Never Stop Fighting 'Til The Fight Is Done
Hanging on my office wall is one of my favorite prints that I bought a few years ago in Chicago. It is a quote from the movie The Untouchables that reads:
Never Stop Fighting ‘Til The Fight Is Done
That quote has come up in at least three conversations this past week as I talked with people about what makes an entrepreneur succeed. Through five classes at The Brandery, we have seen nearly 50 startups come through our doors with our fair share of successes and failures. And while it is tough to point out one thing that separates the companies that make it from the ones that don’t, there is a common thread. The ones who make it are the ones who “never stop fighting”.
The life of a startup is one hell of a roller coaster. Even the companies that ultimately succeed go through their fair share of moments where their backs are against the wall and the future looks bleak. It is in those those moments that it is easy to quit. To take the fall back option that they all have. After all, the entrepreneurs that walk through our door at The Brandery come from remarkable backgrounds. We have folks that were in Med School, were working as a Product Manager at Google, or were running very successful digital agencies. It would be really easy for any of them to throw in the towel and go back to that world they came from.
But the best entrepreneurs are not wired that way. Once they have gone down the path of starting a company, they do not want to go back to the world they came from. For them, failure is not an option. Or said differently, failure would be going back to what they were doing before.
I was reminded of this when I recently sat down with one of our Brandery alumni. This was a company that had moved here from the East Coast and stayed in Cincinnati when they raised their seed funding. Over the last two years, they have been cranking on their MVP but it never really got to product/market fit. Fast forward to today and some folks would have hung up the towel. But not these guys. For them, the fight isn’t done. Instead, they bootstrapped a little more capital and are using it on a new concept. And this new concept might actually be bigger than their original idea. They could have given up many times along the way but quitting just isn’t in their DNA. Sure they still might fail…but they won’t be a failure. These folks gave it their all and I know they put everything into it. They did not just quit because things were tough.
Even after 5 years working with startups at the Accelerator stage, I am still trying to figure out how you determine if someone is wired this way. It is a trait that is rarely going to show up in the “resume” of a first-time founder. But it just might be the single most valuable trait an entrepreneur can have in succeeding in their early days.
CEO/CTO at Plexteq | Building mission-critical, fault tolerant software running under high load
5 年Great article, Dave. The best experience is when you repeatedly overcome challenges and get surprised by the new ones. This is how you gain immunity and succeed. But you know, we "fight" even after the fight is done.?
3x Founder | CMO | Angel Investor | Forbes Top 30 Under 30
10 年Have you ever read "WHO" by Geoff Smart? It's a very good hiring methodology we've implemented that has eliminated a lot of the ambiguity in terms of identifying behavioural traits and patterns when we hire people onto our team. Curious if that methodology applied to The Brandery's selection process would help you figure out how to identify this inherent "wiring" of a strong founder.
Making bets on things I love, things that I believe should exist in the world, and people I believe in.
10 年This is biased, but I like the data point of founders who have a history of doing something that involves winning and losing on a semi-frequent basis. Former athletes, competitive debaters, "Eat what you kill" professionals (sales, agency owners, etc) all understand swings, and as long as they have a game next week, they can still win. They all possess a certain "Comfort in discomfort" since it likely took years, lost deals, and failures to hone their craft. I'd also look to blind passion with technical aptitude or momentum (either market or financial traction). Someone who is obsessed with an idea (you see that through irrational decisions to pursue it i.e. an MBA dropping out to start a business or Google PM leaving his cushy gig) that will stop at nothing until it's built... or the right idea, at the right time, with the right support. I'd also try and find folks with as few external financial pressures as possible. If you're not married, without a mortgage, living modestly, you can afford to fail for a year w/o the pressure of a paycheck. Ultimately - the gut check question I'd ask is "What are you going to do when your business fails?" If the answer is, "Start another one", and you believe them, I think you have the DNA you're looking for.