Qualities for Success

Yicheng Xia

Bill Rossi

ENT 3003

14 July 2015

Qualities for Success

        For start-up companies, it would require many important qualities for the entrepreneurs to get the company successful in the future. In my opinion, some of the qualities are more significant than others. If I am going to join an entrepreneurial start-up company, there are some specific qualities I will look for, and the first quality I would look for is foresight.

        As a start-up company, no matter what industry it is in, it will need business opportunities to survive and then develop. The entrepreneurial leader must have the ability to see the opportunity. He or she must have the ability to foresee or even create the demand of customers. Foresight is not based on guessing or intuitive judgement, but based on the collecting and analyzing of the market data. It requires a lot of knowledge about the market and the industry that the company will get in. As an example, Warren Buffett definitely have the foresight that will make a company successful. As an investor, he reaches out to find the companies that he thinks will be successful in the future base on his abundant knowledge and experience, and then researches and analysis the company’s historical performance and strategy before he makes the investment. Sometimes he even talks to the staffs in the company that he is interested in to get more information about the company. People might think Buffett predicts the future, but actually he makes his investment decisions based on his research. That is where his foresight comes from. If a start-up entrepreneurial leader what to make his company success, this is what he or she must learn.

        The second quality I will be looking for is executive ability. Some people think it is good ideas that will make a company successful. The fact that most successful start-up companies are in traditional industries might surprise them. Even in the high tech industries, an idea without executive ability is not enough. Mark Zuckerberg may not be the first person who comes up with an idea about Facebook or similar websites, but he is the first person have the executive to make the website come true and makes his company one of the biggest companies in the world. Actually he was sued by other people for the reason that he “stolen” their idea. But it doesn’t change the fact that he is the creator of Facebook. There is a movie called “Social Network”, which is basically a documentary about the creation process of Facebook, showing how executive ability is a more important fact than a simple idea. When the Winklevoss twins, who sued Mark Zuckerberg for “stolen” their idea later, first came up with the idea of a social network, they basically did nothing about it. They spend their time on studying and training crew. In the meantime, when Mark came up with the idea, he went straightly to start coding. It shows in the movie that when Mark Zuckerberg came up with an idea of a new function of the website, he rushed out of the classroom in his shorts while it was snowing outside. When the Winklevoss twins were training, they were told that Facebook was already online. When they reached out for lawyer, Facebook had went to Yale, Columbia and Stanford. When they went to the president of Harvard, Facebook had reached 29 schools. When they went to England for a competition, Facebook had already gotten to other continents. The Winklevoss twins might have the same idea as Mark Zuckerberg has, but they never got as successful as Mark was. That definitely shows how important executive ability is and why would I looking for it if I want to join an entrepreneurial start-up.