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Love your unsung heroes

Love your unsung heroes

3 stories of leaders who made their cofounders better

February 11, 2023

I’ve read a ton of business books. I’m probably compensating for a lack of any formal training or education in business, but regardless, I love reading about how companies were founded, scaled and even how some fell apart.

I’ve realized there are few genius founders who built something from nothing. They all had help, whether it be a formal cofounder or simply the support of an ally.

Steve Jobs. Elon Musk. These are fairly easy ones in our modern narratives. They built fanatical followings.

But Steve Jobs wouldn't have founded Apple without Steve Wozniak.*

And Elon Musk couldn’t have built PayPal without Peter Thiel. **

In fact, Jobs and Musk were so problematic for their companies both were eventually forced out.

I am usually thought of as the face of GoWild—mostly because I share the most content—but I couldn’t have built this thing without proper cofounders. Donovan, Zack and Chris were pillars in founding this company. I’d still be pushing my awful prototypes around trying to get someone to pay attention to me were it not for them.

Given my story is still playing out, today I’m going to highlight a few behind-the-scenes cofounders I’ve learned about from the business books. They’ve all inspired me over the years.

Valentine’s Day is here, and while my wife and I choose not to celebrate this dumb commercialized holiday, I can at least use it for a reason to write a newsletter. Founders creating a company together are entering a marriage. In some ways, it’s harder than a marriage.

Whether you’re a founder or leading a team, today is all about remembering to pay tribute to our significant others.

You know, the ones who aren’t sharing your bed or mortgage.

Walt Disney Would Have Been a Failure Without Roy Disney.

Walt Disney created a world all his own. He truly invented a new art form, then built classic after classic in that medium. His work provided escape from the Depression, providing much needed strength during WWII, and he even gifted the country re-assurance afterwards with his heartwarming tales. He gave refuge to children, shielding them from adult distress. He advanced the use of color in pictures. He re-imagined the amusement park. He encouraged conservation, space population and even urban planning.

Walt Disney built the most powerful empire in entertainment. He established American pop culture as the dominant culture in the world, and once, a Russian diplomat threatened war if he was not allowed to visit Disney’s famed California park. Walt founded a school of the arts to teach the next generation how to do things his way. He was a powerful force, and demonstrated how to bend the world to your will.

With accolades like that, Walt Disney is often regarded as a storytelling genius. He was no doubt masterful at narratives, but the man was hell on the bottom line and his team. In the early days, he took many risks that came with eventual reward. But after the first few films, he couldn’t take the risks because the size of the company had increased, along with their debt. They had to move faster and focus on profitability—two things that restrict creativity.

The company fell into creative stagnation. And it was one man who saved them.

Roy O. Disney: The Guy Behind The Guy - Ear To There Travel

Roy Disney, Walt’s brother, is the unsung hero who time and time again found ways to pay for Walt’s recklessness. It was Roy who got loan after loan after loan. Roy secured the distributor deals when they seemed hopeless. Roy even realized that the studio needed to license Walt’s name. He landed the deal with ABC, and worked with them to secure the funding for Disneyland with a very creative deal with the newcomer television channel. Walt predicted early that television would get Disney (the company) exposure for their parks and content, but it was Roy who saw the recurring revenue and funding for the park.

John Lasseter was the genius behind Pixar. Ed Catmull made it possible.

You may not know John by name, but you know his work. He was either Director, Story or Product for Toy Story (1, 2, 3 and 4), A Bug's Life, Cars (1, 2 and 3), Frozen, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and this list goes on for seemingly forever. He has two Academy Awards to his name.

Once fired from Disney as an animator, John went on to set the bar for computer animated storytelling at Pixar. Disney eventually had to buy Pixar Animation Studios for $7.4 billion because Pixar was crushing Disney at its own game.

In the background, though, Ed Catmull was the one finding a way. In 1974, Ed Catmull started putting together a team for the New York Institute of Technology where he established a lab focused on innovating computer technology so they could make the first computer animated feature (which wouldn’t happen for more than two decades).

The Power of Dialogue in Decision Making -A Leadership Lesson | by Shah Mohammed | Medium

It was Ed Catmull who secured interest from George Lucas (you know, the Star Wars godfather). Ed moved to Lucas Films, then laundered his old NYIT team over (literally every employee left for a random job they only held for six months before then moving to Lucas Films—this kept suspicions from NYIT down). Ed led the efforts to build software and hardware for animation under Lucas Films, and was pivotal in striking the famed deal with Steve Jobs when Pixar was purchased for a mere $5 million by Jobs. It was Ed who convinced Jobs Pixar was not a hardware company, or even a software company, but a storytelling company. Once Steve owned the company, it was also Ed who built the culture that made it possible for Lasseter to showcase his storytelling talent to the world.

Reed Hastings is the name behind Netflix, but Marc Randolph was the workhorse.

Reed Hastings is the usual story you’ll hear about when you read high level pieces about Netflix, but without Marc Randolph, the company doesn’t happen. Hastings has been quoted as saying he thought of the company after a big late fee from Blockbuster, but that was actually hindsight bias. It was Randolph who was obsessed with founding an Amazon-like business. He’s the one who pushed Hastings to found the company, worked through how in the heck they could ship movies via mail, slogged through the naming of the company, labored over the assembly of the team, and led the team when they launched streaming.

Co-founder Marc Randolph: Anyone could do start-up like Netflix

Hastings has been an incredible leader for Netflix, and it was largely he who stood off Blockbuster’s now seemingly laughable $50M offer to buy Netflix (at the time, the offer was a serious exit to consider for the young team). But if you read Marc Randolph’s book, “That Will Never Work,” you can see that Hastings was not nearly as involved in the early years. Had Randolph not written his wonderful memoir, I’m not sure we ever would have known about the hardworking cofounder.

Show your team you care

If you’re a leader, manager or founder, you have someone supporting you. It’s OK for you to be in the spotlight, but it’s not OK to ignore the sacrifices and hard work of those around you. Walt Disney was a creative genius, but he was awful to work for and with. The same can be said for Jobs, Musk and many others. I’ve not sorted out exactly how I feel about these types of leaders. Many of them built giant empires with their work ethics and tyrant ways.

However, if left to decide between the path to greatness through tyranny or something lesser while being a good human, I’m going to pick the latter. Our legacies aren’t just what we’ve built—it’s how we build them.

The truth in the story will always come out. Make it one you’ll be proud for your grandchildren to read.