“…none of Hackworth’s ideas had ever developed into companies. He lacked an ingredient somewhere, and as he now realized, that ingredient was subversiveness.” – Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

I have been thinking about this for a long time: what separates those who start companies and those who don’t. Maybe this explanation is too simple but it does seem to separate me from my mom, for instance, who I could never imagine having the guts to go out on her own.

To subvert, according to Reference.com: to overthrow (something established or existing). It tends to have government connotations and we have been trained here in the US that subversive activities are bad (i.e., cold war, CIA, etc.).

But this desire to overthrow the status quo, to see how the status quo has failed us, and to attempt to figure out how to do things differently, is a constant theme across almost every entrepreneur I have ever met.

Plus… I kind of like the bad boy image.

Sean Ellis, writing in a post about a new product he has been working on:

With each new startup, I immediately started working to uncover the “must have” experience before I formed preconceptions about how and why a product would be useful.  This involved a rigorous process for identifying the most passionate users and then getting their unstructured feedback about how they were getting value.  With each new cohort of users that I engaged, I began to get more structured feedback to converge on a signal of the “must have” experience.   Once I had a clear signal, I could work with the team to start aligning the business around the “must have” experience.

I also found that it was important to monitor this “must have” experience over time.  Each new product update can change it.  Shifts in the competitive landscape can also affect it. For an experience to be a “must have” it should be both valuable and unique.  The emergence of a new competitor can instantly turn your “must have” experience into a “nice-to-have” experience.

Must-have versus nice-to-have product concepts have been around for a long time. Pills versus vitamins was another way we referred to it a decade ago.

The story for powerOne has been primarily the same and can be summed up in two words: easy and fast. Those two words have been the consistent customer must-haves for the last 15 years and we have always tried to keep those in mind while working on the product.

But the competition has exploded, too, over those years. When we released our first financial calculator, FCPlus Pro for PalmPilot, back in 1998, there was only one other financial calculator and only a couple of scientific ones for that platform. Now there are dozens of financial calculators and thousands of calculators in the iOS App Store.

The must have features have remained the same but there are a lot more products now, making it harder and harder to differentiate. We have tried — library of add-on calculations, storing your history, a simple language for creating custom templates with advanced capabilities — and will continue trying. The must-have features remain the same, though.

This has been a fun and exciting decade and a half. I hope I get to keep doing this for a long time and hope our customers continue to enjoy our efforts.

As Chris Dixon pointed out the folks behind Angry Birds, a company named Rovio, was around for eight years and had developed 52 games before finally making it big. They almost went bankrupt a few years ago. I heard somewhere that their expected 2012 revenues will be around $400 million.

As Chris said:

You tend to hear about startups when they are successful but not when they are struggling. This creates a systematically distorted perception that companies succeed overnight. Almost always, when you learn the backstory, you find that behind every “overnight success” is a story of entrepreneurs toiling away for years, with very few people except themselves and perhaps a few friends, users, and investors supporting them.

In other words, we fail until we don’t.

It strikes me that this is the case in almost all walks of life. I’m watching my eldest daughter learn to read. She has been learning for almost two years now, starting somewhere in her third year. She failed at it until now.

Failure isn’t the end, and that is what I like about calling it failure. Failure is a good reason to try again.

Just like with my daughter. She didn’t get discouraged. She just kept trying.

If one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.

– Arlo Guthrie, “Alice’s Restaurant”

My daughters turned 6 and 4 recently. I have been thinking very seriously about their future. My goal is to help them understand that anything is possible, that they have control over their own destinies, and that the best way to achieve their goals is to maximize their talents.

I also recognize that my influence over them is waning. My older daughter, in kindergarten, is building friendships that will increasingly have influence over her. It is not that my wife and I won’t influence both of them, it is that there will be competing interests that may or may not steer them in the right direction.

But this isn’t just about my daughters. When I look at the United States I see a country that has too many dependent on others. Someone else provides the jobs, some one else makes sure we don’t go broke during retirement, someone else ensures we get an education. And I see that, given the debt confronting our country and given the changes in demographics, that much of what my grandparents generation and my parents generation have come to rely on will not persist, at least not in its present form.

I don’t see this as doom and gloom. I see this as a chance to emphasize these factors I list above: achieving goals, controlling our own destiny, maximizing talents. So when I hear about teenagers who are forming an art gallery in New York City or another teenager who is writing and releasing mobile apps, I want to celebrate that.

While I try to teach my kids what it means to be entrepreneurial, I recognize that it is their peers as much as me that will influence their direction. And if one kid stands up and does it, well, maybe he’s nuts. But if 50 do it… by gosh, I think we have a movement.

Prompts

MG Siegler is right:

Not everything done in computing is intended to be nefarious. At some point, you simply have to trust that someone — be it Apple, Google, or an app developer — isn’t out to screw you over.

I decided a long time ago to assume that I am being treated fairly and honestly. It feels a lot healthier then assuming everyone is out to screw me.