16/52: Blessings in disguise

#CapitalAtRisk

Above: Grit by Angela Duckworth

The 2010s was the decade of the Entrepreneur. The 2020s will be the decade of the Investor.

“Mythologising natural talent lets us all off the hook”

Angel Duckworth

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Find a way that works

I’ve found myself often saying that starting, growing and exiting a startup will be so difficult that the guaranteed result is that the founder will want to give up. And they’ll be under pressure to give up.

Under such pressure the best founders are the ones to find a way that works.

At the beginning of their startup adventure they don’t know when they’ll face such pressure and it might happen numerous times. However I want to see that they have the attitude and self-assuredness to know that when the pressure comes, s it inevitably will, they’ll figure it out.

That’s what ‘entrepreneur’ was taken to mean in English when the word first started appearing in the 18th century; ‘adventurer’.

Another way to look at it

Sam Altman was on Lex Fridman recently — here. He talked quite openly about that weekend when he was fired from the OpenAI board.

Sam said to Lex that he told himself he had to, “find the blessing in disguise here”. And that was in the middle of that tumultuous weekend, so when he thought that his time at OpenAI was over.

If you force yourself to look for the good stuff when it feels like there isn’t any then that will likely reveal a way forward¹.

But how to test for this?

How can angel investors evaluate if the founder will have enough resilience? There are no guarantees of course but there’s a particular way you can quiz a founder that may reveal their resilience, or lack of it.