These days more startups I meet, more disappointed I am. It is not their ideas or their somewhat blurry focus that disappoints me. Instead it is their complete lack of understanding of what is success. The difference between success and failure is no more than shadow play between a set of continuously changing conditions. As long as you know what success means.
Is getting a million people to download your app success even though no one uses the app for days at length? Is convincing an investor to put money in your company because of those million downloads a success? Or is success in getting thousands – if not millions – of people to use your app or service or product everyday? Knowing what success is to you is perhaps the first step towards realization of success itself. If you don’t know success, then you are always going to be chasing chimera.
You can see that with today’s politicians. Instead of defining success in terms of helping improve the lives of their constituents and the nation they pretend to serve, politicians define success as getting re-election, which in turn prompts them to make decisions that are inherently short term. Company leaders make decisions based on meeting the quarterly targets and appeasing Wall Street. To them, that is success, instead of building products that are good and offering services that serve the customer best. Success, you see is your internal barometer and not some artificial set of metrics that are changing all the time.
As far as I am concerned, knowing what success means is more important than anything else. For me, success is finding a handful of people who share my world view and read what I have to say. If one person emails me with their thoughts or engages in a healthy conversation, that’s success. For a t-Shirt designer, finding people who can relate to his designs enough to put on that t-shirt is success. Everything else – fame and fortune for example- are merely an outcome of success.
I always thought that the point of a startup was to make something and be profitable, but in technology circles, it seems that it’s more about how much money you can raise, where your “exit” lies, or if you can get mentioned on GigaOM. Just kidding about the last part. 🙂
Lol @ jeffputz 🙂
Exactly. I’ve met founders who consider a write up in TechCrunch or a million dollar funding round to be their definition of success, even though their companies make zilch for profit and have no idea how to even go about making money. Startups are businesses. Businesses serve a single purpose: to make money. If you can do social good along the way, all the better, but the fundamental yardstick of success should be “how much money is it making”, and to extend that question, “is it doing any social good?”
Do you think it is the age that we are in, where startups are not trying to build the next light bulb. Instead they are trying to first create a market where non exists now, such that they can then sell the stuff that they are making/creating/selling. In this age it is perhaps progressively harder to define success as simply as you laid out in your piece, rather one has to continuously redefine what success means for … say Pinterest and the 20 other photo sharing startups that followed it.
I think the major difference – do I define my own parameters of success or go by the standards of success as set by majority of the world? The prior one is a tougher approach and people usually go with the latter one as that is more acceptable and quantifiable.
waiting for a better day
Good one. But all days are better if you think of making them better based on your own terms.
Different people are carrying diverse definition about success, and that has been generalized by Om. And Yes, after reading this article- It gave me another view of success ! It helped me !
As a manager, my job is to help my team be successful. To do that, they need to accept my definition of success, but each team member has their own definition. As long as we’re all moving in the same direction, regardless of their motivation, to me that is a successful day.
Gorgeous piece of work, Om. I’ve had some personal struggles defining to myself what success is. On the one hand, I want people to use the product I’m handing them and I want them to continue to use it. On the other hand, I want to be a bajillionaire.
At the end of the day, it is not about the amount of money attained or the amount of cars parked in the garage..it is about the success EARNED by providing something to the people that they can’t live without and not ruining the service in favor of material gain.
I personally think that this blog post would be an asset to every startup company out there. I wouldn’t even stop there though. There are definitely some major companies out there that could learn a thing or two about success.
I have recently been in big discussions about business ethics. I think that would play a major role into what it would mean to be “successful”.
If a startup or any company for that matter is going to be truly successful, I think that they need to be successful on all aspects of the business, ethics included. There were/are plenty of examples of “successful” businesses out there that did/do not have the ethics side to them including Enron, Nike, and even Apple.
Once again, great post and very intelligent outlooks on the idea of “success”.
Thanks @nickstetz9. Very kind of you to say.
This is sort of what I had said in an interview with the VP of a company about 6 years back (define success) and he seemed quiet impressed…its another thing that I wasn’t hired then…
I really like what you say here “If one person emails me with their thoughts or engages in a healthy conversation, that’s success”…
I think that these small little personal, healthy, enriching, uplifting conversation give way more satisfaction ..and of course if you are really inspiring people around you by what you say or do – nothing like it..!!
Wonderful blog and post…