01 Sep, 2008
The Untouchables: a startupper must see
Posted by: Francesco In: Movies| Startupper's life
The Untouchables is one of my favorite movies. It’s a movie about courage, it’s a reminder of the value of friendship, it’s an advice on how important a team is: it’s a movie about crossing borders.
I recently watched this movie for the xx time and I realized how many similarities there are between the story and a startupper’s life.
Eliot Ness, the brave policeman who defeats Al Capone, carefully selects and picks all the members of his team. You can’t face a great challenge alone, you need a team and you need the right people.
Look how appropriate his picks are, how his team perfectly fits his needs. He has the wisdom of a senior policeman, the accuracy of a sniper on the field and a reliable account to plan the strategy. Ness is part of the team too, and he’s the kind of leader the team needs. Highly motivated and charismatic.
Don’t all these features apply also in a startup company? The team is crucial, you always need to pick the right people for the job, not only with the right skills, but also (and perhaps more important) with the right attitude. The team must work together well, it doesn’t have to be a team of gurus if those gurus can’t work together.
Once formed the team Ness engages the enemy in his first raid. There’s only a door dividing him from the enemy, from the battlefield: from waging a war. In that very moment he has to make a definitive choice: crossing the border.
An entrepreneur has to do the same, once he starts his company he crosses the border, there’s no turning back. From that moment he, and his team, will face enemies, challenges and obstacles they’ll have to overcome.
The main question an entrepreneur has to ask himself before starting a new venture is the same one Jim Malone asked Eliot Ness: what are you prepared to do? The leadership of the entrepreneur is in the answer.
The movie teaches us that we’re not “untouchables“, the final result doesn’t come for free. You have to fight for it, you have to push things hard to reach it, you have to cope with pain and sacrifice to grasp it. Are you prepared to do that?
