Navigating Persistence and Knowing When to Quit in Startups
THE 7-STEP STARTUP SUCCESS FORMULA - DR. ANU KHANCHANDANI
Every entrepreneur’s journey is a mix of failures and successes. The probability of failure is higher, however, there is a way to grow and keep growing until you build a successful startup. This book is one such guide to help you with 7 formulas for your success.
TRANSCRIPT
Hi! Welcome to the Startup Mantras Podcast. This is Anu Khanchandani – Engineer, Entrepreneur, Startup Coach for the past 25 years.I’m here to share valuable lessons for Startups in terms of success and failure stories, processes, tools and techniques, which can be applied by Startup Founders in various aspects of their Startup Journey.
Persistence. A virtue which has to be omnipresent in Entrepreneurs at all times in their startup journey.
Today, we learn about this virtue from the story of none other than Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. I feel rather awkward to just say LinkedIn, since this visionary man has a string of Startups behind him.
In fact there are many other lessons that are unearthed as we speak about Reid Hoffman and his life.
Even as an Oxford student in the year 1993, Reid was very clear that he wanted to start a software company. Well, he did, went to investors and was rejected at the first go. After this initial failure, but knowing that he had to have something to keep paying bills, he worked as an employee in Apple and Fujitsu for a brief stint.
The entrepreneurship bug was still eating away into him. After he made some money and felt comfortable with his finances, he resigned from Fujitsu for starting a business. As a solopreneur he launched SocialNet which was a Networking/Dating platform. Many say that SocialNet was too ahead for its time in the year 1997 and so it failed to generate revenue.
Carrying on, Reid went on to get associated with Peter Theil who got him on to the Paypal Board. In the year 2002, they sold Paypal to EBay for 1.5M USD.
Always agile as ever, in 2003, Reid went on to launch LinkedIn and the rest as we all know is history.
Lesson Learnt
Persistence to stay on the entrepreneurship bandwagon was a clear take-away from this anecdote.
Apart from that, there is one very important lesson that came through – Knowing when to quit and move on. Reid knew when to exit SocialNet, when to exit Paypal and move on to find out new avenues. He did not hold on to SocialNet, he was intelligent enough to see that it was not working and wrapped it up logically.
I will make an interesting observation here. I started off by saying that persistence is a virtue that every entrepreneur must have but also made a statement along the way that knowing when to quit is also equally important. Striking the right balance between knowing when to continue and knowing where to let go is the key to success.
Confusing as it may sound, we saw contradictory virtues here but I sincerely hope that you will brood over this as I did and make it work for you.
So, Until Next Time – Ciao and have a great life!
With over two decades of experience in the software technology arena, having worked in multinational and SME companies in India, USA and Singapore in the capacity of programmer to CTO – I felt now was a good time to give back to the world what I have learnt in this journey. Even if it ends up benefitting a few of my readers by giving them insight or solving a technical issue, I think I will have achieved my mission!