What’s the best way to become a billionaire in the 21st century?
Start a tech company in Silicon Valley, of course!
Actually, it turns out that entrepreneurship is an unlikely road to riches for most.
With famous Silicon Valley successes like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs now household names, it’s easy to imagine that starting your own company is a relatively easy way to make millions.
But even in Silicon Valley, the tech start-up capital of the world, there are no guarantees. Most new start-ups fail, whether they liquidate soon after beta testing or limp on in obscurity for years. In fact, some experts predict that the start-up failure rate in Silicon Valley alone is over 90%.
Silicon Valley’s oft-quoted mantra is “fail fast, fail often.” Entrepreneurs are encouraged to not waste too much time on planning, but jump into testing as soon as possible, quickly proving whether their ideas will survive. The knowledge and experience they gain from failures, it’s said, is necessary for their eventual success.
But plenty of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are discovering that failures don’t automatically pave the road to riches. A history strewn with failed start-ups is just as likely to turn away investors as it is to grant you wisdom.
Even so, there are plenty of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who’ve achieved their dreams despite all the odds. The sheer amount of wealth concentrated in Silicon Valley makes even millionaires feel like nobodies: when compared to the giants of Silicon Valley, a couple of million dollars suddenly doesn’t sound like much.
Surrounded by dying start-ups and failures, how did these billionaires of Silicon Valley get to where they are now?
It may seem at first glance that the women and men on this list don’t have much in common. They hail from all over the globe, with vastly different backgrounds and levels of education. Their companies deal with everything from social networks and online dating to enterprise software and file sharing.
But despite all their differences, they all share some factors that helped them get to the successes they’ve reached today. Check out the graphic below to discover their advice on how you can find your own success in the world of start-ups, too.
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