i heard about a great mike speiser quote recently, which went something like:
great entrepreneurs have a strong [usually contrarian] point of view. they move at a breakneck pace to bring their vision to life. and they change course when they have evidence that they are wrong. they repeat the process ad infinitum. after thousands of cycles and years of fighting the change antibodies, they win big. the world then declares the project an overnight success.
i thought this was a pretty interesting framework and wanted to explore it deeper. it’s somewhat self-explanatory but lines up well with what i’ve seen so far (in my very few years in this space)
great entrepreneurs have a strong [usually contrarian] point of view
many investors refer to this as the “unique insight” or “learned secret” that an entrepreneur has found. an elementary way to think about this is - if there are a lot of ideas that sound good at the surface level, is there a unique angle that differentiates the one you’re looking at now from the others? many founders seem to go a few layers deeper in their analysis of a problem / product than others. they see the world in a slightly different way as everybody else, and then they build a company around that. it’s less of an “arbitrage opportunity” because those often go away after they’re exploited, it’s more of having a differentiated and often optimistic view of the future and figuring out how to build an enduring business with that in mind. this unique insight is often about human behavior, but depending on you define it, could also be product-related, sales-related, etc. the “usually contrarian” part of the quote is necessary but feels obvious, if the insight is clear to everyone then either 1. it might not be a good insight or else someone would have built a company around it already 2. if the insight is new and obvious, you will face stiff competition from other smart people who have realized it, for the investor the space might be hot and the round will be expensive, for the founder you might need to raise more capital and execute at a high level to survive. in my experience, it’s great to keep the insight succinct / easy-to-understand and at the front of your pitch / presentation (many younger founders or first-time founders or people unfamiliar with fundraising can miss this)
they move at a breakneck pace to bring their vision to life
from what we’ve seen at the pre-seed stage at afore, speed matters a lot. check out gaurav’s post on what startups can learn from the theory of evolution, and particularly the section about speed:
some analogies for speed / pace:
- imagine walking through a maze, versus running through it (the maze being the idea maze). as long as your memory / navigation skills don’t deteriorate, all other things being equal you’re more likely to make it through the maze before you run out of money if you’re faster. if you hit a dead end you turn around and keep going and navigate it with speed
- [from my colleague derrick] imagine you have a wheel, you start with an insight on one end and then on the other end is market feedback. as you test your assumptions and try to validate / invalidate things, imagine the wheel picks up speed. the faster the wheel spins the better. i probably butchered this explanation but the general idea makes sense
there are some products that take a long time to build, in fact many great companies are hard at first and might not see revenue inflect in the first few months as many companies are doing in this ai era. examples are companies with technical products (like figma, or hardware companies) or long sales cycles (like cybersecurity) or where you need to educate the customer about your product. and separate from execution, it might take a long time to come up with a good idea. but navigating the validation process with speed can still apply here - you can try to pre-sell your product and sign loi’s, you can rapidly build excitement around your brand in advance of your launch, etc.
and they change course when they have evidence that they are wrong
this might be best summarized as “truth-seeking.” you have strong opinions loosely-held, you have a point of view and when you come across conflicting evidence you study the evidence carefully with an open mind. 90% of the time you may reject the evidence, but you’re still open to changing your opinion to get closer to the ground truths of the world. when someone disagrees with you, you might think “how can i take what you’re saying, and see if i can fit it into my worldview.” there may appear to be many exceptions to this - strong founders who seem stubbornly convicted on a worldview - but i wonder what would happen if you sat them in the room with someone they respected who presented a very logical counter-argument. i think they’d be more open-minded than it appears online or through their social presence. even a visionary like steve jobs may have had a “reality-distortion field” but to me this doesn’t mean he didn’t live in reality, he had an insight (that powerful computers could be brought to the everyday person) and used various tactics to get talented people to work hard. this concept of “changing course when you’re wrong” can also differentiate people that are researchers / project-builders who start with a product or solution in mind (nothing wrong with this of course, just perhaps not a fit for venture) from legendary entrepreneurs (who are interested in building a big business that can make a lot of money, and are often truth-seeking or customer-oriented).
they repeat the process ad infinitum
this reads to me as persistence. there are obviously many ups-and-downs that come with starting a company (it’s probably one of the more emotionally taxing jobs to possibly take up), you have to be a little bit crazy and many of your family / friends may not understand your decisions for a while. you have an optimistic vision of the future that is different than today and you want to build that change with your bare hands. it took dyson 15 years to go from idea to successful product launch for his bagless vacuum idea, where he built 5,127 prototypes and experienced a ton of technical failure, rejections from manufacturers, personal financial strain, and more. most people that start podcasts and newsletters barely make it past the first few episodes / editions. most people that work on startups don’t make it past the first few years. being able to “repeat the process ad infinitum” and stay persistent sounds extremely hard (i haven’t done it myself, but have empathy for those who do)
after thousands of cycles and years of fighting the change antibodies, they win big. the world then declares the project an overnight success
self-explanatory. many great people have some version of the quote that overnight success takes years or decades (bezos, jobs, dyson). i respect vc’s who have empathy for founders, who understand how long it takes to achieve “success” / “pmf,” and who apply that understanding in their interactions with founders. this doesn’t mean coddling portfolio companies and telling them they’re doing a great job when they’re not (this is very harmful in fact), it just means bringing a touch of empathy to these interactions.
to sum it up:
insightful- great entrepreneurs have a strong [usually contrarian] point of viewspeedy- they move at a breakneck pace to bring their vision to lifetruth-seeking- and they change course when they have evidence that they are wrongpersistent- they repeat the process ad infinitum- after thousands of cycles and years of fighting the change antibodies, they win big. the world then declares the project an overnight success.