The other day I pressed the Uber app on my cell phone for the first time.  As it opened, I became fascinated by its simplicity.  It showed me where the car was, how long it would take – six minutes – and the name of the driver as well as the type of car.  It also showed what the total cost would be.   Its simplicity was elegant.   Such elegance has created a private market value of 68 billion.  Unfortunately, its founder has been much in the news and none of it has been good let alone elegant.

But that’s because entrepreneurs are different from most of us.  They are very focused … almost obsessed.   Some know what they want to do early in life but most business opportunities are pure serendipity.   It’s being at the right place at the right time.  Uber is a case in point.   Travis Kalanick and his Uber partner, Garrett Camp, were out one night in Paris when it started snowing.  They had trouble getting a cab.  The idea for Uber was thus born.  But what if it hadn’t been snowing? 

Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman had started a sneaker business importing running shoes from Japan.  Knight would load his car with sneakers and visit school track meets selling the shoes.  He got so good at it his exporter wanted to buy the business outright. He said no and Asic, his exporter, stopped shipping the shoes.  He thought about becoming a CPA but fate intervened.  One Sunday morning, Bill Bowerman, turned down his wife’s entreaty to go to church.  As he stood alone in his kitchen making waffles, it occurred to him that you could make the same waffle effect on a rubber soled running shoe. Thus the modern running shoe was born.  But what if he had gone to church that morning?

David Overton was a wannabe drummer in San Francisco in 1975.  His parents owned a bakery in Beverly Hills called The Cheesecake Factory.   For whatever reason he decided his future was not going to be as a musician.  So he left San Francisco and headed to L.A. to help his parents by working in their bakery.  In 1978 he decided to open a restaurant in Beverly Hills with the hope of spreading the fame of the bakery’s cheesecake.  I met him when he had five restaurants in California. Today there are over 200 restaurants throughout the world and the company does two billion dollars in revenue. But what if he had decided to stay in San Francisco and pursue his musical passion?  After all, he was only 26. 

Two business consultants from Bain Capital, Chris Zook and James Allen, wrote a book about entrepreneurship titled “The Founders Mentality.”  As the title suggests, they maintain there is a clear difference in the mindset of a public company founder versus a corporate executive.  Founders have an obsession with detail.   They feel that they own the business.  And psychologically, they still do.   I saw this at a Cheesecake Factory in Boston.  At the time, it was a billion dollar company.  David Overton, the founder, came into the restaurant and went behind the bakery counter.  He then pulled out a bottle of Windex and proceeded to clean the glass on the front showcase holding the cakes.

 The Bain Capital authors found that when a founder is still involved in a public company, the return to shareholders is three times that of other companies.  I wasn’t surprised.  Are you?

Francis Patrick Boland