It’s an interesting read, Caterina.net’s Want to be an entrepreneur? Drop out of college. The obvious conclusion from the title is that if you drop out of college you can succeed and create a world beating business. If Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg et al can do it, why not you? Right?
Factory Production Line
In the article Caterina talks about factory models, and how university and schooling as a whole churns out students like a factory production line, and how from a business perspective, advice and mentoring from successful business leaders is the way to go. Effectively an apprenticeship model. But who do you think the greats followed? As the saying goes: “It is those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world who actually do.”
Sure you can’t necessarily learn everything in college and you can teach yourself an awful lot these days online, but can you really do everything? Surely at some point your overall, and undying success comes down to an effective model and a functioning business that is backed up by hardcore experience and knowledge of business from thanks ranks of the MBA-ers and McKinsey alumni.
Of course, Facebook isn’t just Zuckerberg, Apple isn’t just Jobs and Microsoft isn’t even just Gates. These guys are simply the visionaries that kick started the revolution – with a little blood sweat and tears – but every vision needs wings and it is these other ‘factory produced’ people that add meat to the bone; so at the heart of this ‘drop out’ culture are ideas and guts, but for longevity, proper business sense.
Without those ideas in the first place, and drive to implement them, you wont go anywhere. Napster was a barn storming success until the law put a damper on the party and Roxio snapped up the software and took it nowhere, but look where Sean Fanning is now? His drop out status couldn’t make Snocap a success, nor could his mega bucks, and after nearly 10 years out of the limelight. Who really knows who Napster and Fanning are? The class of 2010 certainly doesn’t … Oh how fickle the internet world can be!
Bad, Awful and Great Decisions
There’s only one way to succeed and that is to truly believe in what you are doing and to go at it unerringly. And when you get knocked back and shot down, or you hit a hurdle and fall down, you simple pick yourself up and keep at it. The history of business is strewn with poor decisions, bad judgments, failure and more, even for the most successful business guys and gals.
It’s about luck as much as anything – and hard work makes good luck, as the old cliché goes – real belief in an idea, whether original or not and making the best execution of it. Bullshit is the universal language of business. If you’ve got the drive, aplomb and the ability to coalesce your ideas, you can make them happen. Any old fool could fall off the back of a truck tomorrow, take a site that is only half of your idea and turn it into a million bucks.
Clearly success owes as much to the chaos theory as the notion of top down management and control and frankly speaking it’s a waste of time to talk about how to generate success, if anything the only science of success is in knowing how to maintain it once you reach the pinnacle and don’t decide to sell out at the top. All I can say is “… avoid doing a Ratner” and make sure you know how to foster that start-up mentality, avoid crushing creativity and know how to learn from the latest and greatest, From Zero to a Million Users.
Web-head & art collector, living in East London and huffing on the fumes of the planet since '78. Here are my thoughts.
Why belief in People Pays Off – A Look at Super Angel Investor Ron Conway May 11, 2010
[...] kind of approach really pays off, especially in the context of my previous posting, Want to be an entrepreneur?, when a commitment to a visionary is not just about a leap of faith but a real belief in that [...]