The startup ideology
Some startups are not just technology companies but also have vision to make an impact to the society. The key success of these startups are not just being profitable but also to grow bigger and attains long term goals. Students need to look at Hewlett Packard, Intel, Apple, Microsoft, and Google as examples of startup successes that grew into large enterprises and impact the society.
If you look at these companies, you will find that they all begin with a passion about technology. Steve Jobs’ original idea was only to prove that he can build a small computer that has several functions of a mainframe computer. When more people were interested in their product, Steve Jobs set the vision of putting a computer in every household in the U.S and expanded the company from his parents’ garage to a larger location. Sergey Brin and Larry Page did not think about creating startup, they just wanted to build a better search engine as part of their research in the university. Only when many friends wanted to use it, then they moved to another location outside the university and started Google.
Many students often believe entrepreneur is a person who wants to make a lot of money. In fact, successful entrepreneurs were mostly people who have passion for technology. They concentrated on technical aspects; try to solve problems than thinking about money. In fact most did not even think about money at all. Steve Jobs offered to give away the Apple computer to Atari if they agreed to build it. He said: “We spent several months to build it and only wanted it to be used by other people. When both Atari and HP refused to build it, we decided to build it ourselves.” Bill Gates only wanted to create a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair computer. But Altair manager refused: “We are a hardware company and have nothing to do with software.” After that Bill heard that IBM was looking for a software company to develop an operating system to its small computer. He approached IBM with a proposal to write software for them but IBM refused to do business with the unknown company. Bill insisted that he could do it and after four reject attempts, IBM gave him a chance. He delivered the PC-DOS that become the operating system for The IBM PC and eventually controlled the PC software market.
If we read stories of HP, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, we will find that all of them were pursuing technical objectives to solve problems, none of them were focus on making money in the beginning. They were all guided by a core technical ideology. Steve Jobs admitted that he never thought about making money in the early days of Apple: “We just wanted it built, we do not care who will build it. We would be glad to give it away and even work for anyone who builds our product. Money never comes to our mind until we sold few million units.” Sergey Brin of Google also said: “Our idea is to build a better search engine, we never think about making money. We are too busy with our design and how to make it better than others.”
A successful startup also preserves its technical ideology when it grows bigger and become an enterprise. When you visit Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. you will find that a majority of people who work there are technical people. Of course, they do have sales and marketing people but they all share the same technical passion that enables them to impact the market without compromising their technical ideas. The successes of these companies are based on their highly skilled workforce who is passionate about their technical ideology. Another key aspect of these companies is that they are focusing on doing something better each time. Steve Jobs always remind his people: “The next product has to be better the previous one in every aspect.”
If you want to start a company but hesitate because you are not sure about making money, I suggest that you forget about the “money issue” but think about how to solve problems for customers first. If you can solve problems to a lot of people than you are already on the right track of making money. Of course, by starting company you will experience a lot of issues but as long as you are willing to learn from these mistakes, you will do well. Today people look at Apple as a successful company but few people know that Apple had many failures throughout its history. Apple 1 was NOT a successful product but Apple 2 was very successful. Apple 3 and Lisa were big failures but the Mac was a success. Both Newton and Next computer were disastrous but iPod, iPhone and iPads were great successes. The strengths of Steve Jobs is “Never, never, never give up but always be prepared to abandon, to revise, or to evolve an idea but never give up on the company.”
The fundamental elements of a startup are its technical ideology and its vision that guides and inspires workers to move toward the common direction. Of course profitability is a necessary condition for existence but it should not be the ultimate destination. Profit is the gas to make the engine running but vision is the direction where the car should go and the ideology is the engine itself that keep the car running. Without the engine and the driver, gas is useless and it will vaporize in the air.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
