As the funding climate in Silicon Valley cools, a lot of old-timers are looking on the bright side: at least this will wash out the startup founders who were only ever in it for the money — the “tourists” as Alfred Lin from Sequoia calls them. Another investor recalled that after the dot-com crash in 2001, investors joked that “B to C” and “B to B” stood for “back to consulting” and “back to banking.” “

But these shifts between boom and bust have been cycling through Silicon Valley for years, as this 1995 video starring Apple founder Steve Jobs shows.

He noted that a lot of people would ask him how to become an entrepreneur, but that they didn’t have an idea yet. 

He’d tell them, “I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something, until you find something you’re really passionate about.”

Then, “You’ve got to have an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about, otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through.”

It’s hard starting a business. If you don’t have a deeper conviction that you’re solving a problem that really needs to be solved, you’ll never make it through the adversity.

 

SEE ALSO: The steroid era of startups is over — here’s what 8 top VCs think will happen next

Join the conversation about this story »