Nike, Twitter, and Groupon prove it’s not about a grand vision but about survival

Photo credit: Jeremy Thomas.

In Professor Linda Darragh’s class while at Booth School of Business, I listened to Andrew Mason talk about The Point, his new venture. This was 2009 and he talked about signing people up to collectively fight for or contribute to causes and initiatives that they cared about—sort of like a mass protest platform for the digital age.

Mason had amassed a list of do-gooders and would unleash it on all the necessary causes. It was similar to Change.org and had been started around the same time. Even if it was a copycat of Change.org, there was nothing wrong with that.

A year later, that list of web-dwelling protesters started getting corny and funny emails selling them coupons. After another year, The Point had become Groupon. Mason, the seemingly unsure founder, was confidently waxing lyrical about the impact Groupon could have on small businesses worldwide.

According to Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitter, Twitter came out of the remnants of a podcasting platform called Odeo, which was founded by Noah Glass and funded by Ev Williams and other investors. Most of these other investors were ready to give up on Odeo when Apple came out with Itunes in 2005, but Williams suggested that he and his team would come up with new ideas. One of the team members was Jack Dorsey and he came up with the idea for a short messaging platform.

Twitter was born, supposedly, from some grand vision about how the founders could change the world and fuel revolutions, which the platform would eventually do. But at the time, it was more about survival.

The narrative of world-changing ideas

There is this narrative that’s seeped into the startup founding story. The belief now is that you need a huge world-changing vision before you can start your business. Without an absolutely unique and wholly original business idea, you shouldn’t be working on a startup. The myth is couched in questions like “What is your competitive advantage?” and “Where will you be in five years?” These have led many founders to question the value of their, oftentimes, simple sustainable innovation.

These questions put up unnecessary mental barriers to entrepreneurship for the vast majority of people out there. In the early days, there was very little certainty about where a startup was going. Even in the introduction of Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston talks about the uncertainty famous founders feel about their ideas. Writing about founders of popular companies like Craigslist, Firefox, Apple, Adobe, 37Signals, etc., she shared, “What surprised me most was how unsure the founders seemed to be that they were actually onto something big.”

You don’t need a grand vision

Phil Knight didn’t know what he was going to do with his life. He was in the financial services industry but knew he was obsessed with feet—especially runner’s feet. In his book Shoe Dog, Knight writes that he decided to travel the world with his buddy and ended up finding his calling. From the book, we learn that he didn’t even sell his own shoes for the first few years of running the Blue Ribbon Company, which would later become Nike. Knight would go on to create his own shoes, but only after some shenanigans by managers at Onitsuka, the brand of shoes Blue Ribbon carried in the US. For the first 10 years or so of Nike, the company was tethering on the edge.

Knight was always hopeful. But according to the book, this was less about a grand vision and more about his force of will and cunning to keep the company alive.

You also don’t need to drop everything

The Warby Parker story, as told in the book Originals by Adam Grant, highlights another element to the founding story that denigrates the more realistic founders. The myth is that founders who stay in their day jobs until their businesses get some traction are less committed.

I can attest to the fallacy of this myth. I moved to America from the UK, got married, started business school, and founded Power2Switch. Believing this myth about founder commitment, I plowed head on, working on the business for no salary for the first two and a half years. It left me in debt (emotionally and financially). I’m still recovering from that mistake. I wish I had acknowledged that my context should have provided my own metric for what a founder looks like. But now I know.

Grant shared in the book that three of the Warby Parker founders, who were students at Wharton business school at the time of the company’s founding, took internships even as they modeled the company in spreadsheets and continued their research.

They didn’t drop it all to pursue some world-changing vision that consumed them. They were measured in their approach even though The Social Network popularized the myth that you had to drop out of college to have the necessary commitment. Only one of the founders worked on Warby Parker between the founder’s first and second years of business school. At this point, it was not about changing the world, it was about figuring out a sustainable business model.

Conclusion