* It depicts something everyone fantasizes about and offers a quick if ultimately unsatisfying release. Who doesn't imagine themselves building something amazing and being idolized by magazines and the general public?
* It happens in an unrealistic sort of magical fairy land, often in the founder's own hazy, romanticized recollections of their past.
* It only shows beautiful companies/people. You don't need to found a space exploration company to be happy just like you don't need to be with a model.
* It offers no real guidance for how to achieve what it's depicting, leaving viewers confused at best and frustrated at worst. This article touches on the fact that people seem to think all they need is an idea, when that's not what it takes.
* It's most popular with those who are either frustrated with their careers/romantic lives, or are otherwise trying to satisfy a need they feel isn't being met. This one is a little shaky because plenty of people enjoy actual porn in healthy ways, so forgive me for the stretch.
The comparisons go on and on. How healthy your relationship with each is depends on how much exposure to the realities of each field you have had and how mature you are as a person/profession.
We certainly don't hear much about efforts or successes in anyone's effort to "disrupt" the toilet paper industry, yet it's something most people use daily. It's not sexy, but we all care a lot when it sucks.
I don't know where people get this apocryphal wave of "nobody ever talks about boring things". Space X is pretty much the only non-boring "hip" company I can think of!
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-do-entrepreneurs-en...
Their success was still very very hard won. But being part of royalty doesn't often make it in the most inspiring stories.
What smart investor seeks out "average chumps" exactly? That's an excellent way to lose money. Your setup is a rather amusing contradiction.
You think the $200,000 (Walton put in $50,000) - inflation adjusted - that his step-father put in, was unavailable to everyone else and it made all the difference in Walton's success?
I grew up in an extremely poor part of the country, financing like that was available to a lot of business people. It's typically how most new small businesses that required any meaningful capital got started: other people in the community with money would invest, as banks would never risk their capital without collateral.
$250,000 is about what it costs to open a small convenience store.
The Ben Franklin store Walton opened and operated, was a very successful venture. His father-in-law made an extraordinarily smart investment. As it turns out, Walton wasn't an average chump.
If someone builds their career expectations and aspirations around what they gathered from Forbes, Techcrunch, or a TED talk, we call them entrepreneurs.
No small sum I suppose. (around $300k adjusted for inflation). But also not a "small million dollar loan". ($4 million inflation adjusted even IF it were true.)
But Sam's real story is not the rags to riches. It the brilliant and hard work that took him from riches to extraordinary success.
So poor people should never try to be an entrepreneur because the world is rigged against them? Well that surely will help reduce the wealth inequality.
It's kind of mind-blowing to think that in 1969 Walmart was the local store needing to fight off the big chains. But now it's the exact opposite.
It's just starting to kinda-sorta catch up with Target and Costco in pay and benefits.
There's a pay trade-off that the Walmart critics go dramatically out of their way to avoid however. Costco can pay what they do, because their employee to sales ratio is extremely different from Walmart. Walmart employs a lot more people per dollar of sales, and operates a very different style of retail business. To match Costco's employee count to sales ratio, Walmart would have to fire a million people. If you ask the critics if they would like to see Walmart fire a million people so they can raise the wages for the other million, you'll get an immediate evasion in response.
Walmart's net income margin for 2016 was 2.8%, and that's typical for them. They get by on a razors edge. They do $485 billion in sales, and only have a $7 billion cash buffer (Twitter has $4.3 billion), while operating on that comically tiny margin. One bad slip, the entire thing collapses in a giant heap of red ink, and a million people lose their jobs instantly. Walmart's ability to survive long-term at such thin margins, is one of the great business stories of the last century.
The notion that Walmart destroys small towns is a crock. I believe only someone that has never actually lived in a poor small town, could claim that. This is what it's like working for a small town retailer: minimum wage, zero benefits, high likelihood of losing the job because the business goes under (pre-Walmart), zero upside potential at all for the employees. That's what small town retailers overwhelmingly looked like in the US from the 1950s through the 1990s, when Walmart reached saturation.
Oh, and Walmart raises the standard of living by drastically improving product selection and access in small towns. Small town retailers have horrible selection and pricing. Critics will claim Walmart's pricing power is a negative, when in fact it's a massive positive for the actual humans that live in small towns (versus the people on the outside that have never lived in a poor small town, that like to write articles from a million miles away and talk about small town retail poverty culture as though it's glorious and should be preserved).
So let's recap: Walmart raised wages, it improved selection, it lowered prices, it absorbed labor slack, it provided benefits, it provided a consistent and large base of employment.
Growing up I watched Walmart move into every corner of Appalachia. It was a vast improvement everywhere it went and it absorbed immense labor slack among low skilled workers. The notion that there was a paradise beforehand, is blatantly false.
This leaves the small town dependent on Wal-Mart, and when Wal-Mart decides to close a town, the whole town is screwed because they don't have any retail left and no one has the means to rebuild it. The cherry on top is that Wal-Mart's square footage is almost always too big for anyone to take over, so the buildings generally sit there rotting until they're demolished
tl;dr walmart hollows out the retail base of small towns, leaving them super dependent and screwed if they ever leave
I feel like if the author is going to make a broad generalization about founding stories, he should use more than 1 example. I don't count Netflix as one of his examples because he simply says "That didn’t actually happen." So to combat Reed saying this is how I started Netflix... the author just says "no" without any proof. Who am I going to believe? The founder or a blogger?
REGAINE (hair loss treatment) only works for some people, not everyone and if you use it consistently twice a day for the rest of your life.
A job at Google/Facebook/haskell job requires you to study day and night for algorithms/functional programming/implement a lot of random programs to get a hold of all of that.
This couple is in love for 50 years, and they ignore how they had lots of fights and had to have lots of compromises from each of them, with a lot of discipline to show care for each other to maintain this love over the years.
These folks got amazing new houses/entered StanfordU because they worked non stop for the past few years while not spending on other luxury items or they will work tirelessly for the rest of their live to pay the debt.
Life is a grind
Not to mention, that particular Netflix myth has nothing to do with the importance of having a lightbulb moment. The point is to provide a north star for the company about the importance of always keeping the customer/user experience top of mind. By charging late fees that exceeded the value of a video, Blockbuster had lost sight of the customer experience, which contributed to Blockbuster's downfall. Meanwhile, maintaining its intense focus on the customer experience helped Netflix navigate what was an impressive shift from mailing DVDs to streaming video online.
Granted, while Walton's was certainly successful, I think they'd be better served highlighting someone that had to cut bait on something professionally in the past and succeeded after adjusting because Walton's story reads like "bad thing happened -> keep trudging" infinitely.
You HAVE to do this when telling a story, and all stories do this. While it is true that believing the narrative tells the full story is incorrect, it is also incorrect to say these stories are 'myths'. They are just one part of the full story.
No harm no foul if everyone feels better about themselves right?
/s
My first job as an auditor really opened my eyes (did some M&A work that blew my mind at the shit companies would try). Funny thing is the company I worked for (Andersen) got killed by their own shady dealings!
Today of course those are not appealing, and just sound crazy, so it is something like "I was just returning a late movie", "I was coming back from my yoga massage and had this idea...", etc.
The important part is that only after winning and looking back the history is rewritten. The boring things like plain luck, or maybe persistence, or enough resources (say because of inheriting money for example) to try some business idea multiple times, failing and try again until one sticks is just not a cool story.
Even more interesting is that not just the myth is born but anything the company did, all practices, rituals etc end up promoted as the cause of success. Anyone notice this? It's the cargo-culting of methodologies. Successful startup did some crazy development practice, but as soon as they become popular everyone starts copying that thinking "surely that is the main cause of their success". What if the successful startup could be have been even more successful without that practice, or maybe it had no impact at all.
How about copying personality traits. There was once a CTO I knew. He fancies himself to be like Steve Jobs. Except instead of copying persistence, intelligence, attention to details and design, understanding what would work and what won't for users, he just copied the part of being an asshole. The idea was that Jobs was an asshole, and look at Apple, that's how I'll have to act to make my company have the same success. It ended as well as you'd expect. Developers who didn't want to deal with that simply left and projects started tanking.
TLB described this archetype some years ago:
95% may have been boring failures
https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/80f0c3/why_yo...
He sold his company for ~17m in the late 90s (so he did fine). In the early 2000s he asked me for stock advice since he kept blowing 60k on penny stocks. I said put 10% of your money on Apple. I'm not 100% sure what's going on but it seems to be a pretty good bet.
Wish I'd followed my own advice instead of doing my first self funded startup (2003). I made about 4-5x my investment. Didn't realize how paltry that would look compared to my Apple advice :-)
As someone that's on startup #8 (about to fire my partner). They're never easy, they are fun (and stressful at times).
