Give Luck a Chance
Give luck a chance. Create serendipity.
I heard this phrase again on twitter a few days back. Ironically, from the same person.
Ashish Gupta, https://twitter.com/Primevp_in/status/1296339689553575937?s=20
And one of the things that I have found that allows you to create exit opportunities is creating Serendipity. And that sounds like an oxymoron, but by that, I mean the CEO needs to constantly build relationships with all kinds of people in an ecosystem so that Serendipity has a chance to strike the company because a lot of acquisitions happen because people know you, people have heard of you and so on so so forth.
So building a steady stream of relationships, just like the CEO builds a steady stream of investor relationships, I have found to have a meaningfully positive correlation with acquisition options.
I heard it for the first time from Ashish himself, years ago. Back in the days when we were building Mygola, he was an investor into our company from his now-defunct fund, Helion Ventures.
I didn’t think about it too much back then. It sounded like a cool play of words and nothing more. But hearing it again now and thinking more about it this time, I find it deeply profound.
So many scientific discoveries have happened serendipitously.
Like the discovery of the synthetic dye. In the 1850s, a chemist named William Perkins was trying to create artificial quinine to treat Malaria. During one of his many failed experiments, he ended up with an incredibly unusual material that was purple (mauve) in color. Instead of throwing it away, he kept tinkering with the material to see what could be done with it and eventually ended up building the world’s first synthetic color dye.
The discovery of microwaves was an accident too. In 1946, Percy Spencer, an engineer working on radar related projects, was testing a new vacuum tube; he discovered that a chocolate bar in his pocket melted more quickly when he aimed the vacuum tube in that direction. He became intrigued and started experimenting by pointing the tube at other objects like egg and popcorns. It eventually led to the discovery of microwaves.
But these are by no means an anomaly; there are many recent examples too.
Twitter had initially wanted to build an audio podcasting app until they realized it was going nowhere, and Jack Dorsey created twitter over a hackathon. Slack originally set out to make a gaming engine but ended up building an internal communication tool. Instagram was building a foursquare-like checkin app, but people were sharing more photos than checking in; it led to today’s Instagram.
There is one thing common amongst all these examples; for these accidental successes to happen, they had to keep working at it persistently. Stuart Butterfield, Jack Dorsey, or Kevin Systrom could easily have shut their companies down, at the first sign of failure, and moved on to do other things in life. But they had the awareness and appreciation of the potential value of the unexpected learnings; they were open to exploring the possibilities that might even be tangential to the original goal. And that made all the difference.
That’s the point, I suppose. That such accidents happen quite often, but they don’t happen by chance. You have to carefully work towards creating conditions for them to happen and give the opportunity to that mysterious little thing called luck to shine.
You have to be willing to take a potential left turn on what you had otherwise imagined being a long straight road. And pursue it till the end.
And hope that Serendipity strikes somewhere along the way.
Best,
Kaddy