It happens all the time. You hear and read stories about a whizzkid who coded a piece of code that changed the world. The code could be software (Bill Gates) or a website (Zuckerberg and Facebook), anything that can be coded. Everyone loves these guys! Hey, who doesn’t? They are heroes! Their piece of code grew to control the world. It was them who did it. THEM!
Truth is, the public face of the company is just that, the public face of the company.
An entrepreneur can be the founder of his company that makes him a billionaire or the richest man in the world and the public face of the company, but what gets him there is “the company” he works with.
Believe it or not, Microsoft has two co-founders but Bill Gates is on everyone’s lips. Everyone “knows” that only Bill Gates started Microsoft.
Many people think Bill Gates started the company and he started employing people because he had made so much money.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
There are many people who worked at Microsoft and on Microsoft products when Microsoft was just a product and a startup that was not generating any money.
Many even talk about Richard Branson as though he is some one man Rambo who just makes it happen.
Truth is, that is not the case. The man has a whole team of people working at Virgin who make Virgin the success it is and Sir Richard a billionaire that he is.
Apple has three co-founders. It was founded by three guys. Two Steves and one guy. Steve Jobs is the most prominent of them and his face is the face of Apple.
Everyone knows that Facebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg. I mean come on, who doesn’t know it?
Well, the truth is that Facebook actually has five co-founders.
Yeah sure, Mark Zuckerberg started coding it, but Facebook was actually founded by five guys.
One of the myths perpetrated by Silicon Valley propagandists is that successful tech entrepreneurs only work with tech people. Another one is that Silicon Valley is only for tech entrepreneurs. That is not true.
You can strike Silicon Valley gold even as a marketer.
Microsoft made many millionaires out of employees who were not techies.
The outgoing CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, studied economics and had some marketing jobs before joining Microsoft when Microsoft was just a startup. Ballmer got shares (share options) as part of the package to join Microsoft, which happens a lot in Silicon Valley. Today Steve Ballmer is a multibillionaire. All it boils down to is exceptional talent, and maybe even who knows you.
There are many people behind the scenes who contribute to every rich technology entrepreneur’s success.
This is something important to know because sometimes you may just keep hiring techies thinking they know it all or you don’t need marketers, accountants, and HR specialists etc. It’s also important to know, so that you can really think about studying what you are good at in school rather than just forcing yourself to study tech for which you have zero aptitude just because Mark Zuckerberg was studying computer science when he founded Facebook.
Take Mo Ibrahim.
An African, he started Celtel and sold it for US$3.5 billion. Mo Ibrahim did not go around erecting every base station all by himself, designing adverts, selling the airtime on his own throughout the country, counting the money, hiring people, and negotiating contracts all by himself.
No, there are people who did that. His success and the success of Celtel was a collective effort.
Even Bill Gates had to leave “legal” to the lawyers and accounting to the accountants.
(I just have to say this. You don’t just start off hiring people just to have experts when you cannot afford them. You will have to be methodical in your approach to growth. For example, if you cannot afford an accountant you can always hire an accounting firm to do your books or maybe even buy accounting software and learn how to use it.)
(Edited 5 September 2015)
Note: I originally posted this post on my Facebook page today under the title There Is Always an Unsung Hero: Explaining the Mythology behind the Super-Powers of Technology Entrepreneurs.
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