Startup Founder Inspirational Short Stories
Nothing beats a good origin story! If you’re a Startup Founder or contemplating taking the leap of faith and becoming one, I’ve gathered together some inspirational short stories that will make you smile, laugh and think.
Inspirational Short Stories From Founders You Know
Daphne Koller – Co-Founder at Coursera
The Spark
The Rise
In the space of a few months, she and Ng persuaded the universities of Princeton, Penn and Michigan to sign on. They wanted to leverage not only the best that Stanford had to offer, but the offerings from other colleges as well. Though Coursera had no monetisation plan, investors jumped on board.
This was because they felt Coursera had the right ingredients to be successful. “Higher education costs too much, and it’s not available to enough people”, says John Doerr, a lead investor at the time. Doerr recommended Koller and Ng consult with Rick Levin, an economist who had served as the president of Yale for 20 years. In 2014, Levin joined as CEO, after which Coursera began charging $30 to $70 to students who wanted course completion certificates. This was when they started making revenue.
Battering Through
Ben Silbermann – Co-Founder and CEO at Pinterest
The Background
Coming from a family of doctors, Ben Silbermann was on track to become one himself at Yale, until he realised it wasn’t his calling. Silbermann would then go on to work in financial consulting at CEB and later in customer support at Google over the next 5 years, before finally quitting his job at Google to startup with his college-mate Paul Sciarra. Together, Silbermann and Sciarra built Tote – an app for online shopping.
The Spark
After it flopped, they decided to pivot to Pinterest, a platform for ‘collecting things’ – something that Ben Silbermann had held a passion for since childhood. The app was to provide a platform to showcase photo collections. Soon after, Silbermann met Evan Sharp, a talented architect and thus their team grew to 3. “It was like he was the only who understands what [I] was saying”, Silbermann said of the time when he met his third co-founder. Sharp created the iconic ‘Grid’ layout that has become synonymous with the app ever since.
The Long Road
Growth began slowly, and Ben Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users. After 9 months, they still had less than 10,000 users – but slow and steady growth, and belief in their product kept them going. They focused on the small group of fanatical users they had accumulated, and built around them – also gaining popularity for their ‘fan meetups’. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘We’ve got it.'” Silbermann says, after the first meetup. Eventually, Pinterest got some traction and that’s when the tech blogs started paying attention. Their iPhone app, launched in 2011, did surprisingly well, and got more downloads than anticipated. They’ve gone from strength to strength ever since.
Inspirational Short Stories From Founders Who Failed And Then Succeeded
Reid Hoffmann, Co-Founder of LinkedIn
SocialNet was the first company founded by Reid Hoffman in 1997. It focused “on online dating and matching up people with similar interests, like golfers looking for partners in their neighbourhood”. Like many other social networking platforms in the 90s, it didn’t seem like a promising venture.
The major reasons SocialNet failed were: Nobody really knew what it was, the public wasn’t ready for what it had to offer, and the platform lacked a clear purpose. It felt like an idea scattered all around.
While building SocialNet, he joined the board of directors during the founding of PayPal and in 2000, Reid left SocialNet to become the COO for PayPal. His stay was a definitive one as he became an expert at competing effectively in an extremely competitive environment because for Paypal to survive, it had to compete fiercely for every advantage and opportunity it got.
When Paypal got acquired by eBay in 2002, he had learnt a whole lot and he was ready to do SocialNet again, only this time better.
In 2002, he founded Linkedin – an online social network for business professionals to network – with his former colleagues. LinkedIn officially launched in May 2003 which was a huge success and by 2014, the platform already had over 332 million members and today it has over 260million monthly users. It has become the most advantageous networking tool for job seekers and business professionals. Today, Reid Hoffman is described as one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific and successful angel investors with an incredible network of entrepreneurs and executives in tech.
Here are the major lessons from his failure and growth:
- Lesson 1 - Don’t just fail fast, learn fast: The goal is to learn fast and tackle the potential points of failure. From failing fast, you give yourself more time to correct your mistakes and change your approach.
- Lesson 2 - Focus your product in one area: It was from releasing SocialNet into the world that he discovered what users wanted and what the demand was for. Most importantly, he learned that to be successful you need to focus and double down on one major area that matters to people (your users).
- Lesson 3 - Don’t try to build a perfect product on your first trial: Reid spent so much time developing SocialNet because he wanted it to be very precise that he ended up missing out on building what users really wanted. Wanting a product to be perfect on the first trial will only leave you frustrated. Rather than spend so much time developing the perfect product, build your product and continue tweaking it based on the feedback from your users.
- Lesson 4 - Don’t hire the wrong people: Reid was focused on hiring professionals with about 10 years of experience doing the same thing, but the problem was that these professionals worked with large companies in a stable market and they have probably never experienced a major failure. Hiring people who can get the job done but is also versatile is someone you need. Reid learned that by hiring generalists who were active learners, growth and pivoting will not be a pain because they are also evolving.
- Lesson 5 - Have a client acquisition plan before you launch: You could build a great or a bad product and you wouldn’t even know because you don’t have enough users to tell the difference. It’s best to have a strategy to put your product in front of its users immediately.
- Lesson 6 - Know when to pivot: Learn when to ditch the original plan for the plan that your audience wants. Paypal started as an idea to build encryption on mobile phones and to sustain it, the synced payments for email. The email payment turned out to be a success for PayPal and of course, the original plan was dropped.
- Lesson 7 - Understand that failure is a very real possibility: Starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down. The possibility of you failing despite putting in your best effort is real and it’s important to know that if you have learned from your failures, it might just be the beginning instead of the end.
Inspirational Short Stories From Founders Like You And Me
13 Years Of Hustle
Jay Winder built the only company in Japan backed by Angel list.
Life is good for Jay Winder in 2015. His second company – a fintech firm called MakeLeaps – is integrated with Evernote, serves prominent Japanese clients like Rakuten and Voyage Group, and is on track to becoming profitable. He is a familiar face in Tokyo’s startup scene, where his natural friendliness and fluent Japanese wins him plenty of fans. He is even entering the year with some nice momentum, only a few months removed from a US$750,000 funding round that included AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and 500 Startups founder Dave McClure. The signs are all pointing up, but journey did not happen overnight. For Winder, it has been a story 13 years in the making.
$7,000.00 In Credit Card Debt
Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar started Atlassian with $7,000.00 withdrawn from a credit card in 2002, while still at University.
“We built the first version of our product while working in the garage before we even had our first office,” admits Farquhar.
The pair were 22 years old at the time and their mission was to earn the equivalent of their friends who were working for major consulting firms. Fast forward to 2022 and the Australian tech giant has a market cap of more than US$100 billion.
Key Factors That Drove Success
With a focus on building a portfolio of reputable and affordable products that could sell themselves, their budget for marketing and sales is less than 20 per cent.
Today, Atlassian’s customer base includes Microsoft, Oracle, Toyota, Amazon and Shell, enabling these businesses to manage tasks, collaborate and track bugs.
The Takeaways
You don’t need an MBA from a top business school or a lot of experience or money to start a company that can eventually become a market leader, and be worth billions of dollars.
Success never happens “overnight”.
Startups are a Marathon, not a sprint.
You need grit and determination, i.e. the kind of mental toughness and resilience that few people ever have.
About The Author:
James Spurway is an Angel Investor, Mentor, Advisor, Speaker, former Commercial Pilot, and Author specialising in raising debt and equity capital. He strives to model diversity, equity, and inclusion in the founders he agrees to invest and work with. He has paused his angel investing activity to focus on raising his first US$ 50M venture capital fund, which will invest in startups that can accelerate the achievement of net zero emissions. James spent the past 33 years living in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Germany, Switzerland, Monaco, the USA, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, and Australia, his country of birth. In that time, he started 10 businesses, exited from seven, shut down two, and kept one. He has invested in a total of 50 startups since 2001 and had six successful exits.