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Ask HN: Can you be a successful entrepreneur without being passionate?

9 points by pringle ↗ HN
Is it possible to successfully pursue an opportunity that you aren't passionate about?

Have you done it? Are there examples out there of people who have done it?

9 comments

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pg
Yes. I wouldn't say we were passionate about Viaweb. We found some of the technical challenges interesting, we liked the idea of helping our users, we wanted to make money, we didn't want to have bosses, and we didn't want to seem like failures to our friends. But we weren't jumping up and down about e-commerce.

What I did want passionately was (a) to get enough money to be free to do what I wanted, and (b) not to fail. The latter alone is probably enough of a motivator for most people who would make good founders.

nreece
Isn't failure an essential catalyst for eventual success? I want to succeed, but I also want to fail.
pg
I don't think it's essential. When we invest in people's first startups, we're not doing it just to fund their personal growth. We hope the startups will actually succeed.
nreece
I wasn't referring to YC, but your personal endeavour with Viaweb. When you say that you were/are passionate about not failing, I was wondering if you rationally consider failure to be an essential catalyst for eventual success?!
andreyf
I was wondering if you rationally consider failure to be an essential catalyst for eventual success?!

I don't see any rational reason for failure to cause success. There might be a correlation, since failure might be correlated with experience, and experience with success.

Tawheed
I think this is a common misconception in the startup community right now. I'm not reallys sure why, because logically speaking, the longer you survive (i.e. succeed), the more scenarios and learning experiences you can go through.

Whereas, if you fail, it's GAME OVER. You're just going to to go through the same experience once again.

patio11
I don't know if I'm successful or not for your definition of successful, but I do know that I don't consider my project much more interesting than toothpaste. The business, on the other hand, I'm passionate about.
whatusername
Have you ever read 'the millionaire next door'? While it had a slightly different use of entrepreneur than HN - he wasn't in any way talking about high tech - his point was that the typical millionaire ran their own business - and it was usually something boring (eg Dry Cleaning, Construction, etc).

It's worth a read.

scorpioxy
I think that depends on your definition of successful. If you mean make a lot of money, then yes you can do it without passion.

If you mean "waking up with a purpose" successful, then I think passion is a must.