The REAL key to success

Success is often presented as going to those who work harder, have an innovative idea and best of all work hard, and have the innovative idea at just the right time. OK, so there is a little bit of luck involved.

Biographies of very successful people often have a theme somewhat like this: "he came up with a great idea", and then "he came up with another great idea", and maybe "he beat the competition yet again", leading to perhaps: "after 3 failed attempts at BIG success the time was finally right". Read: perseverance can eventually get you the "luck" needed. Read: you could have done this to if you just had the drive and gumption.

But I'm pretty convinced that reality is not so nice and neat.

A recent interview in the Wall Street Journal with Reid Hoffman (creator of LinkedIn) sheds a little light on what the real key(s) to success often are in my opinion.

At the very top of the interview it states:
"In May 2003, the former Apple Inc. and PayPal executive launched LinkedIn out of his living room, inviting 350 of his contacts to join his network and create their own profiles. By the end of that month, LinkedIn had 4,500 members."

and a bit down the page:
"I didn't know any VCs, but I knew people who knew VCs. They referred me, saying: "This is a bright young kid coming out of Stanford/Oxford – could you give him a little bit of your time?" Lots of people contact VCs out of the blue; the referrals distinguished me from some crazy person."

The naive analysis of the early LinkedIn growth would probably go like this " LinkedIn had 4500 members after a month because Reid Hoffman had created a better product and had created a product that that people liked to use.", maybe "It had features for...", and probably "no one else had one key feature in particular." maybe ending with "users liked LinkedIn's [fill in the blank] feature(s) and they told their friends."

The naive analysis of his VC connections would probably be that they didn't really matter that much - maybe without them it would have taken him a bit more time to get LinkedIn (and his other projects) going but we know he would have gotten them going because we know he has the goods and the proof is out there in the real world with 50 million LinkedIn members. 50 million people can't be wrong.

But here is the thing. Social network sites are technically not that difficult to create. A reasonably competent programmer/web developer could probably create one on several weeks.

So this leads me to another theory entirely. Perhaps the key to LinkedIn's early growth was Hoffmans ability to influence others and Hoffmans reputation. Perhaps that often trumps product details. Perhaps LinkedIns grew from 350 to 4500 members in a month because Reid Hoffman had established a reputation as powerful or influential person and other people wanted to be linked to him. Perhaps in the beginning LinkedIn was just a mechanism to be linked to Reid Hoffman.

The key then if this is correct (and I think it is in some markets at some times) is to establish a reputation and generate a following.

I think the business press all to often anthropomorphize product features into the "key" to success of a product and underplay the value of the reputation and connectedness of the owners of the product. I suspect the analysis of LinkedIn that I have read is an example of this.

A fascinating case study is the growth of Google. At the time of Google's initial important growth, there were many competitors (Alta-Vista, HotBot, Infoseek, Yahoo, and many others). Many were doing the exact same things that Google was doing (page rankings of some sort or another). Many seemed to be well funded and well connected. The space was hot. But Google won the PR and influence game hands down. Google clearly managed to convince much of the VC communiuty and the press that "we are going to win" and "we have the momentum."

At a time (lets say 1998-2002 or so) when Google was just one of many search competitors they managed to convince key people in their space that they and they alone were "it". The momentum gained then has never been relinquished. But how did they gain it in the first place. I guess you would call that it the science of influence. Note: Google has clearly built great products over the years but a great product built by them in 2004 does not help them in 1998 (unless one of those products is a time machine). It's breathtaking that they were able to convince/influence so many key players during their rise (investors and press). In the early days I marveled how these guys could consistently get glowing nationwide press when it looked like they had nothing more than anyone else. In some cases less. In retrospect they did not have anything really noteworthy in 1999 (look at the history of AltaVista, HotBot and others to verify that Google was actually behind those guys in 1999.) But clearly they were winning the "back room" game. They were getting the press and they were getting the infusions of capital. They had convinced key decision makers in their space that they were where it was at. I'm sure books will be written about this. Those books will probably say something like "the capital came looking and found a great product". I think the reality of it may be more like "they figured out how to get capital and press when others could not and then built a great company"

Next key point in the Hoffman interview: "but I knew people who knew VCs." The power of connections. Hoffman notes that if you approach VC people directly you tend to get rejected. To get anywhere you generally need an introduction. The mother of all introductions in the tech world is of course Bill Gates 's introduction as a teenager to IBM chairman John Akers by his mother who served on United Way's board of directors - alongside Akers. Did this give Microsoft an advantage when they "sold" DOS to IBM on terms no other company got before or since? I think the answer is obvious. Did it help that Gates's father was/is an intellectual property Lawyer? I think the answer is obvious. In the case off Hoffman, we (me at least) do not know the nature of his initial VC connections back in the 90's. Were they people he met and cultivated in college?, friends of his family? We don't know. What we do know is that they were and are important.

We know of course that that George W. Bush famously leveraged his connections in various ways throughout his life.

Can anyone play this game or are facts of birth and luck predominant. Very interesting question.

This post is not meant to disparage Reid Hoffman, Google, Bill Gates or even Bush. It's meant to explore the way our world actually works - in the very important realm of success (or failure). I mean that is important isn't it!? The picture that you look at the process is not sometimes pretty - maybe not ugly either but perhaps messy. Messy and complicated. If you want to be successful how much time should you spend on things we would describe as "work" vs. social networking and managing your reputation. In some jobs social networking and managing reputation(s) is the job. Interesting difficult quesitons.



In closing, it's not ironic at all that it's important to be networked to create a successful social networking site!







The recent fascinating book "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell gets into some of this