Entrepreneurs Are Not Supermen

2022-10-09 original Startups

Technical skill, a name known in the field, business acumen, charisma, and the ability to draw people in… isn’t that basically a superman!?

Actually, I hold something closer to the opposite view. It’s hard to generalize about which entrepreneurs succeed, but if we’re talking about “the type of entrepreneur who seems to have a high batting average,” the pattern is overwhelmingly what you might call the “lovable screw-up” (I see this around me too). You can’t really say this to their face, because in most cases they have no idea that’s how they come across.

From the outside, I can see skillful media bias at work in how entrepreneurs get portrayed. That’s only natural, really, since otherwise the story wouldn’t be exciting. If a towering figure of a serial entrepreneur, someone launching one bold venture after another, were actually well-behaved, a good listener, and ran things democratically based on employee input rather than through sheer forceful leadership, there’d be no drama at all. Readers get bored fast unless there’s a steady stream of stories about rival showdowns, internal coups, private gossip, and last-minute comebacks from the brink.

In short, a large portion of it is fabrication or exaggeration.

Now it’s time to talk about what’s actually going on. There are several categories of entrepreneur types. For instance, an old book by Collins & Lazier called “Beyond Entrepreneurship” defines leadership style to include the following:

Authenticity
Decisiveness
Focus
Personal Touch
Hard/Soft People Skills
Communication
Ever Forward

The claim is that a great leader doesn’t rely on just one of these styles but possesses several and knows how to switch between them. This isn’t limited to entrepreneurs. Picture the leaders close to you: the people you’d call “a good leader” probably have several of these traits, and in some cases most of them. Conversely, I’d go so far as to say there’s almost no one who’s seen by those around them as “a good leader” while having few of these traits.

Now, let’s think about “several” and consider someone who has only, say, “Focus,” “Communication,” and “Ever Forward.” Someone intensely committed to setting a goal and pushing toward it, and who’s good at talking about it to the people around them.

That sounds like a pretty serious con artist. (laughs)

But I think this is actually the pattern of “someone who isn’t Great but still succeeds” (based on what I’ve observed). The key point is that once the people around them recognize this weakness, there’s a lot they can do to help. Take decisiveness: the people around the leader can gather useful information and act as sounding boards, effectively compensating for the leader’s lack of decisiveness. Even if a leader isn’t good with relationships, as long as team members are building solid relationships with each other, things rarely fall apart there. If communication is handled well, even a leader who’s somewhat careless in how they assign roles to members shouldn’t create real problems, since the members themselves can support and elevate each other.

But when a leader lacks drive, or doesn’t try to articulate a vision and strategy and get it to permeate the team, the people around them end up in a genuinely difficult position. And though it’s not something anyone enjoys saying, this is often when a team splits apart. Someone else in the team starts exercising a different kind of leadership. At that point, we’re no longer even talking about whether the business will succeed.

Someone who fully receives the support of those around them, feels gratitude for it, and keeps pushing forward no matter how many times they stumble, without giving up and without growing weary of trying. Many people find meaning and fulfillment in supporting a person like that. And that’s one of the ways a startup comes into being.

The above was a shocking realization I came to fairly early on after moving from Japan to Silicon Valley. Back in Japan, I had convinced myself that “having technical skill” and “being smart” were the absolute conditions for a startup’s success.

The content of this post is an excerpt (original text) from the following book. If you’re interested, please consider purchasing it.

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/10/1267/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.