The 8 Traits Of Highly Successful Entrepreneurs

Since the early 1990s I have been building companies and know many of the others foolish enough to build companies. Some of the better known fools built Yahoo, TiVo, eBay among others. I was a lead investor in Ad Sense which Google acquired and today generates about 30% of Google’s revenue.

The name for those that build new things is “entrepreneur” which is basically French for “dreaming against the odds.”

The dreamers against the odds include Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard to tweak an Altair, and ended up reselling DOS to IBM under the Microsoft name.

Then there’s Steven Jobs, phone phreak (free phone call hacker) who turned his hippy Zen on the PC with uber geek Steve Wozniak.

Jerry Yang, co-fiddler of Yahoo, who was set to be an electrical engineer but got sidetracked on a web directory thingie.

Wall Street quant deserter Jeff Bezos who left a good job with a major banking firm, loaded up his Honda Accord and headed to coffeeville, Seattle, to make an online bookstore.

There are hundred more in my Rolodex (I mean my Contacts! since nobody uses Rolodex any more).

Steve Harmon’s 8 traits of successful entrepreneurs (first here’s my napkin scribble with the traits, followed by more detailed examples):

1] Vision. Seeing what others don’t see. Inventing the future rather than reacting to it.

2] Instinct. Words cannot describe it. Gut feelings mixed with heavy doses of doubt from your brain.

3] Drive. It takes 5x the energy to start something vs. doing something that’s been done. And at least 4x the caffeine.

4] Alert. A certain awareness of opportunity. Quick thinking and reacting to very dynamic environments, changing landscapes of business and technology.

5] Calm. While storms erupt and brew inside as struggles increase, it reaffirms an inner sense of peace. Pruning makes the garden.

6] Persistent. Brothers Walt and Roy Disney started three or four animation studios all of which went bankrupt before creating Mickey Mouse. Pixar nearly went broke until Steve Jobs rescued it and invested when nobody else believed in computer animation.

7] Grounding. Sense of value in people, things, agreements. Belief in what they do for purposes other than “making money.”

8] Balance. Setbacks provide launching points to move ahead. Moving ahead can mean giving up opportunities. Understand the yin and yang of the situation and don’t lose sight of the balance. Build value based on the best whole advantage.