Building a business around a passion is dangerous. What you should do is build it around customers, around a niche market; shit build it for the profitability. Building it because it's your passion is not the thing to do. That's not to say you can't be passionate about a profitable idea but be sure profit comes before passion if you want a successful venture.
How are they outliers? Are they outliers because of their success? Or are they outliers because their founders were passionate about their fundamental mission, and despite this passion, they managed to become huge tech companies? That's a strange use of outlier for the purpose of this argument.
Ok, I'll use another example: Tumblr. Amid the news of the sale, Marco Arment blogged about David Karp was so doggedly passionate about building the community. Yes, another outlier, but if you are going to call passion one of the most "dangerous" things for a business...then it seems a bit strange that many successful businesses have quite a bit of underlying passion.
(Oh, and Steve Jobs and Steve Woz, just in case that wasn't already automatically accepted).
In any case, my argument is not completely sound. While the most successful companies have been founded on passion, it's possible that the vast majority of passionate founders fail. In fact, this is probably the case. But in order for the OP's statement to have any validity to it, one must show that companies not built on someone's personal passion have a higher rate of success. This is extremely heard to quantify, but I'd be interested in just seeing a list of non-passion companies that are considered unambiguous successes.
I'm now feeling like this is the wrong word and I'll refer back to the article: It's assumed anyone founding a startup is going to have passion.
Whether they have passion about the solution, the problem, the market, etc. There is some level of passion and I agree with that. However I'm not going to concede to the idea that you need to be passionate about everything your startup does in order for it to be successful, nor should you base founding a startup purely on the fact that you have passion for an idea.
> Ok, I'll use another example: Tumblr.
You're using gigantic, successful, well regarded companies that get huge amounts of press. Right now I'm thinking of a local startup in my area (Western NY) and I'll refrain from naming them, but they were funded early last month. I've had several conversations with one of the co-founders and he actually founded the company based entirely on the lack of a solution in their market as pointed out by one of his friends. He didn't live in the space, work in the space, or have interest in the space. He took the idea, tested his hypothesis, found a technical co-founder, and launched all based on market viability, not passion.
Again, these are serious outliers.
Building a business around a passion is dangerous. What you should do is build it around customers, around a niche market; shit build it for the profitability. Building it because it's your passion is not the thing to do. That's not to say you can't be passionate about a profitable idea but be sure profit comes before passion if you want a successful venture.