SUCCESSFUL STARTups taken by ELON MUSK
Elon Musk, one the most successful founders in today's business world is sharing his advice for entrepreneurs that can provide them with valuable insights on how to become successful!
So what is an entrepreneur? Put simply the definition reads “a person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit”.
In fact, it’s the last part of that definition that is the most interesting because when you unpack the profile of an individual you get an insight into the fact that they share a trait that many successful people have – the desire to take a risk, of throwing caution to the wind and going all in. Sometimes they bet against the odds and win while in other cases they lose everything; but what makes entrepreneurs different is that invariably they learn lessons from the loss and start again, renewed, refreshed and much wiser.
1-Early Life
Elon Musk, one of the founders of PayPal is one such example. Musk was born on June 28th 1971 in what was then Apartheid era South Africa. Musk was fortunate enough to have been born into the right tribe with his grandfather being a British explorer and his mother of Canadian ancestry. When his parents divorced in 1980 Musk spent most of his time moving around South Africa with his father, Errol, who was an electromechanical engineer. When he was 10 years old he discovered the wonders of computing thanks to a Commodore VIC-20 and started to teach himself about programming. By age 12 he sold a BASIC listing for q video game he had developed called Blaster to a magazine for $500. After graduating high school he moved to Canada in 1989 just before he turned 18 and some have suggested that he did so to avoid having to serve in the South African Military. After transferring to the University of Pennsylvania he obtained a degree in physics before moving on to Stanford to being a PH.D in applied physics. Like many successful entrepreneurs he soon dropped out and began to work on some of his business ideas.
On the connection between physics and entrepreneurship Musk once said that: “[Physics is] a good framework for thinking … Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.”
2-The First Business Zip2
By 1995 Musk and his brother Kimbal started a web software company thanks to a $28,000 investment from their father. They developed a relatively straight forward product that acted as an online city guide for the newspaper sector. Musk proved to be a great salesman having secured contracts with the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune but soon had a falling out with the Board over the CEO’s role. Compaq eventually bought the company (Zip2) for US$ 307 million of which Musk received $22 million.
3-PayPal
In March of 1999 he went onto found a new online financial services and email payment company called X.com with $10 million of the money he had received from the sale of Zip2 and a year later the company merged with Confinity which had a product called PayPal; a money transfer service. By 2001 the companies merged and focussed on the Pay Pal brand. Like his time at Zip2 Musk was eventually forced out of the company after disagreements about the platform and architecture of the product and service. When PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in Stock Musk received $165 million.
4-Space X
By 2001 Musk already had plans for space and was also looking to Mars to establish a habitable human outpost. So committed was he to space travel he committed $100 million to the formation of SpaceX that, 14 years later, now manufactures launch vehicles that are being tested and used by organizations such as NASA.
As Musk’s mother once said “He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world. He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.”
Musk once said on space travel: “There’s a fundamental difference, if you look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that’s out there exploring the stars … compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.”
5-Tesla
But, it was in 2003 that Musk took a big gamble on the future of the car industry and decided it was ripe for disruption. Tesla Motors was born and while it has taken a while to get off the ground and the broader car industry poured scorn on him in the early years the things about entrepreneurs is they know how to play the long game. Today the company has laid out plans to expand its electric car charge stations across North America and Musk’s 32% share of the business is estimated to be worth about $18 billion.
On Tesla he once said: “If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.”