It is all about the money.
You may tell yourself and others that it is more than that. That it is about helping/saving/serving humanity, which it most certainly can be about. At the end of the day however, it is about the greenbacks.
Here is the surprising thing, that is a good thing!
A startup can be about a number of things, but at the core, it is about profitability. Whether that that profit delivers a lifestyle (shout out to Seattle) or to F*** You I Own My Own Plane (you know who you are) it is all the same and it is time to embrace it.
When did we stop celebrating the profit motive? When did it become A reason for building a business, versus THE reason? No one thinks that money can buy happiness, but it does help with everything else you want to do. Whether giving back to orphans or saving the environment, it all takes capital. As in dollars. And the only way to get that capital is to make money.
We have lost the idea that profit is about selling goods or services to someone who needs / wants them. That value is created when someone does that. Value is where wealth comes from; wealth to hire people to pay people and yourself. Wealth is good.
Let’s all say it together “I want to be rich and that is a good thing”.
That wasn’t so bad.
About nathan kaiser
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Funny thing about entrepreneurship…. It’s statistically a pretty lousy way to get a big paycheck. Most small business owners (when surveyed) say that they make LESS than they’d make if they got a “real” job.
The greenback motive is a good one– but profit isn’t always the way to get there. If you really want to be rich, an exit of some kind is a likelier way to get there, which means that you should focus on being worth buying. One way to be worth buying is to have a mess of profit, but there are other metrics that buyers care about… Some of them care quite a bit MORE about growth, brand, team, etc. You can always sell a profitable business but for some profit just isn’t the easiest (or the smartest) path to get there.
(note: it is for me, though!)