It’s incredibly hard to trace the success of any business, product, or project down to the skill of the founders. There’s plenty of correlation, but not much causation.
That’s a scary thought to a lot of people: What if my success isn’t based solely on my talent and hard work, but rather my lucky timing or stumbling across an under-served market by happenstance? What if I’m just a one-hit wonder!?
And I say, so what? So what if you are? I, for one, am completely at peace with the idea that Basecamp might very well be the best product I’ll ever be involved with. Or that Ruby on Rails might be the peak of my contributions to technology.
What about my life would be any different if I could truly trace down the success to personal traits of wonder? Even if I somehow did have a “magic touch” — and I very much believe that I don’t — why would I want to leave those ventures, just to prove that I could do it again?
Yet that siren song calls many a founder, entrepreneur, and star employee. The need to prove they’re not a one-hit wonder. That they’re really that good because they could do it again and again.
For every Elon Musk, there are undoubtedly thousands of people who left their one great idea to try again and fell flat on their faces, unable to go back to the shine and the heyday of that original success, and worse off for it in pride, blood, and treasure.
Life is short. Move on if you don’t love what you’re doing. But don’t ever leave a great thing just because you want to prove to others or yourself that you’re not a one-hit wonder.
Marc Baumbach
on 30 May 14“Or that Ruby on Rails might be the peak of my contributions to technology.”
I think that might be a decent legacy to leave. :)
One of the biggest things to remember is to never stop doing what you love, regardless if it means stepping out of the limelight or never getting into it in the first place. Build what you need and want, share when you can, and only good things can come from it.
Jacob
on 30 May 14@DHH
And I say, so what? So what if you are? I, for one, am completely at peace with the idea that Basecamp might very well be the best product I’ll ever be involved with. Or that Ruby on Rails might be the peak of my contributions to technology.
—
Hopefully you’re not implying that your ambition to create new and exciting things has stopped.
Venki
on 30 May 14Life is short. Move on if you don’t love what you’re doing. But don’t ever leave a great thing just because you want to prove to others or yourself that you’re not a one-hit wonder.”
Life is short.. That strikes hard. Very nice way of saying do what you are passionate about and ignore the noise of the world. How does it matter even if you are a one-hit wonder as long as you are passionate and making a difference …
Rob Cameron
on 30 May 14Methinks a recent departure may have prompted this post…
DHH
on 30 May 14Jacob, for me, improving and polishing existing things and concepts is at least as exciting as “new”. There’s always more to work on.
Arturo Hernandez
on 30 May 14Yet, you do spend time thinking about it. I have been in a similar circumstance. And I don’t think there is a simple answer. I do think it is very important to keep growing. If you can stay where you are and grow in different ways then you may be fine. The problem with growth is that, you may need to be in an uncomfortable position for some time. Otherwise you are staying too close to home. Creating another product may be a path to growth, but trying out newer technologies may be another. Anyway, I may be talking about myself as much as you are.
Anthony Chan
on 30 May 14There are entrepreneurs who only enjoy the startup scene while there are also entrepreneurs who love seeing their startup to grow and become an enterprise. A serial entrepreneur is no better than an entrepreneur who grow his/her business with pride.
Andrew Fallows
on 30 May 14I’d rather be a one-hit wonder than a zero-hit wonder. I’m still working on crossing that bridge.
David Miller
on 30 May 14Two things …
First, I am a co-founder of a very successful SaaS company and I left day-to-day on January 3, 2011. Since then, I’ve watched (from my seat on the Board) the company grow dramatically without me and so I naturally struggle with this issue daily – what if I am a one-hit wonder – and, unfortunately, I do not have an adequate answer.
All I have come up with so far is that life does not always move up-and-to-the-right like a successful business does. There are periods where it moves sideways and even, unfortunately, backwards. What I’ve learned is that you need to just keep moving, and to judge progress not in relation to what you’ve done in the past, but in relation to what you’re doing with the opportunities now in front of you, which takes time.
Those opportunities will be different and require you to measure them differently, just like the metrics for a startup are different than the metrics for a late-stage company. After a rousing success like mine, or like Basecamp’s, I’m not a “startup” anymore, so I’ve needed to think differently.
And second, this type of question only applies to Founders. I don’t believe it applies to employees. Founders have more influence and control over far more areas of the company than any employee ever can, no matter how early they joined the company. It’s not a fair question to be using to compare their contributions or whether they can contribute at that level again. I think it’s far more likely they can.
GeeIWonder
on 30 May 14Once you have a moderate to big success, you should be able to throw the dice more often in different and leverage intangibles in your process, network, and resources to. If you can’t succeed at a higher rate than your competitors, you’re probably getting worse at identifying what works and what doesn’t—effectively you are working to decrease your odds, like a very poor card counter does in Vegas.
So, y’know, no big deal but maybe you should go easy on shilling books about business practices or the like in that case.
This depends heavily on the structures involved, and since you are making a distinction between other employees (and some structures basically fast track ‘founders’ to employee and investors) you might want to separate the ‘Founders’ role into a couple of more relevant ones if you like that line of thought/discussion enough to want to talk a lot about it (as you apparently do!).
Michael
on 30 May 14GeeIWonder’s first point is true for a certain definition of success, but it’s hard to do truly great things more than once. The reason is that successful people can find it difficult to try things that were worth trying when they had nothing. Instead, they try to do things right the first time which isn’t really how great things happen. There’s a good talk by Dick Hamming of Bell Labs fame on his experiences and observations about this subject.
That said, I remember David arguing with Jason Calacanis about this and thought Jason C. made good points as well.
Miti
on 02 Jun 14Basecamp and other ROR projects are amazing
Paul Kaplan
on 02 Jun 14I believe this is called Imposter Syndrome, and it is actually fairly significant psychological issue.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
Denis
on 03 Jun 14@dhh This entire thought is premised on the assumption that you can only love one thing at any given moment in your life. Thus, in the same logic, Steve Jobs would never venture to start Pixar.
Jeff O
on 05 Jun 14When some partnerships go sour, there is a tendency to want to prove you can make it without them.
This discussion is closed.