Page 29 - 6 Secrets to Startup Success

8 6 SECRETS TO STARTUP SUCCESS

For most entrepreneurs, time logged working for others signifi-
cantly shapes their startup aspirations. In a Fall 2005 article in the Cal-
ifornia Management Review, professor of organizational behavior Pino
G. Audia and his graduate student, Christopher I. Rider, noted how
early work experience incubates and prepares future founders. “Al-
though some individuals become successful entrepreneurs without re-
lated prior experience, they are the exception, not the rule.
Entrepreneurs are often organizational products.”3 While working for
other people, we develop expertise, serve customers, observe great and
awful leaders, and watch untapped opportunities come and go. We ap-
preciate the steady income and soak up the lessons, while our startup
ambitions simmer in a semi-conscious stew of hopes and what-ifs.

While studying neuroscience as an undergraduate at Davidson
College in the early 1980s, Mark Williams took a summer job to help
one of his professors build interactive teaching tools. Their goal was
to help students “see” how neural impulses (e.g., auditory or visual
signals) traveled through the brain. Using one of the earliest Macin-
tosh computers, Mark worked in a dark basement for months,
painstakingly building images. “These were very simple, very crude
animations,” he says. “We had a 16 color card, and I would zoom these
images up and literally move pixels around to create additional colors
and make something that looked remotely realistic. I think at the end
of the summer we had, maybe, ten seconds of animation that we could
control. It was an interesting idea, and we were very passionate about
it, but in 1983 we were way ahead of the technology available to us.”
That summer job was Mark’s first taste of how technology could bring
together his passions for art, learning, and neuroscience—seeds that
eventually gave rise to Modality, his Durham, North Carolina–based
mobile learning technology company.

DISSATISFACTION

Whether thinking about retirement, a sabbatical, or a dream business,
most working adults fantasize from time to time about the day they
will be free to pursue some deeper calling. This yearning, while hard
for many to articulate or even admit, can be frighteningly strong, be-

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