There's one thing that you should know about me: money (and more of it) has always been a really bad motivator for me. I just can't get up in the morning and do anything if the pursuit is purely for money.

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I read Ben Horowitz' post about their investment in Instagram that made them a 312x return, turning a $250k investment into $78m. Most people would regard that as a shrewd business decision on Andreessen Horowitz' part, but I think it actually comes down to money making money.

Andreessen Horowitz has raised a venture fund worth almost $3bn in the last 3 years. So for them to make a $250k investment represents 0,0083% of their total investment fund. Considering that Instagram ended up being a pivot from the business that they actually invested in, I'd argue that the $250k investment was a "calculated" gamble. Sure, you might argue they backed the entrepreneurs behind the original idea, but that too is a calculated risk / gamble at best. (I'd stick to this opinion regardless of whether or for what amount Instagram was eventually acquired.)

Compare that to Y Combinator that invests an average of $18 000 into approximately 120 startups every year. Or Yuri Milner & Ron Conway that puts $150 000 into any Y Combinator startup that wants it (via Start Fund). As of last year, Yuri Milner alone had a net worth in excess of $1bn (Wikipedia), so putting $150 000 into a startup represents small change.

Their respective returns on these investments are however a far cry from small change, making their investment status a goal for most other investors. Myself included.

Yet, these guys have a head start: they have bucketloads of money. Marc Andreessen co-founded Netscape back in the day. Yuri Milner created DST which has become a premier investor in so many awesome tech companies. And Paul Graham has become the leader of the whole startup community with his work with Y Combinator. So they deserve their success & all these new opportunities now.

The one thing all of them have in common now is that they had one big success as an entrepreneur; one big success that propelled their reputation into the higher echelons of our community & gave them the capital (or access to it) to make all of these investments. It only took one big success.

Ultimately I'd probably be able to make quite a bit of money if I had a $5m venture fund and I could invest $250k into 20 hot startups right now. You could too. Provided we're not totally shit at making our picks.

Money makes money. And it only takes one, big success to get there.

Reading through Ben's post, from which I've extracted the above quote, I found myself nodding in agreement to most of what he said. The quote above made me stop reading though and I found myself unsure of whether I actually believed that.

Why did I consider myself an entrepreneur? Did I start a business to make money?

Regardless of my definition of success, I'd have to agree with that; I definitely didn't start a business not to make money. I know that I've never been able to motivate myself with the potential lure of money and that's not why I come to work every morning. But it would be an outright lie if I said I didn't believe that I would profit financially from starting my own business.

I think this borders on my opinion that the execution of any ideas includes the actual monetization thereof. I would definitely consider myself a failure had a I started a business - even if it was for non-financial reasons - and then I failed to profit from it.

More importantly though, I believe I'm an entrepreneur because I want to be involved with building sustainable businesses. There's obviously an element of "money" involved in that and to be sustainable one needs to be profitable, but the initial aim of creating a sustainable business versus making money sits more comfortably with me.

And once you have created something sustainable, the other "nice things" that Ben mentions (having fun, changing the world, disrupting an industry, creating jobs) comes into play: having a sustainable platform to explore, where money isn't the only consideration.

AirBnB just announced a whopping new funding deal worth $112 million. Sheesh. What do you do with $112 million?

I come from a bootstrapped background and I've never been close to seeing anything like that kind of money in my own business (not even on wishful projections or targets), so I have no idea how to spend $112m. If I were given a $112m investment at WooThemes right now, I would honestly not know how to spend it.

And I guess therein lies the difference... I'm co-founder of a very successful business that exceeded 40k paid users over the weekend and we are very profitable (and have been for a while). We don't however operate on the kind of level where a $100m would ever even come into a serious conversation.

Guess I have a lot to "(l)earn" yet...