I did not set out to build a big company. I actually wanted to be a software designer. I saw having a company not exactly as being a necessary evil, but there wasn't a good alternative. My experience had convinced me that being a program author and having somebody else publish it wouldn't give me enough control over the process. In Hollywood, the v

Forty-niners took on a lot of risk and worked extremely hard, but they had a literal pot of gold as the motivation. The Traitorous Eight stumbled across their pot of gold. They were really just looking for a new job. It hadn’t occurred to them that they could start something new themselves, something they owned.

This was the second statistically significant difference I observed in my data comparing the billion-dollar and random group. The founders of billion-dollar companies were more likely to either work for themselves or to work at a tier-one company.

There’s no right or wrong in deciding where to work to prepare you for your own entrepreneurial journey. On average, founders of billion-dollar companies had eleven years of work experience before founding. They were more likely either to have started companies throughout their career or to have worked at brand-name corporations like Google, McKins