Not every successful startup is impactful and not every startup with potential to be impactful is successful
Impact - Will or did this change the direction of humanity in any way? (An easy proxy for this is how many other companies where doing the same thing as company X before company X succeeded)
Success - Many things can go here, but some quantitative guides could be the number of people affected (customers, employees) and their satisfaction, market value, years of success
My thesis is that founders initially aim for a low-impact high-success business and later, after a successful exit, aim for high/medium impact
- This goes a bit against what I learned from sama is called the “deferred life plan”, which is doing something that’s not really what you want to do but that you believe is easier to succeed in so you can go after harder things later
| Founder | Company | Impact | Success |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sama | Loopt | Low | Medium |
| OpenAI | High | High | |
| Elon | Paypal | Low | High |
| Tesla | High | High | |
| PG | Viaweb | Low | High |
| YC | High | High | |
| Pedro Franceschi & Henrique Dubugras | Pagarme | Low | High |
| Brex | Med | High | |
| Victor Lazarte | Wildlife | Low | High |
I want to be clear here, I’m not saying that low-impact business are wrong, or not enough pursuing, after all I’m only citing them because I’m a huge fan of the people who created them. The point here is to recognize that some companies are more a result of the zeitgeist than others, and if they weren’t found by the people I mentioned, something similar would’ve taken their place in history.