Most Successful Entrepreneurs Aren’t Young and Inspired. They’re Old and Fed Up.

How does one become an entrepreneur, especially if you’re 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 years old?  There’s a secret.  The secret isn’t talked about much.  In Silicon Valley where I live and come from we like to think of all these start-ups as coming from people leaving Stanford, being enlightened, being inspired.  In fact, that’s a myth.

Most of the successful companies over the last 30 or 40 years that define Silicon Valley actually spun out of major corporations.  They were oldies.  They were people 30, 40, 50 that got so fed up with the work routines of the current corporation they were in but they also understood how business actually got done. So they said, “I know the business game but I feel too constrained.  I want to break out of this.”  

So if you’re a venture capitalist you look for those types of folks because they’re seasoned on the one hand, they know responsibility, they know certain aspects of leadership, but on the other hand they know how boring it could be to be over-constrained in work.  So these are often the folks that build the successful start-ups.

60 Second Reads is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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