What’s the secret of a startup’s success?

A legendary hero is usually a founder of something – he begins a new era, forms a new religion, establishes a new town, or creates a new lifestyle. In order to create something new one has to give up the old and set off to search for initial concepts– some catchy idea with potential to introduce something new.

– Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth

Despite his brilliant ideas and beautiful visions, the legendary hero often falls in the world of enterprise. Some statistics show that 9 out of 10 created startups encounter such fate. There are lots of reasons, starting with  so-called bad timing, which means a bad time for a  certain idea, through lack of money  or running out of it, to a  badly selected team. And in practice there are presumably as many reasons as many businesses.

And yet the Wright brothers managed to get the first flight with their plane in 1903, although they had no funding for their construction from an investor. Neither of them had the education which could be expected to create such a work – they hadn’t finished an academic institution. Nobody was talking about them, following their actions, supporting them. What’s more – Samuel Pierpont Langley was working on the same idea at the same time and got 50 000 dollars from the War Department.  He was working at Harvard and had a great team. And yet he wasn’t successful.

Why did The Wright brothers do it?

Behind every business  there stands a man or a group of people. Some are well-known, others are not too popular, although the  brands created by them are known all over the world. Some have achieved great success without bigger plans and slightly by chance, and the others have put lots of work into it and  previously they suffered many defeats . Every story can by analyzed and factorized. It’s worth  drawing  conclusions from them, although  the enterprise has something from art that’s why  some parts can’t be fully defined.

The purpose of these entries is to show such stories as above and to  think about what  the road to success is. And to avoid popular mistakes and to  make use of the  experiences of those who realized their plans. We will not always be able to say why certain people made it and not the others. And this is probably the most beautiful thing about that – business can surprise us. But these are surely stories which are worth  getting inspiration from.