saying that while those examples aren't particularly impressive, I still think grit matters in areas that don't require physical exertion.
Toughness is only a partial order. There are plenty of people who would have no problem being in a fistfight, but would be terrified at the thought of e.g. having to perform surgery, or give a speech in front of a large audience.
I've seen plenty of people who are very tough on the axes you mention but were unable to deal with the stress of starting a startup.
When I wasn't outside working in the below-freezing weather, I fed a coal stove through this past winter because we didn't have a modern heater in our workplace. The ash turned my snot and phlegm consistently gray. Things are a little cozier now, but I still don't run the air to save on money - and Beijing is hot in the summer.
Not to mention that most startup founders in the western world come from affluent families, so quitting a great job to do a startup isn't particularly risky for them since they normally won't end up on the street if they fail. Bouncers and fighters on the other hand risk their lives.
This talk about startup founders having to be "tough" just seems like an ego boost to make the whole startup experience feel heroic and epic, which I think is OK because a little self-aggrandizing is probably good for motivation.
Yep. Look I love platitudes as much as the next guy, but that's all this is.
My entire world is consumed with interactions with business owners (lead generation for the service industry). We work with thousands of small businesses, some "tough" and some not so much. To me the defining characteristic of a successful business man is always "obsessively analytical", not simply "decisive".
Every successful business person I've ever encountered can tell me (to the number) the key metrics for their business on demand. They know that our program is generating x% return on their spend. They know that we're +- y% better than a competitor. They know everything about their business.
When you've aggressively instrumented your business and have a lot of data, it's easy to be decisive. I've also encountered a number of business people who are decisive, but are more or less always shooting from their gut. They don't tend to do very well. For them everything is a guess, even if they're really sure that they are right.
Toughness is overrated. Great businesses are built by constantly trying to assess and reduce risk. You don't do that by being tough, you do it by being fascinated with data.
That's probably a little overly tough, but I agree with your sentiment.
It does have some value, but the excessive machismo is not particularly appealing. Yes, you get shit done. Yes, getting shit done is a prerequisite to getting a startup done. No, that doesn't make you some kind of super-human being. There are plenty of others out there, outside the world of startups, who get tremendous amounts of shit done.
With a bit more life experience, you may learn that there's more to effectiveness than being "tough". You can get a whole lot more done with intelligence than with mere bullishness.
"Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done. Now, if you know what you’re worth, then go out and get what you’re worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you are because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain’t you. You’re better than that!" -- Rocky VI (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z5OookwOoY)
Actually never thought about the long term vs. short term benefits.
I think you may be right. The guy that's best to start the business is not necessarily the best person to run it a few years later. I'll let you know in a few years ;)
"More than just the quality, I was amazed by the toughness of the founders. These guys (and gals) were not the young, sheepish, technical founders you’d expect. These guys are operators – savvy, confident, operators."
Stereotype much?
In general this sort of post is vapid bullshit. Success in business comes from:
1) Having a product or service that people want.
2) Having a way to let people know that you have it and persuade them to try it or purchase it.
3) Having a way to deliver that product or service that costs less than the amount you take in as payment.
That's it. Everything else is bullshit, including whether or not the founders are "sheepish" or are "operators."
Business is actually very superstitious. There are so many factors that go into success in business that it makes rational analysis from hard data or from first principles hard, so people fall back on superstition. A lot of this superstition revolves around this almost mystical notion of having "what it takes," which tends to reduce to some notion of alpha maleness combined with luck.
I actually had an investor type tell me once that one of the things he looks for in potential founders is a "prominent jaw line." It was the funniest fucking thing. I am not making this up. Very very hard not to laugh out loud...
It reminds me of the Superbowl winner who wears the same pair of socks that he won the Superbowl in for every final game he plays... without washing them of course. Correlation != causation.
Superstition always causes people to make bad decisions. The big one I see in business is that amazing amounts of money gets thrown at superficial correlates of success and at empty cargo cultist alpha male types. Ever wonder how CueCat got funded? Why, it was going to <buzzword buzzword buzzword> and the founder I'm sure had a square alpha male jaw line and was very assertive.
It's ironic that you describe Rich's post as "vapid bullshit" because the problem I see in your comment is that you give such a uselessly facile answer.
Yes, sure, all you have to do to make a successful company is make something people want and charge for it. In the same way that all you have to do to climb Everest is keep walking uphill till you can't anymore.
The real issue here is that doing these things is in practice very hard, at least the way startups have to do them. Doing them at the level of a service business like, say, a sandwich shop, is easy. Doing them at the sort of scale required in a startup is so much harder that in practice few can bear it.
We have a huge amount of data about this after funding over 200 startups. We think constantly about the problem of how to predict which startups will succeed. And nothing is so clear as that toughness is the deciding factor.
Your list of requirements for success is about as useful as telling someone that you need to go to college to get a degree. Its actually pretty vapid. It overlooks the ability of overcoming adversity to achieve all those things.
Your overlooking all the tremendously difficult and gutsy things you have to make a business sucessful:
1. Quit a well paying job which affords your family food,shelter and clothes.
2. Work 14 hours a day on a service that people may not buy even though they have given you letters of intent that they will.
3. Partner and work with people (devs, designers, customers) who you've known for less than the guy who works at your favourite pizza place.
4. Work on something which at the end of the day might be useless because the whole industry could change. (Launching a new mp3 player on the same day as the ipod)
5. Cold call hundreds of potential customers of which 90% will slam the phone on you.
6. Work with no health insurance (if you dont get funding) to save money for your startup.
I dont think you could even think of attempting a "real" money making startup unless you have brass balls.
Great article (I suspect people that don't think it's great haven't had to wake up every morning, day after day, for years, and tear themselves apart for that extra inch).
One thing I find interesting is that people often call me very tough and direct, while most of the time that's not how it feels. I always hesitate on whether I'm being too wimpy, and I still get amazed that it doesn't come through in conversations. I don't know if it's because I got lucky and have a good pokerface where my emotions don't easily come through, or whether I am actually not wimpy and the state of hesitation goes hand in hand with toughness.
This is a great post. This is why businesses will always kick ass regardless of economic cycles. It's strong resilient operators who spot a unique opportunity that make it happen throughout history. That's why a large part of any investor's job (and also any founders' job while recruiting) is having a special eye for that die-hard resilience and determination.
For those of you who are Buffett fans, regarding this there's a great quote by him on page 293 of "The Snowball" (bio written by Alice Schroeder):
"Intensity is the price of excellence."
This is also probably why Andy Grove penned his book "Only the Paranoid Survive".
This can be good for getting the ball rolling and keep it rolling. There are several problems with a team like this:
1) Leads to lots of arguments and falling out.
2) The team in unbalance, it may lack creative elements. Might produce stuff but nothing world changing.
Start-ups have seen traits that they see as necessary for them to win. For instance, Shopify has identified the Resource Investigator/Plant team.http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2378-profitable-proud-shopify . They only hire creative programmers. What they have seen is that creative programmers might be slower but they make up for it by reducing the amount of code written. The problem with this team is that rarely creativity people follow through with stuff to the end. They like the creating part but once that is gone they don't want any part of it.
Just a side note Shopify team would whip the shit out of wePay team any given day. But they don't have the tough guy act going for them(Data taken from belbin's book).
"The first rule about [WePay] is you don't talk about [WePay]." <sucker punch> Take that.
In Rich's blog, he has the fight part right. You have to fight for what you want and what you believe in. True entrepreneurs know this, because if you don't fight for it, what you get in return is near nothing, or zilch. You get railroaded and sidetracked.
IMHO, the guts, the brain, the heart must be tough but also flexible enough to avoid damage & to adapt. The api needs to be user-friendly and soft(most of the time).
[+] [-] seigenblues|15 years ago|reply
Or, to put another way, he's taking "tough" and using that word to mean a whole bunch of other traits: resourcefulness, perseverance, endurance, motivation & ambition -- and smashing them all into the word "toughness". Echoing swombat & enjo in this thread, yes, toughness can help you get things done, but it isn't what lets you get things done. Nice but not sufficient.
[+] [-] api|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxawaytoolong|15 years ago|reply
This sort of definition of "tough" seems a bit insulting to bouncers, cops and cage fighting champions. Like how the nerd definition of "risk" is an insult to soldiers, parachutists, and Evel Knievel.
[+] [-] scott_s|15 years ago|reply
I've seen many different people train over the years, and I think grit can be acquired. Hard training encourages it. But, on the other hand, I think some people start out grittier than others. I have some training partners who never really acquired much grit. Those without much grit in training tend not to have much grit off the matt.
This is a long way of saying that while those examples aren't particularly impressive, I still think grit matters in areas that don't require physical exertion.
[+] [-] pg|15 years ago|reply
I've seen plenty of people who are very tough on the axes you mention but were unable to deal with the stress of starting a startup.
[+] [-] garply|15 years ago|reply
When I wasn't outside working in the below-freezing weather, I fed a coal stove through this past winter because we didn't have a modern heater in our workplace. The ash turned my snot and phlegm consistently gray. Things are a little cozier now, but I still don't run the air to save on money - and Beijing is hot in the summer.
Adopted a dog?
[+] [-] mburney|15 years ago|reply
This talk about startup founders having to be "tough" just seems like an ego boost to make the whole startup experience feel heroic and epic, which I think is OK because a little self-aggrandizing is probably good for motivation.
[+] [-] petercooper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stefanp|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enjo|15 years ago|reply
My entire world is consumed with interactions with business owners (lead generation for the service industry). We work with thousands of small businesses, some "tough" and some not so much. To me the defining characteristic of a successful business man is always "obsessively analytical", not simply "decisive".
Every successful business person I've ever encountered can tell me (to the number) the key metrics for their business on demand. They know that our program is generating x% return on their spend. They know that we're +- y% better than a competitor. They know everything about their business.
When you've aggressively instrumented your business and have a lot of data, it's easy to be decisive. I've also encountered a number of business people who are decisive, but are more or less always shooting from their gut. They don't tend to do very well. For them everything is a guess, even if they're really sure that they are right.
Toughness is overrated. Great businesses are built by constantly trying to assess and reduce risk. You don't do that by being tough, you do it by being fascinated with data.
[+] [-] swombat|15 years ago|reply
It does have some value, but the excessive machismo is not particularly appealing. Yes, you get shit done. Yes, getting shit done is a prerequisite to getting a startup done. No, that doesn't make you some kind of super-human being. There are plenty of others out there, outside the world of startups, who get tremendous amounts of shit done.
With a bit more life experience, you may learn that there's more to effectiveness than being "tough". You can get a whole lot more done with intelligence than with mere bullishness.
[+] [-] ph0rque|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acangiano|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aberman|15 years ago|reply
I think you may be right. The guy that's best to start the business is not necessarily the best person to run it a few years later. I'll let you know in a few years ;)
[+] [-] noodle|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|15 years ago|reply
Stereotype much?
In general this sort of post is vapid bullshit. Success in business comes from:
1) Having a product or service that people want.
2) Having a way to let people know that you have it and persuade them to try it or purchase it.
3) Having a way to deliver that product or service that costs less than the amount you take in as payment.
That's it. Everything else is bullshit, including whether or not the founders are "sheepish" or are "operators."
Business is actually very superstitious. There are so many factors that go into success in business that it makes rational analysis from hard data or from first principles hard, so people fall back on superstition. A lot of this superstition revolves around this almost mystical notion of having "what it takes," which tends to reduce to some notion of alpha maleness combined with luck.
I actually had an investor type tell me once that one of the things he looks for in potential founders is a "prominent jaw line." It was the funniest fucking thing. I am not making this up. Very very hard not to laugh out loud...
It reminds me of the Superbowl winner who wears the same pair of socks that he won the Superbowl in for every final game he plays... without washing them of course. Correlation != causation.
Superstition always causes people to make bad decisions. The big one I see in business is that amazing amounts of money gets thrown at superficial correlates of success and at empty cargo cultist alpha male types. Ever wonder how CueCat got funded? Why, it was going to <buzzword buzzword buzzword> and the founder I'm sure had a square alpha male jaw line and was very assertive.
[+] [-] pg|15 years ago|reply
Yes, sure, all you have to do to make a successful company is make something people want and charge for it. In the same way that all you have to do to climb Everest is keep walking uphill till you can't anymore.
The real issue here is that doing these things is in practice very hard, at least the way startups have to do them. Doing them at the level of a service business like, say, a sandwich shop, is easy. Doing them at the sort of scale required in a startup is so much harder that in practice few can bear it.
We have a huge amount of data about this after funding over 200 startups. We think constantly about the problem of how to predict which startups will succeed. And nothing is so clear as that toughness is the deciding factor.
[+] [-] keeptrying|15 years ago|reply
Your overlooking all the tremendously difficult and gutsy things you have to make a business sucessful: 1. Quit a well paying job which affords your family food,shelter and clothes. 2. Work 14 hours a day on a service that people may not buy even though they have given you letters of intent that they will. 3. Partner and work with people (devs, designers, customers) who you've known for less than the guy who works at your favourite pizza place. 4. Work on something which at the end of the day might be useless because the whole industry could change. (Launching a new mp3 player on the same day as the ipod) 5. Cold call hundreds of potential customers of which 90% will slam the phone on you. 6. Work with no health insurance (if you dont get funding) to save money for your startup.
I dont think you could even think of attempting a "real" money making startup unless you have brass balls.
[+] [-] coffeemug|15 years ago|reply
One thing I find interesting is that people often call me very tough and direct, while most of the time that's not how it feels. I always hesitate on whether I'm being too wimpy, and I still get amazed that it doesn't come through in conversations. I don't know if it's because I got lucky and have a good pokerface where my emotions don't easily come through, or whether I am actually not wimpy and the state of hesitation goes hand in hand with toughness.
[+] [-] modsearch|15 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rFx6OFooCs
[+] [-] sayemm|15 years ago|reply
For those of you who are Buffett fans, regarding this there's a great quote by him on page 293 of "The Snowball" (bio written by Alice Schroeder):
"Intensity is the price of excellence."
This is also probably why Andy Grove penned his book "Only the Paranoid Survive".
[+] [-] chegra|15 years ago|reply
This can be good for getting the ball rolling and keep it rolling. There are several problems with a team like this: 1) Leads to lots of arguments and falling out. 2) The team in unbalance, it may lack creative elements. Might produce stuff but nothing world changing.
Start-ups have seen traits that they see as necessary for them to win. For instance, Shopify has identified the Resource Investigator/Plant team.http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2378-profitable-proud-shopify . They only hire creative programmers. What they have seen is that creative programmers might be slower but they make up for it by reducing the amount of code written. The problem with this team is that rarely creativity people follow through with stuff to the end. They like the creating part but once that is gone they don't want any part of it.
Just a side note Shopify team would whip the shit out of wePay team any given day. But they don't have the tough guy act going for them(Data taken from belbin's book).
The main thing I think start-ups should realize that a lot of studies have gone into what makes a good team. Belbin Team Role Theory is a must: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Management-Teams-They-Succeed-Fail/d....
The best team is a mixture of people, not a unbalance team.
[+] [-] mansilla|15 years ago|reply
In Rich's blog, he has the fight part right. You have to fight for what you want and what you believe in. True entrepreneurs know this, because if you don't fight for it, what you get in return is near nothing, or zilch. You get railroaded and sidetracked.
[+] [-] dilipd|15 years ago|reply