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A comment on Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business.

Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by DavidWanjiru on Friday September 04, 2015 @11:03AM (#10170911)
I say build a company. Go where it takes you. If it takes you to a billion dollars, fine. If it takes you to a million, fine. If you aim to achieve a given number, I suggest you question why your ego, as opposed to your business, needs you to achieve that number. Are you aiming to become number one or two in your business because you have substantive reasons, or is it becaused you once read about Jack Welch saying GE businesses had to be number one or two, and you took that message to heart for no other reason except Jack Welch said it? Are you aiming for the low millions coz you have a substantive reason for it, or are you doing it simply coz you admire Paul Graham who exited at those low millions and you want to be like Paul Graham when you grow up? Life is fluid, people and businesses change, goal posts get shifted all the time, businesses that shunned evil start being evil. These are just the places where businesses take people. Go where yours takes you. And if you don't like where it takes you, then by all means come back, shift your goal posts. Change your sport, even, if that's where your business takes you.
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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by AndrewKemendo on Friday September 04, 2015 @12:45PM (#10171522)
No one accidentally builds a Billion dollar business - so it's not the case that it just leads you there by default, you need to choose to be that size.

At the same time though, you are right in the market leading nature of it. That is, while building your business the opportunity might arise that you can shift what you are doing and that shift would open up your market to a larger opportunity. Alternatively you could choose not to shift and go for a smaller win.

Why I take issue with the original post is because it is basically saying, if it looks like there is a market opportunity to make a billion dollar company, don't take it.

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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by arbuge on Friday September 04, 2015 @01:28PM (#10171775)
>> No one accidentally builds a Billion dollar business

Actually some do. The classic example is Google's founders - they tried to exit to Yahoo! for a million or so, but were turned down.

Perhaps "accidentally" is not the word. Of course, it's not accidental - tons of hard work is involved. But many people never dream of building a billion dollar business, and a few of them still get there.

More importantly, focusing on building a billion dollar business might not be productive. It might actually distract you from doing what customers would like you to do.

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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by AndrewKemendo on Friday September 04, 2015 @01:45PM (#10171863)
This gets the point backward. Again, it's not that they set out to create a billion dollar business. Certainly at one point they were trying for a smaller exit.

The key point though is that, somewhere between their Yahoo pitch and today Sergei and Larry made the decision to grow to the $B scale. I think it was when Eric came on actually was when that shift happened.

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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by kristianc on Friday September 04, 2015 @02:20PM (#10172037)
The creation of AdWords must have been a key moment in that, surely? If Auletta's book is to be believed, there were long periods where any kind of revenue at all out of Google would have been cause for celebration.
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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by speeder on Friday September 04, 2015 @12:52PM (#10171566)
> No one accidentally builds a Billion dollar business

Mojang?

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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by AndrewKemendo on Friday September 04, 2015 @01:00PM (#10171616)
Nope. Mojang CEO Carl Manneh made a conscious decision to push Markus to sell to MSFT after Markus was starting to get burned out. Mojang could have stayed small, reorganized and kept moving forward but they decided to go for a big win and sell to MSFT.

So it wasn't an accident, as it happens it lined up so that interests aligned for the buyout.

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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by crazy1van on Friday September 04, 2015 @01:12PM (#10171688)
The decision to sell to Microsoft may have been conscious, but what about all of the other decisions that got them to the point where they could get a big sale? I'm talking about the years prior of building and selling Minecraft. I don't think those decisions were made with a billion dollar exit in mind -- and really those are the ones that count the most.
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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by AndrewKemendo on Friday September 04, 2015 @01:43PM (#10171851)
The point is not that they decided "we are going to be a billion dollar company" and then chased it to get the MSFT acquisition. It's that when given options about which way to take it they took the Billion dollar route consciously instead of choosing to not sell and stay small - which again is how I read the article to promote.
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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by gozo on Friday September 04, 2015 @03:26PM (#10172384)
When talking about startups "a billion dollar company" usually means valuation. Considering Mojangs profitability they were probably a billion dollar company in early 2012.
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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by TillE on Friday September 04, 2015 @01:09PM (#10171666)
That's just how it was sold for billions. Mojang was built into a massively profitable company without ever really intending to do that.
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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by deelowe on Friday September 04, 2015 @01:38PM (#10171829)
The decision to sell was a result of the valuation not the reason for it.
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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by DavidWanjiru on Friday September 04, 2015 @01:57PM (#10171930)
While I wouldn't say Larry Page and Sergey Brin have built google into a multi-billion dollar company by accident, I'd imagine they weren't thinking billions when they tried to sell their prototype to yahoo (they did try to sell what they'd built to yahoo or alta vista, did they not?). They set out to make webpages easy to find. Now they are onto a much bigger mission. At any rate that's what they say. That's the sense in which I mean being led somewhere by your company.
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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by ryanelfman on Friday September 04, 2015 @12:34PM (#10171467)
Great post with great perspective. I feel like a lot of the self-help community is responsible for the ego boost people get.
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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by amatic on Friday September 04, 2015 @12:38PM (#10171490)
Yeah, agreed. There was a wonderful website called "Guru ratings" where this guy read a whole bunch of self-helf literature and rated them and posted a short review. Can't find the site now, seems to be down. edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20110820085531/http://lukeprog.c...
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Re:Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business by ryanelfman on Friday September 04, 2015 @07:25PM (#10173281)
That's a damn good find!
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