Entrepreneurship

Wisdom is about pattern recognition. It’s time for investors to recognize a pattern that is destroying value and making a mess of companies. The start-up game isn’t the same as the keep-it-up game. Start-ups are full of idealism and chutzpah, charisma and hubris. But, these blitzkrieg tactics wear thin when the keep-it-up game requires diplomacy with regulators, humility with competitors and clients, empathy with employees, and stamina to run further than a start-up sprint.

Lost and clueless. That’s what I felt six months after I launched my boutique hotel company at age 26. I had quickly renovated the “no-tell motel” we’d bought in a dodgy San Francisco neighborhood—partly due to my putting a beer keg in the courtyard each weekend, so my friends would come over and help paint the place (learned a thing or two from Tom Sawyer).