Self-Aggrandizement: RE 0. How to Build a Business

If you’re nodding your head in agreement but getting ready to skip ahead to the good stuff, you’re an idiot. Because anybody can pay lip service to those steps.

Actually doing them, doing them no matter what, is unbelievably hard. Yet that’s what it takes to build wildly successful companies.

I cannot emphasize this enough. Growing a company is long and hard and tiring and difficult and overwhelming. You’ll want to stop at many, many points along the way. Most people do. The way you win is, don’t. In the words of Winston Churchill, “if you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Churchill meant it. Brought in as Oxford’s graduation speaker, he got up on the podium, looked around, said, “never, never, never give in,” and sat back down.

Never, never, never give in. Keep going no matter what. Come hell or high water, push the damn company forward one little step at a time. That’s all it takes to succeed. Really.

0.1. More Keeping Going

Allow me to continue flogging the dead horse of this point, because it’s absolutely the most important thing in the entire book: Radical Entrepreneurship is, more than anything else, a commitment to starting a company, and then doing whatever it takes to build that company into a success.

This shouldn’t sound like a new idea. If you’ve read a handful of biographies of unusually successful people, you’ve doubtless noticed that the one thing, the only thing, they all had in common was the ability to keep going no matter what.

Thomas Edison’s journals show that he created more than 10,000 failed lightbulb attempts before making one that worked. Colonel Sanders pitched his chicken recipe to over 200 restaurants before one was willing to go into business with him. The list goes on and on and on.

Here as well, we’re really good at paying lip service. “Oh, absolutely,” we say. “I’d have done the exact same thing.” But, in reality, when things get tough, we tend to wildly overestimate the amount of ‘never say die’ we’re actually putting forth.

There’s a great story about a guy who attends a Tony Robbins seminar, and complains to Robbins that, despite trying everything, he can’t lose weight.

“You’ve tried everything?” asks Robbins.

“Everything,” the guy replies.

“What were the last hundred things you tried?” asks Robbins.

“Well,” the guy admits, “I haven’t actually tried a hundred things.”

“Then what were the last twenty-five things you did?” asks Robbins.

“I haven’t tried twenty-five things, really, either,” the guy responds.

“So how many things have you actually tried?” asks Robbins.

“Well,” says the guy, sheepishly, “maybe five or six.”

At various times, we’re all that guy. I know I am, frequently.

I’ll think to myself, “jeez, I’ve gone to everybody, and I can’t raise this round of financing.” And then I’ll realize that, by ‘everybody’, I actually mean ‘ten or fifteen venture capital firms’. Which leaves more than 3300 venture capitalists I've yet to approach. That’s a lot of rejections to go before I can legitimately say I’ve tried ‘everything’.

Fortunately, I can’t tell you what it’s like to get shot down by all 3300, because on even the toughest fundraising rounds, the ones that left me despairing and ready to quit at countless points along the way, we raised funding successfully long before getting that many rejections.

In my experience, that’s almost always the case – keeping going usually requires only that you somehow take the few steps beyond where you think you can’t possibly take any more.

Still, if it ever came to it while fundraising, I’m absolutely certain I could force myself to work through the entire list of 3300, painful as it might be. If you’re not similarly sure you could make yourself do the same thing if necessary, save yourself some time, close this page, and start looking for a safe job in middle management.

To be a Radical Entrepreneur, you need to commit, one hundred percent, to what you’re about to do: start your company, and keep it going, no matter what.

RE 0. How to Build a Business Filed Sunday, March 13 2005.

RE 0. How to Build a Business
Filed Sunday, March 13 2005.