“Can-Do vs. Can’t-Do Culture” was the title of a great blog post recently by Ben Horowitz, co-founder and partner of Silicon Valley venure capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Off the top, he got my attention with a George Bernard Shaw quote I had chuckled over many years ago, and forgotten:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Horowitz then gives great examples of how reasonable can’t-do people totally trashed three innovations: the computer, the telephone and the Internet, the brainchildren of obviously unreasonable men who had no understanding of what impossible meant in persisting with their innovations. As we all know, with these unreasonable innovations, the can-do’ers prevailed spectacularly over the can’t-do’ers.
Here are two thoughts for angels and venture capital investors wishing to profit from can-do’ers trying to do the unreasonable with technology innovations.
•How did you hear about the idea or startup? If it won a beauty contest or best-of-something competition, chances are it was promoted by one or more very reasonable people along the way to winning, and it is not unreasonable enough to be very disruptive or of great value.
•Which idea or startup has impressed you that either didn’t win any best startup awards or didn’t even bother to enter the competitions? It might just be unreasonable enough to achieve significant success, but was judged unworthy by can’t-do’ers with reasons why it wouldn’t work and eliminated.
HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes recently wrote “Why Hype Killed So Many Startups in 2013” (Wall Street Journal). He noted that “last year was filled with overhyped, sensationally promoted new companies that flopped, spectacularly. At times, it seemed the Valley’s biggest names were lining up to attach themselves to visions that were half-baked at best.”
Holmes contends that many of the folks doing the hyping and spinning of these startups – as brilliant as they are – have never gone through the motions of starting and building companies themselves and therefore couldn’t tell that these startups were not ready for primetime.
Maybe he’s right about poor execution being the reason for failure of these startups. However, if you follow Shaw’s premise, maybe the hypers just hyped the wrong startups. Maybe the truly unreasonable startups didn’t appeal to their lemming-like reasonable thinking. Try to find one “best business plan or best startup” winner that ever became a billion-dollar company.
Holmes believes that one reason HootSuite has become very successful is that the company never had a launch – or a huge public profile – until it had solved enough problems and made enough progress. By that time, HootSuite was ready to tell its story to the world. The product worked. It had its champions.
I agree, but also offer another view.
With Holmes and HootSuite, Shaw may have called it right. I see can-do culture at work there, and the can-do culture would probably have prevailed even with a hype machine at work around the company. However, a brilliant, unreasonable person would just not have wanted the spotlight before he was good and ready. Too many distractions, too many naysayers, and too much unwanted advice to do the reasonable thing.
In my venture capital experience at Discovery Capital, we have had some great portfolio success stories over the past 20 years. We backed companies like Sierra Wireless, A.L.I. Technologies, TIR Systems, Aspreva Pharmaceuticals and Avigilon Corp. Three of them achieved remarkably rapid growth, early liquidity for investors, and market caps of more than a $1 billion each (Sierra Wireless, Aspreva and Avigilon).
Not one of these companies was a hyped startup or the winner of any best business plan or best startup contest or scrubbed up by an accelerator. They were all applauded after they succeeded, not while they were starting up. All of them were steered by leaders who were not satisfied with adapting themselves to the status quo around them. In fact, you could say that they were all unreasonable.
At the root of all of them is, of course, innovation. To quote Horowitz, “the trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time. That’s why they are innovative – until now, nobody ever figured out that they were good ideas.”
