Wanting to get rich is a bad reason to start a company. Successful founders solve problems or share ideas; those chasing wealth rarely make it. Wealth can fuel scaling, but it pulls you away from what actually matters: your customers.
I want to start a company and I say, why? Oh, I want to make lots of money. I say, forget it. That's not a good enough reason. Most people that have started companies because they want to make lots of money, I haven't seen very many of those succeed. The ones that succeed are people that come. Sometimes they don't even want to start a company. They just have an idea that they want to get out, expressed out in the world. And oftentimes they have to start a company because nobody else will listen to them.
I completely agree. I mean, I'm all for getting rich. I'm not one of these people who says that you should only start a business for the mission. But every successful business that I've ever been a part of started with a problem that needed to be solved. And more times than not, it was started by an accidental entrepreneur who didn't even realize that they were starting a business. That said, there's nothing wrong with deciding that you want to scale your business because you want more money. Wealth is a perfectly fine motivator for scale, but it is a terrible motivator for startups because startups have to be customer centric and you can't be customer centric if all you care about is getting rich.
