Every year brings a bit of hope and excitement for me. There is nothing like working with a team to
try to do something important in this world. Personally, I can’t get enough of
it. I think we are all better off when we find our professional passion in life.
I also like to reflect on what it is like to be an
entrepreneur in today’s world. There is so much opportunity and growth that
many have the chance to be part of numerous startups. Our journey is not just
one company, but a few at least. Along the way, there will be success and
failure. The quest is for the meaningful success that will add value to this
world.
I will never forget a talk by the CEO of Motorola when I was
an idealistic MBA student. He said that his grandfather had started the company
after failing at two previous attempts. He also said that successful
entrepreneurs often think differently about markets. They look at an existing
market backwards and see what everyone missed. In Motorola’s case, everyone was
competing heavily in the radio entertainment set market and beating each others
heads in. One day, while sitting in his car, the Motorola founder had a
backwards moment. Why are there no radios in automobiles? After all, we spend
so much time in our cars. Motorola made
the first car radio and the rest is history.
I believe that this talk was inspiration for GeoTrust where
we looked at an existing security market and reinvented it through
authentication and distribution methods that made a lot of sense looking
backwards. You can look at existing markets today like Palo Alto’s reinvention
of the firewall market and Apple’s reinvention of the smart phone market to see
this concept in action.
There was another lesson in the Motorola CEO’s talk. Failure
is often a requirement for success and persistence pays off. I learned in my
time at US Army Ranger School that your mind often fails before your body. If
you can conquer your own mind and hold out just a little longer, you can
accomplish more than you think.
Part of this resilience requires thick skin. Not only must
you learn from mistakes, but also the people who contributed to a failure
cannot consume you. I must admit that I
have spent time festering over why certain people could do such things.
However, I always do better when I put that aside and focus on the fun of building
something new. People who do the wrong thing generally get the final outcome they deserve
after a number of years. A bad VC may have her/his fund fail and a bad
entrepreneur may never build a company of value or cooperate with a great team… Mostly, it all comes around.
It is best to keep moving forward and focus on your passion to try to build
something that brings great value to this world and correct your own mistakes. Keep your glass always half full.
Anyway, as I sit on a train bound for NYC, I am thinking
back to my MBA years. I feel as passionate and idealistic as I was then, but
with a small dose of reality and experience around the concepts I heard in that
speech. For a quick talk, there was a life time of substance..
(etaerc gnihtemos) I spelled that in reverse for fun.. you have to look backwards to see it.
