Redefining Success: I Made $5 Million in Revenue and Still “Failed”

The Chase Jarvis LIVE Show

Chase Jarvis

Celebrity, Art, Career, Creativity, Money, Entrepreneurship, Self-improvement, Education, Careers, Writing, Interview, Investment, Influencer, Business, Photography

4.8 • 641 Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2024

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, I share my eye-opening experience about what success truly means in the startup world. For years, I prided myself on always finding a way to win, whether in sports, school, or work. But my experience with startup culture completely changed my perspective on success. I thought we were killing it with $5 million in annual revenue, but from a venture capitalist's perspective, we were failing at being a unicorn. This humbling experience taught me that success isn't about meeting others' expectations—it's about defining our own success and playing the game we want to play.

Some highlights we explore:

The venture capitalist's perspective on startups vs. traditional success.
Defining your own version of success with the IDEA System: Imagine, Design, Execute, Amplify.
Overcoming the fear of forging your own path.
The power of small, consistent actions in achieving big results.

Enjoy!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, what's up? It's Chase. Welcome to another episode of the show. Today's
0:07.6	Microshow. It was about a time I was really, really wrong about what success looked like
0:15.4	in the world of startups. You know, for years, I prided myself on being someone who didn't know how to lose, who, you know, give me a game and I'd do my best to find a way to win.
0:24.6	I did this with sports, I did it with school, work even, just anything. Give me a task and a chance, and I loved winning.
0:32.6	You know, I was generally good at figuring out how to make that happen.
0:36.6	But my experience with startup culture was a very humbling one, something that completely
0:42.8	changed my perspective on success.
0:45.2	I've got a sort of an interesting and painful lesson.
0:48.6	Here's the thing.
0:49.3	With my last startups, I thought we were killing it at some point.
0:52.0	We were doing roughly 36 million run rate.
0:56.8	That means one of our last couple of months were around the $3 million a month.
1:01.7	And then you multiplied that by 12.
1:03.3	We were growing at about 40% year every year.
1:06.2	Everything was going up into the right.
1:08.9	And so by my guess, we'd come out of a period of stagnation,
1:12.6	even a little bit of negative growth or loss. And, you know, again, by all the standards that I had,
1:19.3	we were a success, right? And yet, I remember had a meeting with one of our investors, a venture
1:25.7	capitalist. And by his standards, we were struggling.
1:29.8	Not that interesting was the actual words that were used in my meeting. I showed up with all these
1:35.1	results and he said, yeah, it's just not that interesting. And that is when I realized a very hard
1:42.9	truth, right? This is not about being good at business.
	...

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