Your startup idea doesn’t have to be your passion, and it’s OK

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Back in 2003, Davis Smith, fresh and bright-eyed, graduated from Brigham Young University. He knew the internet was a massive opportunity (this is pre-Facebook) and wanted to take advantage of it. So what did he sell? Pool tables, of course. He had always loved billiards and thought that the internet could really facilitate the transaction of buying a table. By 2011, he earned his MBA from Wharton and sold PoolTables.com.

So, what’s next? An obvious choice—creating an ecommerce company for mothers and babies in Brazil. The opportunity became apparent during his time in graduate school. Baby.com.br raised over US$40 million in venture capital from top investors like Accel and is now Brazil’s leading ecommerce platform for baby products.

And now? Smith is the CEO of Cotopaxi, an outdoor gear brand with a social mission at its heart. He has always been an outdoor man and knew that there was a space in the market for a brand that could resonate with climbers personally.

So what do pool tables, baby products, and outdoor gear have in common? They were all massive opportunities during the time Smith started his company around them.

Was he interested in all these verticals? Sure. But was he so passionate that these were all he thought about before starting? Probably not.

When I chatted with Smith, he consistently pushed against the “passion hypothesis” which states that you need to develop an idea that you deeply care about in order to succeed. He instead recommends a technique that he learned in a product design class in graduate school—innovation tournaments. His argument is it doesn’t matter whether or not you have a burning passion for your idea. “At the end of the day, if you start something of your own, you’ll automatically be passionate about it. After all, it’s your baby,” he said.

How does it work? Write down all the opportunities and problems you possibly can. According to him, you just have to get into the zone of looking for interesting opportunities and they’ll come. Then, you want to slowly cut down all the ideas that don’t meet certain thresholds. “For example, cut down all the ideas that don’t have a total addressable market that’s large enough,” he explained. Cut down ideas that don’t have the right technology in place in a particular environment. Once you have a single or a few ideas, just get started. Do interviews with customers and see if there’s really a demand for the product.

Smith had not been thinking about diapers for the last 10 years. He just found an opportunity and acted on it at the right time in the right place.

In his second year as an MBA student, Smith was inspired by the success of Marc Lore who built and sold a portfolio of ecommerce companies called Quidsi to Amazon for US$545 million, one of which was Diapers.com. Having spent 12 years of his life in Latin America, Smith thought that something similar in Brazil could be interesting. He went and did hundreds of surveys with mothers about how they bought diapers and knew he was onto something.

“Brazil was ripe for Baby.com.br. There was a growing percentage of people connected to the web and the process of buying diapers sucked. I heard stories of mothers who had to spend hours to go to a nearby city to get them,” he shared.

What’s important to note is that Smith had not been thinking about diapers for the last 10 years. He just found an opportunity and acted on it at the right time in the right place.

So, how true is the passion hypothesis really? What if all those people who preach about how important it is for you to find your passion to find happiness, fulfillment, and success are just plain wrong? What if it’s not about figuring out what you’re passionate about and then building a company or finding a job around it but the other way around?

Cal Newport would agree. In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, the computer science professor posits that passion at the get-go really doesn’t matter or happen. Instead, passion develops after you become so good at what you do because that’s when you are really an expert and can push the boundaries. It’s not that passion leads to mastery and success. Rather, mastery and success lead to passion.