Think Small
Companies are easy to start, right? People do it all the time. Seeing it through to it becoming a thriving business and/or having a successful exit, well, that’s quite a different story. Stated another way, we had a professor in a fiction writing class in college who started the semester with: “I met a fellow at a party and asked, ‘So, what do you do?’ To which he replied, ‘I write the beginnings of novels.’”
Which, for the record, doesn’t make you a novelist. You’ve got to see it through to that last page. And publish!
Igor Jablokov, who is a founder rather than investor, spoke at one of our investor breakfasts a while back, and it’s amazing what you can learn from someone who has been there, done that – and who has had a successful exit. Igor had a company, and as he was building, he would go to various conferences and expos to network, and to see what he might learn. At one conference, he spoke to a group who had had a very successful exit and he asked how it had happened.