The title of this post is not just a maxim used in business and entrepreneurship (or just life even), it's also the title of a book written by Randall Lane, the editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine who I had the opportunity to meet in 2015 at the Forbes U30 Summit.
There's something about the saying "You only have to be right once" that resonates with me deeply and is almost like a mantra - it's what I cling on to, what I choose to believe when I think of the insane journey I have had in building tech startups. The hardest part is even though you know you only have to be right just once, you might never find that "just once", but the entrepreneurial spirit demands that you keep on pushing, trying, iterating, pivoting till you "are right".
Anyway, I'd like to tell you guys a little about meeting Randall Lane and reading his book back in 2015 - my friend and I were in the US for a month or so, and our first stop was Philadelphia to attend the Forbes U30 summit. Our AirBnB hosts were Van and Amy (for some reason I can't seem to forget their names) who were super nice and happened to be book collectors. After settling in I decided to check out some of the books they had and I stumbled on Randall Lane's book (I think it was the gold/yellow on the cover of the book that caught my eye) and immediately I started perusing.
Incidentally, Van and Amy had attended the previous U30 summit and were willing to allow me take the book with me to the summit.
On the first day they had Elizabeth Holmes (yes, her), Aaron Levie (Founder of Box), The Collison brothers (Founders of Stripe and the guys who bought Paystack) and I think Sean Rad (Foudner of Tinder) too was on the first day. We networked a lot, learned a lot, made a few friends and enjoyed the food village. Also there's Kelly Osborne, infact she walks right past me when she arrives, strutting in with her signature goth look.
During one of the breaks, I'm gallivanting through the very large corridor when I spot Randall Lane, and as fate would have it, I'm holding his book in my hand - perfect time to say hi! I walk up to him and say hi, he says hi back and points to his book in my hand and goes "Ohh nice, hope you're enjoying it..". I can't explain how cool that moment was, I had a wry smile till the end of the day.
So the book - it's about several tech entrepreneurs and their success stories, about how they tried and failed with different ideas before finding the one that worked and how you need just one of your ideas to work to become hugely successful - you see, most of the time when you see a successful entrepreneur (whether in tech or not), it's super unlikely that they succeeded with their first idea, most of the time it's the third or fourth idea or even the 11th! (Remember Jason Njoku and Bastian's story?). Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y-Combinator) once said that at YC, the media loves to sell the narrative of really young successful founders building successful YC companies, but in reality most of the successful alumni are folks who have worked on several ideas. This is not to say that there aren't guys who build successful companies quite young or at their first attempt, but statistics show that they are by far the exception.
So Randall Lane goes on to discuss a few founders in the book - here are a few whose stories I already knew about before reading the book:
1. Drew Houston (founder of Dropbox) worked on a failed exam prep idea before starting Dropbox
2. Sean Parker built Napster which got destroyed with lawsuits and had to shut down - he then joined the Facebook team and helped Daniel Ek make Spotify what it is today.
3. Travis Kalanick (first CEO of Uber) had worked on Red Swoosh and another idea (that both failed eventually) before meeting Garret Camp and starting Uber.
Personally, I've met tons of founders in Nigeria who built several companies before finding the right one - most recently I met one such founder last year at the local airport in Lagos while traveling to Abuja - he told me how he had worked on several ideas in various capacities before eventually founding his current one which was doing extremely well and had raised over a million dollars.
Like I said earlier, it's absolutely possible for you to succeed with your first idea/business, and you shouldn't go into it thinking you will fail, rather you should start believing you'd succeed and if you don't, well, you'd have learned a lot (hopefully).
There's a lot more that can be said about markets, team, product-market fit, distribution, raising funds etc but I can't do all that in this post.
My journey so far has been interesting - I've been humbled by all I've learned and I'm excited by all there still is to learn.
On some days I'm pretty sure I've lost my mind, I keep asking myself "who sent me message", then I fall deep into the chasm, the sunken place, then I quickly snap out of it and keep firing forward. Moonlighting has made it way easier for me, and with a well paying tech role, you even become your own angel investor ;-))
I almost didn't come back to Nigeria in 2015, I had the option of staying in the US and abandoning tech startups for good - but I'm glad I came back, if I hadn't there would probably be no TwoCents and you won't be reading this.
Now if you're reading this it's because I and my co-founder believe that TwoCents is the one we will be right with - we've both worked on things that didn't work out, but we keep pushing, working hard and smart, listening to feedback and giving it all we've got...
..because you only have to be right once.
Thanks for reading!