Page 28 - 6 Secrets to Startup Success

True Believers 7

sonality, preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. These characteristics
are largely developed at an early age, shaping whether or not you
will be predisposed to the entrepreneurial leap.

Dan Bricklin, who transformed the computer industry with his
invention of VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, says his entre-
preneurial backbone was formed as a kid in Philadelphia, where his
father ran a printing business. As a boy, he spent his afternoons helping
at the plant and his evenings listening to business chatter around the
dinner table. “I suppose you could say the entrepreneurial instinct was
in my genes,” he says. “My family’s unspoken dedication to the busi-
ness gave me a healthy respect for the paradox of running your own
business—the contradictory feelings of freedom and responsibility
that define the experience of setting out on your own.”2

Our early years not only inform whether we will leap at a startup
opportunity, but why we might do so and what kind of founder we will
most likely become. Dan Bricklin credits his religious instruction at a
Jewish day school with seeding many of his founding values and skills:
his early creative drive; his desire to make the world a better place;
and his leadership skills learned by guiding services in synagogue and
mentoring other students.

J.C. Faulkner, who built Decision One Mortgage from a blank
sheet of paper in 1996 into a company valued at $100 million over
four years, says, “I have a memory of when I was in the third grade.
When it was time to pick teams, the other kids would look to me and
ask ‘J.C., who will be the captains today?’ They would ask me to settle
arguments and make rulings about whether balls were in- or out-of-
bounds. I remember one of the teachers asking me how I came to be
the one who ‘ran’ the game, and I said I didn’t know. It seemed like it
had always been that way.” Looking back, he recognizes that he had a
knack for figuring out what motivated people, and a strong sense of
fairness. Thirty years later, these qualities drove his growing ambition
to leave his senior leadership role with First Union Corporation and
create a new kind of company, one that attracted and unleashed the
best possible talent. His venture, Decision One Mortgage, quickly de-
veloped a national reputation as a great place to work with a high per-
formance culture.

American Management Association • www.amanet.org