| Most successful businesses in the U.S. are not technology companies at all, they just solve problems in creative ways. Look at someone like Wayne Huizenga who started AutoNation, Blockbuster, and Waste Management. That is like if Computer/Math prodigy Reed Hastings started a couple billion dollar companies in the Auto and Waste industry alongside Netflix. The point being that great entrepreneurs can repeatedly find problems to solve and create value from. For example, the author of this article was a successful entrepreneur in his own right. "Previously, the Chief Executive Officer of The Tie Bar - the #1 e-commerce destination for stylish men's accessories. Prior to The Tie Bar, Alter was a co-founder and President/CEO of SurePayroll, a SaaS technology company that is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Paychex®. Alter co-founded SurePayroll in 2000 after six years with McKinsey and Company, where he was a co-founder and leader of its Service Operations Practice." The mention of Steve Blank's methodology is interesting. The best work I've seen done on this phenomena of customer-value-driven entrepreneurship is from https://www.effectuation.org/....basically that entrepreneurs start with what they have and the problems they know and go from there. The counterargument is the Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerburg argument for having a concrete vision and stopping at nothing to achieve a goal. But let's not forget that Apple started selling the Apple I which was primarily for hobbyists, and the Apple II didn't blow up until spreadsheets came out. Zuck was about to dedicate as many resources to Wirehog as he was to Facebook in the early days. Not to mention YouTube started as a dating site and many more classic examples of entrepreneurs having to figure it out as they go along. I wonder what Keith Rabois would have to say to this. He has an interesting perspective in that he thinks founders will their companies into existence with clear visions that are often unwavering, and doesn't believe in the "lean" approach to building companies. Interestingly enough, Khosla where Keith worked earlier is the namesake of Vinod Khosla who does like the Effectual model of entrepreneurship (which is basically "lean" customer development based entrepreneurship). Another interesting thing to note is that most academic research into the age-old management question of what makes a good entrepreneur has far more to do with an individual's unique approach and perspective in the world, than it has to do with technology. Very few researchers are looking into "technology driven entrepreneurship" as much as they are personality, disposition, persuasion techniques, idea generation techniques, macroeconomic factors. This might change, but if anything when researchers look at entrepreneurial skill, technology skills are not the main focus. Again, this may be changing. Personally, I think the only type of entrepreneurship that makes sense is very bottoms up. Look at the U-Haul story. The founder of that company simply did things none of his competitors would do because they thought it too risky. |
About a decade later that same CEO was writing a check to them for $100M+.
They didn't even know how to design the algorithm for calculating payroll. They put the site up and had some elderly ladies who loved doing payroll calculate everything by hand and then send it back to a user within 24 hours. This went on for two months until they had figured out the algorithm.