Being a founder, leader and entrepreneur means...
- Having a vision for how the future should be and pouring your very heart and soul into pulling it into the present
- Ignoring the rules - making big bold bets
- Looking at problems, and solutions, differently
- Knowing what people need, not what they think they want
- Thinking past any given decision or quarter to the ultimate vision and mission
- Making mistakes, learning from them, making them again
- Being the boss + being camp councilor
- Making big decisions - fast forwarding to the future
- Reminding people to let go of their fear - by demonstrating optimistic leadership and giving them permission to dream and agency to act
- Trusting your people to be entrepreneurs - to encourage them to always be hustling
- Hoping your work will speak for itself - being inside out
- Having the weight of the world, and your employees, on your shoulders
- Wearing your heart on your sleeve, but not letting people see you get defeated or emotional
- Begging others for funding - while posturing that you don't need it
- Dealing with investors whose incentives are never properly aligned with your own (and that's if you're lucky)
- Dealing with people who don't know how to be entrepreneurs
- Dealing with those on the sidelines who snark and jeer - substituting pessimism for insight; conventional wisdom for actual wisdom.
- Riding the rollercoaster that takes you from high, highs to low, lows within hours
- Getting all the blame
- Getting much of the up-side (Hopefully)
- Risking everything
- Often getting little of the praise
- Often putting your company, team and vision ahead of everything else.
- Being alone
Being an entrepreneur also means evolving as fast your company does. Being the leader it deserves. But when your company evolves from 0-world domination within 6 years (largely thanks to your own relentless focus, firefighting and hustle)... I don't think there's an entrepreneur alive who can evolve that fast. Nor should they be expected to. There's also not an entrepreneur alive who, once placed under a microscope, will come out looking like the hero of every encounter, incident and decision.
Ultimately, though, being a founder and entrepreneur means it's your damn company. No one else's.
Unless you have lived this (and not as part of a lifestyle business with a few employees - but with 50+ employees backed by venture capital, with real customers and years of personal, emotional investment on the line) then you can not understand it.
Travis embodied (and in some cases taught) me these things. There wasn't a moment or a minuscule detail that he noticed that he didn't immediately spring into action to help me solve - with that wry smile and enthusiastic glint in his eye
The cost of losing him as Uber's CEO will be incalculable.