- Jobs appears to have that certain je ne sais quoi. There are exceptional folks and outliers and he is one of them IMO. I wish I was smart enough to what it is about him so I could bottle that and become rich selling it, but alas...
- Market is significant because the size and growth of it matters. Picking a niche market that is not growing is a fatal flaw even if you do everything else right. Or when a market turns on you - just ask anyone involved in real estate in 2008.
- Success is profit or wealth-creating exit (not acq-hire or asset sale). By the metrics of funding, user growth and employee growth, most dot-com startups in 1999 were successes. I worked at one of them (Kozmo.com) - by those measures, we were one of the most successful companies ever :) Again, funding, users, employees may all be conditions which are necessary for success (not sure that's the case to be honest) but definitely not sufficient.
Am a data junkie so see lots of value in what you're doing but worry about efforts to distill entrepreneurship into a 'playbook'. There may be correlations with what is being observed but causality is a whole different world.
- Market is significant because the size and growth of it matters. Picking a niche market that is not growing is a fatal flaw even if you do everything else right. Or when a market turns on you - just ask anyone involved in real estate in 2008.
- Success is profit or wealth-creating exit (not acq-hire or asset sale). By the metrics of funding, user growth and employee growth, most dot-com startups in 1999 were successes. I worked at one of them (Kozmo.com) - by those measures, we were one of the most successful companies ever :) Again, funding, users, employees may all be conditions which are necessary for success (not sure that's the case to be honest) but definitely not sufficient.
Am a data junkie so see lots of value in what you're doing but worry about efforts to distill entrepreneurship into a 'playbook'. There may be correlations with what is being observed but causality is a whole different world.
Look forward to seeing future updates.