Page 24 - 6 Secrets to Startup Success
P. 24
CHAPTER ONE
True Believers
Why Founders Fall in Love
with Their Ideas
“Following our path is in effect a kind of going off the path, through
open country . . . Out there in the silence we must build a hearth,
gather the twigs, and strike the flint for the fire ourselves.”
—David Whyte, The Heart Aroused
The stories of commitment are as different as the founders who tell
them:
9 Lynn Ivey heard the fear in her father’s voice and realized
her mother was slipping into the abyss of Alzheimer’s disease.
“I knew at that moment that my career at Bank of America
no longer mattered,” she says. “What mattered was my fam-
ily.” That moment led her to leave her bank job as a regional
sales executive to care for her mother and, later, to build The
Ivey, an adult daycare center devoted to ailing seniors and
their caregivers.
9 For years, Mark Williams passionately pushed the bound-
aries of technology, learning, and design. Long before Apple’s
American Management Association • www.amanet.org
