We Only Have to be Right Once

The beauty of the startup game is that you only have to be right once.

The frustrating part is you never know when that one time might be! While we all love to hear Founders regale us with origin stories of their massive successes, what we miss most often is the part where they had many misses along the way.

We write those misses off as incidental — they aren't. Every one of those misses started with that very same Founder thinking that was going to be the time they got it right.

How Many Shots Do We Have?

What we tend to misunderstand, most often early in our careers, is that there's rarely one single moment where it's all “make or break.” It's kinda like when we were in High School and we thought what happened at that moment was going to make or break our entire lives.

What we were missing at the time was perspective. We didn't yet realize that our lives were going to have many, many moments to completely embarrass us! We thought we had to get it right that one single time.

Founders live many lives before they become the success story they thought they'd be. A professional career spans 50+ years, of which we need 3-5 of those to work out really well. So yeah, we've got a few shots on goal here.

It's Not Sequential — At All

What messes us up is we're so trained to think that success is a sequential process. We've spent our formative years in a very graded form of success. You pass first grade, then go to second grade. Success is always forward. You don't "fail" twelfth grade and go back to Kindergarten.

But that's how startups work. It's a bunch of random paths that keep restarting us over and over until we find a path that works. It doesn't matter that we put in crazy hours in our 20s — if it didn't map back to success we get no credit for it.

We have to think of this game more like betting — we place a bunch of bets on a bunch of places and we hope that one comes in. It's not all luck, but it's also not guaranteed. That's the game we're playing.

Only One Shot Matters

Mark Cuban famously said, "It doesn't matter how many times you fail, you only have to be right once." For Mark, it was his $5 billion sale of Broadcast.com to Yahoo at the peak of the dot com mania. Never heard of Broadcast.com? Me neither. It doesn't matter. Mark built something that Yahoo wanted for 5 seconds and forever became a billionaire from it.

How many times has Mark done it since? Zero. That's his point. He also has gone on to say, "There are a lot of businesses I've had that you've never heard of. I started a powdered milk company. Just the worst of the worst."

We're all taking as many shots as we need to in order to get the one shot that matters. The rub is that none of us knows when it's our shot that matters, so we have to keep taking them until something hits.

But remember — we only need one.

In Case You Missed It

The Case for Growing Slowly Instead of going full force too fast early on, take the time to understand whether the bets you’re paying back or not and when it’s time to change direction.

How Much Should I Be Working? (podcast) Wil and Ryan take a deep dive into the benefits of thinking quality and not quantity when it comes to your weekly punch card.

Don't Rush into Your Second Act After a successful exit, most Founders are overly eager to start their next big idea and land another win. But is that the best approach to take?