What makes a someone successful – especially at startups – is, in my opinion, performance, honesty, common sense, and ability to face failures.  In the last 5 years of self employment, if at all I have learnt anything valuable its this realization.  

Performance is the core engine for your success.  If you lack this, no matter how much support you have you are doomed.  Performance doesn’t necessarily mean that you have all the skills to do it by yourself better than anyone else, it could also mean that you have the skill to identify, motivate and make others perform to attain the said objective.  The latter is easier said than done and is what will help you grow or else you will be your own bottle neck.

Honesty is not about saying the truth at all times, but a core value that is built into your organization that will help you project your best face with all your stakeholders.  This is by far the best thing that you could build in your organization which help you in your initial stages where your customers, suppliers, partners, employees all know that what they see is what they get.  

Common sense, mostly uncommon sense if you ask me, is more about being practical.  There will be lots of people out there who have no clue would tell you that this how its done so you should do it too will put you into a hole faster than you can blink.  Trust your instincts and take your time to make strategic decisions as its hard to pull back once you get the ball rolling for various reasons.

Facing failures is probably the hardest thing to do and this is probably what makes or breaks success.  Business is about doing 100s of thing everyday right by many people in and associated with your company, but everyday something or the other goes wrong.  If its not anticipated and derisked you can expect the failure to get bigger while lots of other things are continuing to fail.  When faced it has to be swift and always go with your gut feel.  Whatever the outcome be prepared to face it.  If other 3 rules are followed this becomes easier and well accepted otherwise its further aggravated and causes you to go into a death spiral.  

Managing these four attributes in addition to conventional wisdom – learnt in b-schools etc – is what will make or break a company.  Statistically, 9 out of 10 startups fail, in my opinion 9 out 10 failures is because of the leadership in the company who don’t manage these 4 attributes.