What's your entrepreneurial dream?
Mine is not so surprising: selling a company I built from scratch for a small fortune after years of hard work. A few weeks ago, it happened to Buddy Media founder Michael Lazerow, who sold his social media management platform to CRM powerhouse SalesForce for $689 million dollars.
What delighted me the most about this story is not the princely sum the company went for; it's the way Lazerow chose to announce the sale to the public. In a short, sometimes emotional video, Lazerow tells a very personal story through Keynote slides on his iPad. It's a story of his success as well as a story about facing fear.
The entrepreneurial journey is paved with risk and failure, and it takes a unique individual to make it through. Do you have what it takes? In a new article, we detail the essential qualities that separate entrepreneurs from the pack:
- The ability to see failure as a learning opportunity: Steve Jobs famously had a number of failures before he hit on the enormously successful formula that built Apple.
- Conviction in your ideas: Body Shop founder Anita Roddick faced stiff criticism from an unlikely source during her early days.
- An appetite for risk: While not strong on typical business skills like bookkeeping, the duo Ben & Jerry's definitely had an appetite for risk in starting their gourmet ice cream business in a snowy college town.
What qualities do you think are most important for entrepreneurs to have? And are they born with these qualities or do they develop over time?