Successful Entrepreneurs are Dreamers, Innovators and Risk Takers

Of dreams, not nightmares

” you might as well dream big, since it’s a dream. It doesn’t cost you any more to own a Lamborghini in the dream than it costs to own a Bicycle” – Unknown.

There once lived two boys in a small township. Boy A, growing up, had always been told how much money the the local cheese sellers made and how great it would be if someone from the family made that much money. As expected, the young boy set his sights on that goal and whenever he went to bed, he had dreams of being the top cheese seller in the town. Several blocks away form Boy A’s home was Boy B. Boy B never felt comfortable in this town, he always thought people were too cautious and the standard of living could be better. He started visiting other towns, reading books and learning about things other people did. He found that there were several other things he could do to make him be who he truly wanted to be. He started dreaming of making money and having people work for him, doing things people really wanted to see! Truth is, people always work toward their goal and you get what you work for…most of the time. Fast forward 40-something years, Boy A is the top cheese seller in Blackheath, England and Boy B is Founder/Chairman of the Virgin Group with an estimated net worth of £2.6 Billion.

When you dream, you open yourself to a whole new world of possibilities. You find that it is possible to imagine things and attempt to live them out. This ability to not only dream, but dream big is a common trait of the most successful Entrepreneurs of our time. When Mark Zuckerberg sat down with some of the board members of Facebook and told them he saw their numbers doubling in 6 months time to over 300million users and refused to back down on his decision to change the Homepage and not carry banner ads, things got heated. Some employees who were starting to see a decline in the rate of pageviews and signups at the time even started to panic, resign and take other positions. Today, the evidence is there for all to see, Zuckerberg did make the right decision.

There’s so much talk in Silicon Valley about the importance of Lean startups and why Investors are looking to invest only in Entrepreneurs who know how to make the most out of a little change. The gospel has spread like wildfire and Entrepreneurs have started cutting back on their goals and asking for less money in a bid to look like they can be “lean”. If you have built a prototype and you’ve shown without a doubt that there is a market for your product, it IS time to take over that market and scale up accordingly. Don’t target the west coast only and ask for 1/4 of the money you need because you want to appear lean, knowing fully well that scaling up and reaching out to the entire country will yield the best rewards. When you work on your startup, how about put it all on the line, dream of the best your company can do and go for that.

“…at Inter Milan  we are a blood team not a skin team. When we play, we leave it all on the pitch. You don’t see skin on there, you see blood. As long as we win, it doesn’t matter.” – Jose Mourinho (Manager of Inter Milan FC after beating Barcelona in the semi finals of the 2010 UEFA champions league)

Innovation comes in handy

Innovation is something you either have or you don’t. Some people will make good Entrepreneurs and some wouldn’t. Simple. The ability to envision something most people don’t even know they need and then make it really happen is what makes a true Entrepreneur. For the life of me I didn’t know why anyone would care about Twitter when I first heard the idea. Evan Williams (@ev), co-founder of Twitter was addressing a room full of Entrepreneurs, geeks and a handful of investors a few years back right after releasing the product to the public. He said “we had this idea of letting people express themselves and share what they are doing with friends in 140 characters or less.” At this time, Facebook was still rather bare and didn’t have the “status” feature it has now, but still a good number of people found the idea totally unnecessary and didn’t see the point behind it. They believed that bit of social interaction where you can tell you friends what you are doing was already available on Facebook, so why tweet?

The founders of Twitter obviously had several other ideas in mind as to what Twitter can be used for. They saw beyond the typical 140 character blab and anticipated celebrities building a following and keeping these “eager fans” updated. They saw Businesses taking advantage of the opportunity to share and showcase their products. They were innovative. The rest is history.

Take a risk

“…he’s gonna have a hard time explaining to Hayley and Laney, these food stamps and this weak sh*t, coz he never risked sh*t. He hoped and he wished it, but it didn’t fall in his lap, so he ain’t even here” – Eminem

Two months ago in donwtown NYC, I overheard some fresh-faced, college students talking about how “awesome” they thought the site textsfromlastnight was. Apparently, one of them had sent in a text he got from his ex-girlfriend two nights prior and luckily it made its way to the site’s homepage. The conversation slowly drifted into a discussion about their own little project they had been working on for a few months. One of them mentioned how it would be absolutely impossible to take on Foursquare, which happened to be their major competitor. He gave several reasons in his attempt to convince his partner to give up on this project and look in a different direction. He said “I am certainly not willing to put all that 10 grand seed money into something that will just fail dude, let’s find something else to do. If someone chooses to invest in us though, then sure, as long as we are not wasting our own money.”. But for the very beautiful girl I was entertaining on the day, I would have turned around, bounce my head around in disgust and told them to “grow some balls”…well maybe not, but you get my point.

If every one starts thinking this way and running away at the first sign of competition, the world we know now will be much different. There’s no way guys like that will make it 2yrs at the helm of any company, if they are even lucky enough to start one. Willingness to take risks has to be a driving force for Entrepreneurs. You have to be prepared to fail in order to succeed. We don’t need to start talking about posthumous stories of Thomas Edison and his lightbulbs, but it is common place, if someone like Ron Conway doesn’t take the risks he takes in investment, he won’t be the man he is today.

So Tolu, what are you saying? Dream big, think deep and lose the fear. What is failure anyway? if it isn’t merely 2 blocks down the road from victory…or so they say.

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Tagged as: Evan Williams, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Ron Conway, Silicon Valley, twitter, Virgin Group