Could you be a successful entrepreneur? Three intriguing attributes might help

His firm, TVI, had funded Microsoft, Compaq, and other notable technology companies, but it was not these that McMurtry wished to talk about. Rather, he wanted to talk about the companies that did not succeed. He recalled that in the mid-1970s, having been in the business a number of years, he had become depressed because “out of ten start-ups, we

Steve Blank—a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Stanford professor—has a theory he calls “dysfunctional family theory.”[4] He says that good entrepreneurs “have similar personality

Leadership ability. If the entrepreneur is not a ninja-coder-saleswoman-finance wizard, then he or she needs to recruit other people to fill those roles. For a risky startup on a small budget, finding A+ players and then inspiring them to greatness is difficult, and much of the success or failure of the venture will come down to the leadership qual

Above all, strategic thinking, persistence, assertiveness, and being achievement-oriented, optimistic, and thick-skinned are the attributes most shared by successful entrepreneurs.

It turns out they have a lot in common. They are all independent thinkers who do not let anything or anyone stand in the way of achieving their audacious goals. They have very strong mental maps of how things should be done, and at the same time a willingness to test those mental maps in the world of reality and change the ways they do things to ma

It turns out that a lot of billion-dollar startup founders, like Xu, also lack this kind of direct work experience in the industry they are disrupting. Among billion-dollar companies, fewer than 50 percent of founding CEOs and fewer than 30 percent of founding CxOs had much, if any, work experience that directly related to their startups. This mean