What makes a successful serial entrepreneur?

There are all kinds of blogs telling us the ‘4 main characteristics‘ or insider insights or revealing secrets of the profession. The fact is that if we knew the answer, newspapers or school teachers would be picking out the geniuses very early in their professions.

Israel’s Shlomo Kremer has been described as “one of the world’s greatest information security entrepreneurs”. He has just made the headlines again because he is one of the prime investors in Trusteer, which was sold to IBM for US$700m.

Of his other companies, Worklight was handed off for US$ 90 million in 2012. The previous year, Digital Fuel changed owners for US$120 million. And he is currently placed in a series of other ventures such as WatchDox, SkyFence and Alicanto, which are all plodding along nicely, thank you.

So what makes this 47 year old Israeli, temporarily living in Silicon Valley, such as hit when handling Israeli companies…..tens of thousands of miles away? And when I say managing, press reports indicate that this is often hands-on!

Reading between the articles, it would seem that Kremer is a man who has foresight. He understood very early on the impact of apps. In parallel, he is a person, who will get his hands dirty, trying to ‘muck in” and help. He demands expertise and the best, while prepared to talk with and then motivate people even at the bottom of the company ladder.

I assume that Kremer must have leadership qualities, a phrase casually thrown around by many without knowing what it means. And what does this teach us mortals?

I caution against trying to copy or to emulate. After all, Kremer did not become a whizz kid overnight. We can watch and observe and then look internally. What specific attributes of ourselves are we prepraed to change, a step at a time?