Hockey Stick or Slinky

Tonight NUventions hosted a speaker who took us through his journey of starting his own medical device company and ultimately leading it a multi-million dollar acquisition by a more renouned player in the market, customary in the med device space given the low IPO alternative for commercialization. The speech was great, and what I gleaned from it, as a budding entrepeneur, is that a successful idea is driven by three pillars: an inherently great product, persevearance, and luck. Even more important, however, is that the cliched term "the end justifies the means" does not apply in the journey of starting your own company and building it to fruition. The journey itself is as important as the end, whatever the end may be. You may cultivate an idea that seems perfect for the market, but there are factors ultimately outside all of ours control. In the medical device space, that factor happens to be a three letter acronym starting with F, but more importantly, if you fail to be flexible and are too tenacious to your original idea, focusing on the end that truly only exists in your mind and not in reality, then not only will your end fail to meet your expectations, but your journey will suffer too. That is not to say that you don't need to have a good, fundamental idea to start with, but in reality, what you ultimately bring to market, is in many ways influened and molded by what the market will come to demand from your product, and not what your expectations demand of it. This journey is an amazing one, and as the speaker recounted fondly his stories of developing pitch materials in his backyard, literally as we heard the birds chirpign in his videos, what came through was his inherent persevearance and belief that what he had created would ultimately add value to the market. He cautioned us that persevearance is much harder practiced than preached. Sure it's easy to say that I will persevere for my company, but when the rubber meets the road things change. The hockey stick of success most entrepeneurs believe in (the idea that their idea is an 18 month journey to early retirement) is in most times, or all times, foolish. Rather, every new company will face its successes, but those will be dampend by many failures: threats from competitors, threats from buyers, threats from regulatory stakeholders, even threats from within your own company. Success in entrepeneurship is a slinky, sinusodial with many ups and downs, and if you don't enjoy the journey, smile from your $0.002 milestone and sweat harder facing the $100,000 barrier, you will have wasted your time not maximizing on the knowledge you can build from simply walking the path.