Startup CEOs should not play the odds

I’m in the middle of the book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, by Ben Horowitz, and I LOVE IT. It will almost definitely make my list of books I recommend.

The above quote is spot on about the mindset that a CEO / entrepreneur must have. People mistake this mindset – not paying attention to the odds – as optimism. It is not the same. I am a very optimistic person by nature, and there is great power in optimism, but this is something different.

When you are guiding a business to grow survive, you have to believe that you can defy the odds and sometimes will your company to stay alive. It’s hard to understand what I mean by this without actually doing it, but the stories that Ben tells in this book are great examples of this mindset.

At the end of the day, if entrepreneurs played the odds, they’d never start a business in the first place.