Entrepreneur, You Need a Manifesto | Makerbot's Bre Pettis

by DSN Editors

 

"The decisions made when you’re making a company are hard. And it’s much easier to live with them if you’ve made your own spiritual guidelines for how you’re going to live your company."- Bre Pettis, Makerbot

Bre Pettis, founder of MakerBot, a pioneer in consumer 3D printing, is interested in everything. He sees the world as an endless series of problems begging for creative solutions. Over the course of his career thus far, his curious brain has led him to puppetry, teaching, and ultimately to tech entrepreneurship. 

Entrepreneurs as a class tend to be creative and multivalent. In other words: all over the place. In order to harness their energies and accomplish something great, Pettis argues (from his own experience), they need to bound themselves and their companies within a specific set of rules. Early on, Pettis’ guiding manifesto for himself and MakerBot was what he called “The Cult of Done,” the principle of seeing each project through to successful completion before moving onto the next. Sound obvious? Core values often sound deceptively simple, but they reign in tendencies (like leaving a trail of half-finished, abandoned initiatives) that over time can drag a business (and its founder) down.

Eric Paley, a Managing Partner of Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture capital fund, spends his professional life evaluating promising entrepreneurs and their companies. Founder Collective has an impressive track record of picking winners.

Here are his thoughts on what make Bre Pettis and his company extraordinary: 

The Visionaries series is brought to you by DSN in collaboration with Founder Collective. In it, we profile remarkable entrepreneurs and the ideas and practices that make them great. 

Image Credit: Thos Robinson/Getty Images