a question after Facebook's Zuckerberg

This article is not very special but it brings me back the question: Would startups be more successful if their founders have a plan of building the company own their own, having a long term plan or would they be more successful if the founders know what to do and one of the plans would be selling the company?

It is, however difficult to say you know what's going to happen with your company, especially if the startup is in the Internet environment. Things are changing faster than you expect, normally. I'm not sure if there are a lot of people out there can say that they know what's going to be in the next 5 years with new technology, on web or mobile,... So having a plan of selling the company within 5 years, 10 years is also difficult. Your plan might be to get the company bought by one of the big companies, but you don't know if within 10 years Yahoo!, Nokia will still be able to do some acquisitions. Yahoo! is even being pitched by the other players.

Reading Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or even with my own good intention, I do hope that founders of startups have a long-term plan for the company. Those are companies built to last. There are yet opportunists out there, and entrepreneurs who are successful building and selling companies. Who are more successful? What's the rate of failing among the opportunists and the long-term planners? I don't know what reality and statistics shows at the moment. Yes, I have to do some research on this.

Last thought: if the people in the industry don't know what is going to happen in the next 5 years, how do VCs and Private Equity firms set their expectation? If it's not the technology they know thoroughly, shouldn't it be the experience with seeing the people and the resource of the company to make the evaluation? VCs and PEs can be those who set trends, who can have the view of what will be  in the future, because they are the one who sponsor company for the existence of startups. However, hanging around in the Internet industry for a while, I don't think it's the case. It must be the ideas, vision and the execution of the people inside the industry that make things happen.