Phil Libin, Evernote's founder, says the main qualification for entrepreneurship is being able to afford total failure. He warns that if losing everything would devastate you, startups aren't for you. Silicon Valley tolerates repeated failures; Japan, Singapore, and parts of South America don't.
Spanish. The main qualification for who should be an entrepreneur, who should try to start a company, is you got all the basic stuff. You know, you need to be smart and talented, you need to figure out where you fit on the founder scale, but the main qualification that most people don't think through, which you really should, is you should be an entrepreneur if and only if you are completely prepared to fail and you're at a point in your life where you can afford to fail, which means that you're at a point where you very likely will work really, really hard, the hardest you've ever worked in your life on an idea for 3, 5, 10 years and then walk away with nothing. That's the most likely outcome. You're going to work really hard, you're going to walk away with nothing, you're going to fail. If you can do that, if you can get behind that, if you can go like, yeah, that sounds pretty good, then you should be an entrepreneur. And if you're thinking, man, that would be devastating, I wouldn't be able to live with myself, my family would disown me, I wouldn't be able to support my kids, I would never be able to show my face, then you should be honest with yourself about that. You should be honest with yourself from the beginning, and you should say, well, this life isn't for me. This is actually one of the things that I think Silicon Valley does better than any other place in the world, is this is a much bigger deal almost everywhere else. One of the things that we really do well in the US, in particular in Silicon Valley, is we have a really healthy attitude towards failure. You're not penalized for failing in this town. You can start a company, you can fail, you can start another company, you can fail again, you can get a job. You're not penalized. You're not penalized very much. I mean, as long as you fail for interesting reasons and not the same reason twice and you demonstrate learning behavior and you're not a criminal or anything, then it's fine. But there's lots of other countries where this is not the case. Like, this is a big deal in Japan. This is a big deal in Singapore. This is a big deal in South America. There's lots of people who otherwise would want to do it. They just can't. They can't handle it. So this is a moment of self-honesty. Can you afford to fail? Can you embrace it?
