RIP OVERNIGHT SUCCESS STORY
Transformation can be something humans are naturally averse to, but to stagnate means almost certain death for a business. In this era, change is a constant, whether it’s applying new technologies, revamping the ways products are built or sold, changing the way information is managed, or rethinking a workplace culture. So how do we get comfortable with the everincreasing rate of change? Perhaps by accepting that good things take time, refinement and adaptation, unlike this digital world would have us believe.
A study by the Journal of Economic Psychology found that resilience – which was defined as ‘hardiness, resourcefulness and optimism’ – helped to predict entrepreneurial success. As Vaughan Fergusson writes on page 81, Vend was a 10-year ‘overnight success’ and the charity he launched to help kids learn technology, the Pam Fergusson Charitable Trust, is a five-year ‘overnight success’. He says both of these ventures had multiple staring-into-the-abyss moments that didn’t quite get captured in the narrative. The path to success is inevitably paved with failure, it’s just shadowed by the myth of this overnight success story. In this issue, you’ll find stories from entrepreneurs that have gone through all sorts of transformations: investments, expansions, exits, personal struggles, career changes, upheavals to new countries, and ventures into brandnew industries. This includes Predict HQ founder Campbell Brown beating the pavements in Silicon Valley for a year before he landed investment
(page 46) to head of delivery at Trade Me Diana Minnee being told she’d ruined her hopes of a career by getting pregnant at 17, but persevering anyway (page 71) to Soul Machines co-founder Greg Cross saying if there’s one thing he’d do differently, it would be accepting his mistakes as part-and-parcel of the entrepreneur’s journey, as they are critical to being good at what you do (page 38), to Bryony Cole introducing sextech as a whole new industry to the world (page 63). These people have all achieved success on the national and international world stage, but the common thread connecting all of them they were tenacious and kept evolving and moving forward, even in the face of failure.
This doesn’t mean we should glamourise failure as a badge of honour, either. But New Zealand’s attitude to failure – and its ugly cousin, tall poppy syndrome – has something to answer for here in cultivating this myth. So like tech entrepreneur Robett Hollis’ #RIPTallPoppy call out, I’m adding another death to the mix: RIP to the overnight success story. It does a disservice to all the founders out there shedding blood, sweat and tears into their ventures. Instead, let’s reconfigure what success looks like by being more realistic about what happens in that invisible journey towards it.
Speaking of journeys, we're on one to help revive the wool industry with the New Zealand Merino Company through the Wool-ovation Competition. We put it to the people to reinvent an everyday object using strong wool and if the huge range of ideas put forward were anything to go by, this age-old fibre is definitely in for a resurgence. View all the finalists on page 40.