Backable

Backable, The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take A Chance On You, by Suneel Gupta with Carlye Adler, Little Brown 2021

That word "Backable" in the title?  Could just as well have been "bankable" because it spells success, and that usually means $$.  It's not enough to be brilliant, or a workaholic or even a conniving weasel.  There's something in certain people, Musk and Bezos, for instance, that naturally leads people to trust and engage in a joint adventure.  You can almost smell it.

And if we can figure out what this "x" backable factor is, and how we are perceived, we know we can move toward demonstrating that special skill.  Being backable means we are picked for a new job, even if we didn't expect a "yes," or - surprise! -  it can mean everyone wants to be on your new product team.  And it can get bigger with investors waiting to sign up for your next idea, and news media eager to spread your good news.  Becoming backable can be transformative, or it can be deliberate, a learned and well-practiced skill set that becomes a big part of your career choice.  

 "There is a very thin line between the visionary founder and the founder who is purely having visions"  Ann Miura-Ko

Author Suneel Gupta offers up some very credible examples from his discussions with successful business types. His work with Ann Miura-Ko stands out.  As a venture capitalist investor with a great track record, Ko believes that winners separate themselves from all the others.  In fact as one of the earliest investors in Lyft, the ride app, she even backed the idea when the company had a different name and very few supporters.  What persuaded her to go with this start-up was their vision and their pitch making her aware that the landscape in which they were working - transportation - was one with a big history of transformations.  

In fact she talks about successful entrepreneurs as being the visionaries who create a dotted line connecting what they want with what they envision, alongside their work to make it all happen.  And she cites the example of the Fyre Festival, a failed vision that came out of its founders visions - but there was no dotted line there connecting it to a real and usable business, and so it ended up as a chaotic fiasco.  Not only are the pitches she buys different and credible, she's looking for the dotted line connection to make it all work.  

We hear about new start-ups all the time now on the East Coast.  But it's a challenge picking the ones that will survive.  Gupta's book Backable offers us a ticket to the track, a simple formula requiring a certain amount of research to pick the winners.  Some of it lies in the numbers, and some of it is those odd "feelings" we get when we hear the pitch - science and art.

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers,  patriciaemoody@gmail.com