Ever feel you're not super smart enough but also not dumb enough to start a really successful business?

You don’t have to be super smart to start a successful business.

You just need the right product at the right time and to treat employees and customers well. It’s not rocket science.

I think it generally helps to have a business/finance background in order to maximize profits and safely grow while having the same quality. But, having a business/finance degree isn’t required.

Maybe in tech or finance, but do you really think the founder of the 17th restaurant in town or the 7th gym in town is that much smarter than a competitor who closed?  I think it's just luck and probability.

There are more dumb successful business owners than smart ones for this exact reason.  People who are just smart enough to understand the risks are too big of pussies to start the business.

Take a look at the guys who started Charter Communications.  Most people here would think they are stupuid hilbillies.  Well turns out they started one the largest communications companies in the country. 

ironman32

Phil Mickelson, the golfer, has a saying, to be successful on the PGA tour, you need to be either really smart, or really smart. Sometimes I think the same in business.  

Title basically says it, you ever feel you're in the middle. Basically, not Jeff Bezos or Musk level intelligence, but also just smart enough to understand risks and all the ways your business could potentially fail. 

For example, I've been listening to the podcast "how I built this" about companies and their founders. Recently, I listened to the one about Stacy's Pita chips, the lady who started it (Stacy), just didn't seem that busy savvy. The whole time I was listening to it I thought, I that was risky, that part was dumb, that part was risky and dumb. 

Also, (not hating on women only businesses here), but something like Spanx. To me, its just almost dumb idea, almost a fraud idea (concept: hey, are you 50lbs overweight? want to look 48lbs overweight?). And when I say almost, I mean, I respect hustle, and definitely think if people will buy something why not sell it. Just more reflecting on the middle ground. 

Sorry, no because I have started a business and I work on it every spare time that I get. Working for someone else is OK for some but not for me.

With companies featured in How I Built This you do get a good degree of survivorship bias. Also, I feel people in finance and similar industries are pretty risk averse (take a in demand job that pays a lot, invest and save aggressively, etc.) - but no doubt intelligent enough to run a business. The difference is that the average joes who are successful in entrepreneurship are either fine with that risk or really aren't good at quantifying it 

reliably starting and running a business from scratch in a field thats not advanced as fuck is an aggregate of knowing basic economic concepts (think first year econ courses), having the capital and risk tolerance to make asymmetrical bets, people skills and brass balls 

It's entirely possible to run a successful, cash-flowing business while mismanaging it. Just look at your average HVAC, landscaping, or repair business. Do you think they have any idea how to properly manage working capital, plan for a market downturn, etc.? Probably not. That's why you have so much PE activity in spaces like this- there is just so much low hanging fruit when it comes to value creation.

The older I get the more I think smartness just doesn’t really matter. It’s experience and understanding.

I’m confident a majority of MD’s couldn’t pass calculus, but they have spent 10+ years looking at transactions in a specific vertical making then unbelievably valuable if you are selling a business in that vertical.

The genius in some of these founders is recognizing a vertical before it existed—that might be more luck than genius though.

Spanx was a *genius* idea. 

I think the vast majority of entrepreneurs (at least the ones I've met, which working in growth equity is a fairly large sample size) fall somewhere in the middle as well. Most aren't Bezos/Musk/Zuck level of intelligence (a lot are surprisingly average), and most are also pretty level-headed and recognize the risk-reward tradeoff of starting a business vs. pursuing a conventional career.

The reality is, the vast majority of entrepreneurs aren't starting anything original and thus don't need to have genius-level intellect / foresight. Think about how many HVAC or lawn care companies there are in just one suburban county. Even with tech founders, most enterprise software isn't that groundbreaking. Same with consumer, business services, etc. So it's not like most founders are taking a massive risk on whether or not an idea is business-worthy. I think by now we've kind of proven out that selling enterprise software is a pretty good business model. 

Instead of starting something original, most founders end up just being people who a) like the idea of taking on slightly more career risk with opportunity for additional upside vs. working a corporate job, and b) have the financial safety net to do so (in the form of existing savings, raising funding from others, having rich parents, etc.). And then whether their business succeeds comes down to some combination of execution / motivation / luck (obvious, I know).

So to wrap it up, I wouldn't be discouraged from starting a business if you don't view yourself as a super-genius or some sort of risk-taking idiot. Just make sure you have some safety net and decide for yourself whether the risk (which is oftentimes overestimated) is worth taking.

A very underrated trait in business success is just the desire for money. Some people are innately more interested in money than other people are. People vary in this just like they vary in extroversion, math aptitude, or other traits.

A friend of mine, whom I've known since we were kids, is a successful entrepreneur. When we would go to, say, a pizza place in high school, he would just spontaneously start calculating how much money the store owners were taking in. X number of customers per hour paying Y, rent is probably Z, etc. The math isn't particularly complicated and I could do it just as well as he could, but he was naturally drawn to thinking like that constantly. It's just how he's wired.

I think really high intelligence might actually be a hinderance to most entrepreneurship, because a lot of the smartest people just find the constant hustle and selling uninteresting. They would rather work on hard intellectual problems with other smart people than motivate employees and sell stuff to get rich. So they end up in academia or in pockets of the business world that suit them, like quantitative hedge funds, tech companies, biotech, etc.

Intelligence is acquired and sectional, you can learn how to make a lot of money and still be ignorant of other things.

You don't need to be a genius to collect profit, and the people you mentioned are less freak geniuses and more people born into immensely wealthy business families pursuing their own ventures as their parents did. A lot of these business magnates will "borrow" millions of dollars from family and friends, and not all people want to apply their minds towards making a ton of money.

You can succeed in business if you know the right people and have the right ideas, but it's a risk like any other investment. The intelligence necessary for this is something you can acquire through education, experience, or both. A lot of people in this business are chasing after these large bonuses and investments in order to raise capital for their own ventures, but I do know a number of bankers who were lifelong analysts or in similar support roles.