看山跑死馬

Starting Your Own Company – Or why I am not a billionaire

已有 59 次阅读 2015-7-29 10:07 |个人分类:生活点滴|系统分类:海外观察    推荐到群组

(For new reader and thosewho request 好友请求, please read my 公告栏 first)

  

Almost allof us, dream every now and then about becoming the next founder of FACEBOOK,or  Amazon, or the next Jack Ma. We all think we have good ideas  that will let us start a company and make billions of dollars. I am no exception.  During 1984-1994 I actually started my own company with the above dream in mind. Of course I did not succeed but did not lose money either (the initial  10,000Iinvestmentreturned  20,000 after ten years when the company liquidated).

By 20/20 hindsight it is clear why I didn’t succeed.  There were two major mistakes which I list here to share with any aspiring  young scholar.

1.    I was not committed. To succeed you need to believe failure is not an option, i.e., 破釜沈舟. But I was doing it part time since I had a perfectly good  and comfortable job plus consulting on the side. I was not hungry or desperate.  Additional successes are not crucial to my happiness. Such an attitude is fatal.

2.    I had the wrong business model. This is crucial. First of all,  see: 看山跑死馬- Never mistake a clear view for short distance 
http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-28314.html . Second, a good idea must be able to SCALE up  if you wish to make billions. In other words, whatever product or service, once  dreamed up by you, must be able to be produced or replicated by inexpensive labor ( by ordinary people not nearly as smart as you are) on a large scale or volume.  All great commercial successes have this common characteristics. If everything has to be  custom made or tailored for every client, then you don’t have the ingredient  to scale things up. Thus, consulting cannot become a big business. Anyhow,  my plan was to commercializemy idea of Perturbation Analysis (PA) http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-29014.html . What I realized only later, that to apply  PA to a real problem requires talented person who understands the theory behind PA and adapted it to the particular problem.  This cannot be done by run-of-the-mill engineers with just BS degree. In other words, you cannot scale up “brain power”.  After several years all I have accomplished is a slightly larger consulting business  than my individual effort; created a couple of clerical positions and a small  business of several hundred thousand dollar per year. My net income  was not any larger than working alone and I have to work harder to support others.

Of course, you would immediately bring up the exception of McKinsey and Company which prospered under business consulting. However, their "successes” are built on a unique insight common to all BUSINESS and training a bunch of new but bright college graduates to do all the grunt work with lowpay. Besides  how many of the partners of McKinsey are billionaires and how many McKinsey-like companies are there in the world?

 

So there you are. I don’t always succeed at what I attempted to o – Rule #5 of my seven life lessons  http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-5844.html. All aspring young enterpreneuers take note.

 

本文引用地址：http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1565-909246.html  此文来自科学网何毓琦博客，转载请注明出处。
上一篇：US won Math Olympiad for the first time in 21 years
 

更多

收藏 分享 举报

当前推荐数：2 推荐人： 曹聪 李胜文

推荐到博客首页

发表评论 评论 (1 个评论)

[1]李胜文  2015-7-29 11:07

Insightful! That's why some un-educated or college drop-outs could get it worked out as they could closely work with those of less expensive labors. " a good idea must be able to SCALE up  if you wish to make billions. In other words, whatever product or service, once  dreamed up by you, must be able to be produced or replicated by inexpensive labor ( by ordinary people not nearly as smart as you are) on a large scale or volume.  All great commercial successes have this common characteristics." After all, staying in Ivory Tower comforts the soul of scholars. The more successful a scholar is, the less likely he steps out of his comfort zone for business - it's tough there as shown in your #1 reason. In reality, the mindset is wired differently.