Naval Ravikant identifies a pattern across great companies like Dropbox, Twilio, and Airbnb: founders who sweat every detail early on because they're building for 5-10+ years, not looking to flip. The ones who rush or accept the first offer tend to fail.
Chapters
True. I definitely believe that as an entrepreneur, you'll never accomplish anything great in life unless you stick with it through the end. And so I was reminiscing the other day, of the six or seven really amazing deals I've been fortunate to see in my career, most of which I either passed on or didn't get into, by the way. So I'm not. No, you're talking about the six or.
Seven deals you were lucky to have a meeting.
Right. These are not the whole. They're not the deals you did. Yeah, there were some people I passed on, like Dropbox and Twilio and people I didn't get into, like Airbnb and Square and so on, and people I did like Twitter and Foursquare. And I was thinking to myself, what was a common thread amongst each of them? Because it's very hard to draw a common thread across such a large group. And I realized that the entrepreneurs were extremely deliberate in every early decision that they made. They were not haphazard. And the reason is because they really felt like they were laying the foundation for a 10 year business. None of them was thinking of it as something that they will try and flip. So that's necessary but not sufficient. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who are forward looking, who will not make it. But I think that unless you're extremely forward looking for the long haul and you ooze that with every fiber of your being, you're never going to build a great business.
But you could pick up on it in hindsight.
In hindsight, right.
But no, but you can. There is something to somebody like Jack who did Square or Drew from Dropbox. We're going to solve this problem. We've got a great name, we've got a great logo.
They work every detail out. The name, the logo, every investor, every person they hire, where they put the office. Every little detail really matters to them because they're laying bricks to a foundation and they're saying, am I going to be able to deal with this five or ten years from now?
And so the sloppy entrepreneur who's not really thinking about that stuff, it's a little bit of a tell that maybe they won't even be there in two years.
Sell when they get the first offer or they'll shut down when they hit the first road speed bump. Yeah.
