Starting a company changes the emotional weather around you. One of the first things I noticed was how kind strangers could be. People who owed me nothing would make an introduction, answer a question, share a resource, or offer encouragement at exactly the right moment. A small act of generosity from someone you barely know can keep you going for another week.
But entrepreneurship also attracts another kind of attention. Not hostility, exactly. Something smaller and harder to accuse anyone of: a trace of contempt wrapped in politeness. A former colleague of mine had done well at a major technology company and risen to a fairly senior rank. One day, he came to see me and said, “I’ve heard about everything you’ve been doing. Amazing. You really know how to keep yourself busy. A serial entrepreneur!” Every word was friendly. The sentence was not.
For a while, I wondered why people seemed to dislike founders. Then I realized that entrepreneurship was not the real problem. What people dislike is failure—or, more precisely, watching someone continue to do things that appear to be wrong. This is especially true among people who have succeeded inside large institutions. A middle manager in a technology company may owe his position less to one brilliant decision than to a long record of avoiding serious, visible mistakes. That is not an insult. It is often exactly what the institution rewards. Large organizations are built to contain error. Entrepreneurship is built around producing it.
A founder chooses the wrong customer, hires the wrong person, builds the wrong product, enters the wrong market, or arrives with the right idea at the wrong time. Even yesterday’s correct decision can become today’s mistake. From the outside, this looks like incompetence. Sometimes it is incompetence. That is part of the problem. There is no reliable signal telling you whether you are learning your way toward something real or merely becoming more sophisticated at wasting money. You have to make the next decision before history explains the previous one.
People like to imagine that successful entrepreneurs somehow escaped this process. Please. That is nonsense. Success merely changes the way earlier failures are narrated. Once someone becomes wealthy, experiments become “vision,” stubbornness becomes “conviction,” and years of wandering become an “unconventional journey.” Fewer people enjoy criticizing the rich, and the rich can afford people who manage the criticism. The founder who has not yet succeeded receives no such generosity.
What makes the situation worse is that being right does not necessarily rescue you. A correct decision may take years to reveal itself. Until then, it is socially indistinguishable from a mistake. Everyone around you may sincerely advise you to stop, become realistic, and correct your life. Howard Marks writes in The Most Important Thing that even excellent investors are wrong regularly, and that a sound judgment may not be validated immediately. He has another line that founders understand instinctively: “Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.” The market does not issue a certificate saying, “Please remain calm. You are correct, but three years early.” It simply punishes you for three years.
This is the ordinary rhythm of entrepreneurship: small failures interrupted by larger ones. Something breaks. Someone leaves. A customer disappears. Months of work become irrelevant. Money that took years to earn vanishes in weeks. And a wrong decision rarely wastes only your own resources. First, you lose your own time and money. Then you discover that you have also consumed the time, money, patience, and trust of other people. After enough rounds of this, becoming slightly unbearable is almost an occupational hazard. Take one million yuan, put it into a company, and lose all of it. Very few spiritual practices can cleanse the soul so thoroughly.
This, I think, is what the Chinese expression “nine deaths and one life” really means. It is usually interpreted statistically: ten people start companies and nine fail. But perhaps the causal direction is reversed. Nine people do not necessarily leave because their companies failed. Their companies fail because, at some point, nine people can no longer bear the profession of being wrong—publicly, expensively, repeatedly, and without knowing when the verdict might change. So they choose another life.
The tenth person is not necessarily the smartest, bravest, or most visionary. Sometimes he is simply the one who can remain inside the mistake a little longer.