Having talked to dozens of founders now, I’ve generally come to terms that exceptional people and founders often share very similar traits. Here’s some that I have been able to verbalize, but it is more than a collection of these traits that make someone truly great.
- Do they hold gravitas and tend towards optimism? This makes it easier to raise, to sell, and to lead, as trivial as it sounds. Can they excite me with their ventures – both through their ambition and their ability to communicate?1 An easy way to tell is to assess how I feel after speaking with them. Do I leave feeling excited and optimistic for the future? Or do I leave feeling, well, normal?
- Are they innately curious and show signs of a lifelong learner? Do they challenge the status quo and actively seek the bleeding edge of frontier technologies? In my experience, these people are oftentimes generalists: those who consume books and knowledge regularly and go further by synthesizing the information (aka note-taking or writing a lot). Those are people who have been able to learn from many different fields and are thus fast learners who have failed many, many times. Their rate of learning (slope) is steep, and they’ve built the skills to excel now.
- Were they contrarian or a risk-taker in their teenage life? Teenagers especially are conformists – they often follow the social norms around them. I find that the people who went against the herd at the time of their lives when it is the hardest to do so are the people who have the will to think and the will to know for themselves. They are able to reject current notions of the world and manifest something new of their own designs. Outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom, though conventional wisdom is usually right. Finding early contrarians ensures that I filter for those who seek to bet against conventional wisdom in their DNA.
Henry Ford on Conventional Advice
If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, a faster horse!
- Status signals matter less than they should. This includes education and previous work experience. Potential isn’t about where you start or are now, but how far you can travel. I’d rather be with a founder who grows exponentially than a founder on a linear path. A graduate at Stanford isn’t usually significantly better than a graduate from UT Austin.2 Nor are people who are ex-Meta and ex-Amazon engineers. There is no number of years of experience that correlates with skill. These credentials are only proxies that signal that you can do a job (or proxies that you seek prestige). In a startup, you don’t get rewarded for things you did in the past. On another note, there are just too many people who are ex-Meta or ex-Amazon engineers. Status signals have degraded.3
- Do they have domain expertise? Specifically, I’m looking for people who don’t. Patrick Collison started Stripe at 19 without ever having worked in financial services. Blake, who started Boom Supersonic, never worked in aerospace. And Elon Musk learned about rockets from textbooks. I love self-believing individuals who are fast learners and contrarian thinkers, who can rethink the assumptions within their industry from first principles. After all, the idea of SpaceX was laughed upon just two decades ago. Airbnb too. Even Apple, who had excellent computers, was laughed at by Intel when they wanted a new chip for a mobile device. No way they can beat Nokia! And guess what? All eventually became valuable companies that defined their entire industries.
Vinod Khosla on Non-Domain Expertise
After all, retail innovation did not come from Walmart; it came from Amazon. Media innovation did not come from Time magazine or CBS; it came from YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. Space innovation did not come from Boeing and Lockheed; it came from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Hotel innovation did not come from Marriott, but from Airbnb.
- Do they operate fast, not only in their ventures but in their everyday life? There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that the best founders reply to emails within minutes, compared to other founders who respond in days. Operating fast increases the probability that a founder operates with high agency on an exponential growth curve. Moving fast is a necessary prerequisite for founders. So how do you cultivate urgency in people? You don’t. You can only find them. Find the self-motivated and self-believing people, who always feel the urgent need to do better, to win. They need to be people who make you worried they’re going to burnout than worrying if they are moving fast enough.
- Are they serious, but don’t take themselves seriously? There aren’t a lot of people seriously focused in one thing, and so if there is someone who has spent their entire life focused on a goal, you can bet their resiliency and commitment. At the same time, you want people who are able to have fun and not take themselves seriously either. In short: serious in action, fun in personality.
- Most importantly, are they a good human being? We all love and want to work with good people.
Footnotes
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This doesn’t mean that the person has to be an extrovert! Introverts can still hold gravitas. ↩
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Usually prestigious universities have better networking opportunities – but that’s something that can be built and developed easily with the right investors and firms. ↩
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A great piece on finding amazing individuals: Hiring (and managing) cracked engineers. Hint: it isn’t status signals! ↩