Why Long-Term Businesses Rarely Succeed | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about why people fail to build long-term businesses?
Answer:
Here are some genuinely unpopular (but commonly observed) opinions on why most entrepreneurs and business owners fail to create enduring, multi-decade companies:
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Most founders are sprinting addicts, not marathon runners. They optimize for quick wins, viral growth hacks, and “10x” narratives because that’s what gets funding, attention, and ego strokes. Building something that lasts 30+ years is boring, low-status work that rarely makes it to TechCrunch.
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People massively overestimate how much “vision” matters and underestimate how much raw stubbornness and boredom tolerance does. Iconic long-term companies (e.g., Toyota, Walmart, Berkshire Hathaway) were often led by obsessive, paranoid, slightly unpleasant people who just refused to die or pivot for decades.
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The majority secretly want to be rich or famous more than they want the business itself to survive. The moment they get a decent exit offer or enough personal wealth to live comfortably, the incentive to keep grinding through the inevitable 10–20 year plateaus disappears.
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Modern culture has pathologized loyalty (to employees, customers, suppliers, geography). Long-term businesses require irrational commitments—keeping a factory in a dying town, paying people above market for decades, refusing to screw over a supplier who’s been with you since 1973. That behavior is now seen as naive or exploitative.
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Founders who complain about “work-life balance” almost never build century-level companies. The ones who do are usually workaholics who derived their identity and meaning from the business itself, not from travel, side hustles, or “optimized living.”
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MBA-ification and “best practices” have killed more long-term businesses than recessions. Over-professionalizing too early (hiring McKinsey-trained executives, implementing OKRs, “firing fast,” chasing margins over relationships) turns resilient family-style firms into fragile public-company clones that get disrupted in one cycle.
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People underestimate how much luck and timing matter, then blame “execution” when the luck runs out. Many legendary long-term businesses were mediocre for decades until macro tailwinds (demographics, regulation, technology shifts) kicked in. Today’s obsession with “meritocracy” makes founders quit or pivot the moment things get hard instead of just surviving long enough.
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Social media trained an entire generation to optimize for applause instead of antifragility. Posting revenue graphs feels better than quietly compounding at 8–12% for 40 years, so they swing for the fences, leverage up, and blow up.
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Most people would rather be “right” than rich long-term. They cling to ideological purity (crypto maximalism, no-ads ever, open-source everything, ESG theater) instead of pragmatically doing whatever boring thing actually survives compound interest and human nature.
In short: enduring businesses are built by weird, patient, often unpleasant people who care more about the organism surviving than about their personal brand or lifestyle. That personality type is increasingly rare and socially discouraged.
References:
- The Founders Podcast – various episodes on long-lived companies
- “Zero to One” vs reality check from decades of company graveyards
- Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters (1965–present)