The author leaves no room for any concept of "skill" in entrepreneurship, and this is the big flaw in his article. He doesn't so much argue this view as assume it, except to say that person X succeeded only to fail later, and person Y thought they would succeed, but didn't.
VCs know more about start-ups than he thinks. They do "care" about whether the ventures they fund succeed (obviously, ha) and even so they fund founders who have failed in the past all the time. The pretty low stigma on failure in the Valley is part of what makes the culture so great and why we get so many successes and, dare I say it, skilled entrepreneurs.
As we all know, team and execution are just as important as idea or more so. Once we acknowledge the importance of ability, and the existence of many great successes, successful serial entrepreneurs, and, of course, failures and failed entrepreneurs, it seems like he's just trying to take everyone down a peg.
Surprisingly, his first three takeaways are pretty agreeable, basically just be grateful for your successes and acknowledge there was probably a healthy dose of luck in there. I'm pretty sure his fourth point about investing in people despite past failures is already incorporated into Valley thinking.
"The author leaves no room for any concept of "skill" in entrepreneurship, and this is the big flaw in his article."
From the article:
"And you certainly can’t go through life as an entrepreneur without becoming smarter. You learn from your mistakes, you make great contacts within an industry, you understand better what other competitors are doing."
If that isn't a round about way of talking about entrepreneurship skill building, I'm not sure what is.
The skill you reference has to be developed somewhere – even if that's just watching others and learning from the litany of mistakes out there... otherwise it's an innate ability and that's exactly what the author is arguing against in this piece.
If anything, I feel as though the author still falls into the trap of believing in the mythical "great idea". There are plenty of really good ideas out there – they just need to match up with the right environmental factors (time, money, competitors, etc. etc.) and the right people at the right point in their lives. Good ideas don't execute (and thus succeed or fail) in a vacuum – and so, just like the fundamental attribution error the author mentions early on, as it applies to people, the same thing goes for ideas.
VCs know more about start-ups than he thinks. They do "care" about whether the ventures they fund succeed (obviously, ha) and even so they fund founders who have failed in the past all the time. The pretty low stigma on failure in the Valley is part of what makes the culture so great and why we get so many successes and, dare I say it, skilled entrepreneurs.
As we all know, team and execution are just as important as idea or more so. Once we acknowledge the importance of ability, and the existence of many great successes, successful serial entrepreneurs, and, of course, failures and failed entrepreneurs, it seems like he's just trying to take everyone down a peg.
Surprisingly, his first three takeaways are pretty agreeable, basically just be grateful for your successes and acknowledge there was probably a healthy dose of luck in there. I'm pretty sure his fourth point about investing in people despite past failures is already incorporated into Valley thinking.