MacGyver Factor: The Best Entrepreneurs Work Miracles
Like anything in life, entrepreneurs come in differing shades of talent: poor, average, good and great. What makes the greatest that way? The answer may come as sweet or sour news.
Some entrepreneurs are great at recognizing opportunity. Others have a feeling for putting a team together. Still others know where the money sleeps and how to wake it. But For VC Jeff Bussgang, a general partner at Flybridge Capital and a Harvard Business School entrepreneur-in-residence, greatness equals resourcefulness. The ability to make something out of nothing.
To work miracles.
Here is what he tells the Harbus, the independent student newspaper at HBS.
"I think the thing that really distinguishes great entrepreneurs from others that I've noticed is that they're able to do things that by rights, they should never be able to do or achieve. So every now and then one of my entrepreneurs will surprise me and just blow me away. I think you didn't have the resources or means to accomplish what you did. That ability to do the miracles, to do these audacious things and actually pull it off and surprise me, that is what I really value with the entrepreneurs I work with."I know entrepreneurs for whom this observation is crushing. They know how to pitch a business plan or carve out a founder's exit strategy in their sleep. But when faced with a problem whose solution is not immediately evident from their experience, they go blank.
How high is your "ability to blow me away" quotient? Is your miracle making up to snuff? Are you more MacGyver than Machine? Then you just might have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.