Does a big ego hinder or help you? [Part 1]
Exploring the paradox of ego and its underlying value in driving one’s success.
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Most individuals at some point in their life will ask themselves ‘what is success’ and how it is they want to pursue it. For some it means making millions of dollars, starting a family or buying a house.
And for some it means starting a business of their own, making a mark on the world around them and perhaps becoming a household name.
Let me ask you this, which friends or colleagues of yours want to become successful startup founders and what are their key traits?
To begin answering that question, how does one measure their success as a successful startup founder? There’s the metric we all know of - unicorn status (When a startup reaches a billion-dollar valuation). But to me, a successful startup is one that addresses an under-served problem with a good product or service and has a great founder, who can hire a great team.
With so many people wanting to become founders themselves, I think it’s important to delve deeper and ask what makes a great founder?
I believe some would argue that ‘you’ve either got it or you don't, some would say it involves waking up at 5am every day and getting your work in order, and others would require you to wear a black turtleneck and some blue jeans.
To take matters into my own hands, I spoke to some friends about what they consider to be characteristics of a great founder. These were the common themes in their responses:
resilience - the ability to continually try when things don’t work out, someone who can achieve their mission without burning out
confidence - the ability to advocate for an idea when others don’t believe in them
courage - being willing to take action and make changes to drive one’s business forward
Ability to identify and successfully commercialise their disruptive product, at scale
I believe a strong theme that ties across the responses I received are confidence. Not only is having confidence important, I believe this extends itself to having a sense of ego.
A sense of self-esteem or self-confidence that one possesses, which is often confused with hubris - excessive pride or self-confidence.
Along a founder’s journey, this ego presents itself as an important driving force at multiple stages:
Having an idea and conviction in it - what makes your idea one people should pay attention to?
Building an MVP - do you have the confidence to build an MVP? (especially when the data shows the first iteration tends to be very rough). Remember watching the Social Network (movie) where Mark Zuckerberg creates the early Facebook, how different is that to the Facebook of today or even 10 years ago?
Going full-time - are you confident enough to take on the risk of going full-time into your startup, especially without financial support? (with 60% of Australian startups failing within the first 3 years)
Raising investor $$ - do you have the complete confidence in yourself and your product to convince others to invest?
If it’s so important for the likelihood of success to be linked with this self-esteem and confidence — when is just having confidence enough? Can hubris prove to be useful?
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As I shared above, you often think a great startup must have a good product/service.
But was that the case with Adam Neumann and his startup WeWork? An individual who managed to achieve a valuation of $47 billion in 2019 as a tech company, when in reality, it was a finely tuned real estate business that flipped buildings and made them into co-working spaces.
Neither was this the case with Elizabeth Holmes and her startup Theranos, which was considered to be a breakthrough health-tech company and achieved a maximum valuation of $10 billion in 2013. Only to be uncovered as a fraud three years later with no promising product.
Or even Trevor Milton and his startup Nikola, an electric truck company that achieved a maximum valuation of $34 billion with no fully functioning electric vehicle in sight.
What do these three examples all have in common? At face value, they all involve misleading products and over-valued stocks, which were driven by hubristic founders.
Adam Neumann, 196cm tall was said to have such self-confidence and charisma that left people in awe. He exuded such hubris that prevented people from confidently calling out WeWork as being a facade tech company, but instead one that would ‘elevate the world’s consciousness’.
Elizabeth Holmes, who dressed in black turtlenecks and spoke in a deep voice was able to take advantage of people’s emotions with the promises of ‘saving lives’.
Trevor Milton, who faked EV demo videos was able to convince investors that Nikola was going to ‘revolutionise transportation’ and declared himself an individual that would ‘out-Elon Elon’.
So with all this in mind, where do we draw the line?
What really does make someone a great founder?
It seems to me that having self-confidence can get someone very far, but does hubris get you further? I do not have a definitive answer, yet.
Like most things in life, I do not believe the answer is black and white, but perhaps grey. No matter what you tie your success to, self-confidence and ego will play a big role in helping you get there.
So what does success or being a great founder really mean to you?
In Part 2, you’ll learn about:
How VC’s and current startup founders in Australia view this connection of confidence and ego or am I wrong in my hypothesis?
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