Success means never being satisfied, says Emery Wells, the CEO and co-founder of video collaboration software tool Frame.io.

Three years ago, Wells sold his business to Adobe for $1.275 billion, a culmination of seven years of hard work building and perfecting his software platform. Pulling off a billion-dollar exit can be life-changing, but Wells was soon back at work and thinking about what comes next, he says.

If anything, the sale made Wells think about "just how relative success is," he tells CNBC Make It. And meeting other successful entrepreneurs led him to believe that he isn't alone.

"I think one of the traits of highly successful people is really never being satisfied or never thinking you're done," Wells says.

You can always celebrate how far you've come. The most successful people also tend to seek out discomfort, like learning a difficult new skill to advance their career, and constantly hold themselves to high standards to strive for excellence, Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote for Make It last year.

"Somehow, we have the ability [that] no matter what level of success you achieve, you're always looking at the next thing that you can do," says Wells.

Constantly re-defining success

As a teenager growing up in Miami, Wells dreamed of a career in the film industry. He skipped college and, at age 19, moved to New York to bartend while honing his filmmaking skills, with an eye on picking up freelance gigs as a video editor.

After years of struggling to pay his bills, a rash decision to buy a $17,500 digital camera paved the way for Wells to open a boutique video post-production business called Katabatic Digital. Owning the camera, an industry-changing piece of technology, gave Wells plenty of work: By 2014, Katabatic brought in more than $1 million in annual revenue from clients like Coca-Cola and Pfizer.

Wells could have continued with Katabatic, making a good living, for the rest of his career. Instead, he and Katabatic engineer John Traver started tinkering with software coding in their spare time — hoping to build a piece of software they could sell for big money, Wells says.

Their first real project together, a software platform for people to collaboratively give feedback on videos throughout the post-production process, was supposed to be a "smaller idea" for learning how to build and sell an app, says Wells. Afterwards, they'd "swing for the fences and do something really huge."

The project became Frame.io, which grew bigger than they'd imagined, raising more than $80 million in funding before selling to Adobe for an eye-popping figure. Wells initially considered the deal life-changing, he says — until he realized that among other tech entrepreneurs who'd sold their companies for billions, his success was relatively small.

"I was like, 'Well, I'm not actually successful in this group of people,'" says Wells. "That's a wild thing ... 'Am I king of the world? Not at all.'"

'There's just an internal motivation to build something'

Having sold a billion-dollar startup, Wells says he's no longer "super motivated by trying to achieve some new financial level." Rather, his current motivation — as CEO of a company now owned by Adobe — revolves more around his own creative desires, and his ability to influence and impact other people.

"I love building stuff. I love being creative. And I actually really love making software," Wells says. "So there's just an internal motivation to build something [and] then see people use it. Can I have more impact? Can I reach more people?"

In that sense, Wells is following in the footsteps of entrepreneurs like Richard Branson, who told Make It earlier this year that a person's reputation should be defined by "what you create," not their net worth. The self-made billionaire's ventures have often led to financial success, but he was adamant that money was never his motivating goal.

"Paying the bills at the end of the year is important, but what entrepreneurs are doing all over the world today — and the only reason they're succeeding — is that they're making a difference in other people's lives," said Branson. "And that's all that really matters."

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