It almost feels like techcrunch is stooping down to businessinsider style sensationalism.
Seriously though, it's funny to see Swisher post every lame email from Yahoo corporate and write about it like it's the second coming of investigative journalism.
crap + well executed => big return
the next big thing + poorly execute => wait for someone else to get rich off of it
It's the resilience that is baked into my personality and how I work that I never give up and I always make things happen. It's quite a delusion I'm sure because I have this I can always make it work out mentality while everyone else around me says I'm crazy, but in one way or another I always manage to work it out. I haven't hit a 'home run' yet but I've always worked for myself and always managed to pay the bills. Just in the two years from being out of high school I've come pretty far by my own standards. I'm co-founding a startup now and we just launched two weeks ago at a local university, we gained 1,200 users in just under two weeks at this small college. It's a small victory in a long line of uphill battles along the way to success but it's the only thing I can imagine myself doing. And I'm going to keep doing it.
I'd wager there are plenty of folks that got fed up with their jobs after reading any number of self-help rags-to-riches articles or books and went on to have successful self-employed careers, some of which probably ended up in the millions of dollars.
Maybe it's because I'm corporately employed, thirty, sick of the grind and working to get out, but the "this is who I am; this is what works, and if you're not this, then you can't get it anywhere else" implication rubs me the wrong way.
On a different note, I can tell how little I've replied to this sort of article over the years by how many times I had to spell check entrepreneur (got it that time. boom. little victories, amirite?)
[edit: I also want to say that this isn't an attempt to try and slam the OP. Seriously, congrats on your success so far, and I hope you do just as well and better in the future. I just think there are a lot of paths and destinations in success, and even the cliche market of motivational memoirs and self-help guides can kick someone in the ass occasionally and get them to make the move they need to.]
> The average age of first-time entrepreneurs in all industries is 43; in tech industries, the average age is 39. Only 16 percent of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in the United States had venture investors. 11 percent had revenues of more than a million dollars.
http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/FactSheet/EntreAndEcon...
According to the US census bureau, about half a million new firms are established each year (where a new firm is defined as having at least 1 employee on payroll, so this doesn't count everyone starting a website in their spare time). 16%, 11%, these are of big numbers, bigger than the couple dozen companies you might read about on TechCrunch each year.
This is a common theme in some of Altucher's other stories. I think it would only be lying if you acted like you had already built it. However, selling your ability to build a future product is definitely not lying.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/larry-ellison-hearsay-we-ca...
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Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle says, “I remember him very distinctly telling me one time: Bruce, we can’t be successful unless we lie to customers.” And adds: “All the things that you would read in books of somebody being a leader, he wasn’t. But he was tenacious; he would never give up on anything.”
In my experience with running my business, when a customer asks for something it has to do with your business. Maybe at the time he was just processing transactions, but he was working with credit cards. So expanding his business beyond processing and into databasing makes a lot of sense.
Customers will often tell you what they want to pay for, and if you say no, you're going to fail.
Its the story of how he built a web design business, exited for ~$12 million, drank himself broke and nearly to death, and then built himself back up (he is a VC now). Its about learning to be happy even though you sometimes feel like you're broken. I drew a lot of lessons from it that help me daily.
"You don’t have to come up with the new, new thing. Just do the old, old thing slightly better than everyone else. And when you are nimble and smaller than the behemoths that are stuck with bureaucracy, you can often offer better sales and better service, and higher touch to your customers. Customers will switch to you."
Still, coming up with the new, new thing can be the most creative & fun.
How To Go From $0 To $1,000,000 In Two Years?
Start with $2,000,00
