What The Strategic Founders Are Known For.
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Clarifications: We are using “The Strategic Founders” and “The Great Founders” interchangeably, to mean the same thing in this article, as we did in all of our contents on this website. Of course, using the two phrases interchangeably comes with some limitations. So, we are working around these inevitable limitations by making three basic assumptions: (1.) That part of what makes a founder great is the right strategy for the founder’s particular kind of business and that the founder has such a strategy. (2.) That such a right strategy is well executed by the founder. (3.) That fate — anything outside the founder’s power and control — doesn’t work against the right and well-executed strategy.
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Founders are founders for one reason: they are very different from the generality of the masses. Otherwise, they wouldn’t start anything new in the first place; otherwise, they wouldn’t create anything that never existed in the world before. You couldn’t start something new if you didn’t dislike what already existed. You couldn’t start a startup if you had no unique traits that made you think the world wasn’t the way it should have been.
Unsurprisingly, even among founders there are ones who are great founders — founders who lead other founders in the foundership journey. The word “great” here doesn’t necessarily relate to how much money a founder makes (even though that is obviously an inevitable by-product of being a great founder); rather, great here measures how much of an overall impact a founder makes on the world through his company.
Like what makes founders different from the masses, what makes great founders different from the ordinary founders are their unique traits and the kind of choices they make along the way of the foundership journey. From John D. Rockefeller to Henry Ford to Steve Jobs to Bill Gates to Elon Musk, all great founders have unique lenses for viewing the world, different ways of seeing life, in which outsiders – the masses and the ordinary founders – don’t have or understand. And you, as a great startup founder, aren’t any different: you are unique and you see the world in eccentric, original ways. That is probably part of why you are reading this in the first place.
Below are some of the attributes The Strategic Founders are known to have.
1. The Strategic Founders are irrationally passionate about something.
The reason they are great founders is that they are both eccentric and “irrationally” passionate about something in the world. As Naval Ravikant put it: “All those who have succeeded have been irrationally passionate about something”. So you may call them maniacs; you may call them extremists; you may call them fundamentalists; whatever it is that makes them think the world is wrong about something would be a good fit.
From those who built nations like George Washington and Lee Kuan Yew, to those who fought against great societal evils like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, to those who revolutionized the business world like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, all the great founders are people who have been irrationally passionate about something they thought the world got wrong and should, therefore, be righted.
You need to measure yourself against this trait of being a maniac of some sort and see if you are irrationally passionate about changing something in the world, about solving an important problem in the world, about righting a great wrong in the world. If you are, you will likely make a great founder so long as you have the other qualities that follow below. If you aren’t, you won’t likely make a great founder, even if you have the other qualities (since the most important quality of a great founder is that he or she is irrationally passionate about fixing a problem in the world).
Guy Kawasaki, the great founder who helped popularize Apple’s Macintosh in the 1980s and who also wrote The Art of the Start, said that there are three ways to fix a problem in the world:
a. You can right a wrong. What great wrong do you see in the world? What can you do to right it? Do you have the skill and the ability to do so? Are you passionate about doing so? If yes, go ahead and correct it with great passion and energy. You can do this through a nonprofit or for-profit venture. You can start a startup to right this wrong, or you can start an NGO to do so, depending on the business model that works best for you. Or you can join forces with those who are already solving such a problem.
b.You can stop the end of something good. What is it that is so good in the world that you think it shouldn’t stop? A good leadership? A good society? A good market? A good business? Do you have the skill and passion to get this done? All you need to do is build your business around this thing. It will be a win-win: you are stopping the end of something good for people and for the society, and you are creating a great value for yourself in the process.
c.You can increase the quality of life. You see all the sufferings in the world, right? Do you see all the poverty, all the adversities, and all the pains that mankind and businesses go through? What can you do to help alleviate them? Do you have some unique skills, or can you develop them, or can you get those who have those skills to work with you? Are you irrationally passionate about increasing the quality of life of people in any way? Are you strongly passionate about helping other businesses solve their own problems? How can you build your company around any of such things so that as you create value for others, you will be creating for yourself as well?
2. The Strategic Founders see the world differently.
To start something new like a great company, you necessarily have to see the world very differently. Peter Thiel discussed this extensively in his legendary work, Zero to One: How to Build the Future. You have to think very differently and uniquely. Because it is only when you see the world differently than others that you can begin to spot out important problems with people, with businesses, and with the world in general.
What problem do you know about yourself or about other people or about your industry or about your society that others don’t seem to see the way you see it? Can the problem be fixed? Do you have the skill to fix it? How can you build a profitable business around it in ways that others easily can’t? That is your Competitive Advantage there!
That was what Henry Ford did to transform the automobile industry in the early 1900s. That was what Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did to transform the PC industry. That was what Jeff Bezos did to transform the e-commerce industry. That is what Elon Musk is doing to transform the EV industry. How do you see the world differently than other people? Take advantage of those unique insights and competitive advantages of yours. That is what The Strategic Founders do.
3. The Strategic Founders pursue bold and ambitious visions.
Sam Atman, the former president of Y Combinator, said that it is easier to succeed with ambitious visions than it is to succeed with memetic visions. And every successful founder can attest to the same truth. The reason is simple: people want to be part of what is grandiose and ambitious. Believe it or not, the world likes to support grand dreams and ambitious enterprises. When you pursue ambitious, hard projects you are more likely to attract the best talents who also want to be part of something bigger than themselves than when you pursue easy, uninspiring, me-too projects.
When you pursue bold visions as a startup, you become the underdog – the world always roots for the underdogs because it is an intrinsic part of the human nature to support those who we think are being marginalized or who (supposedly) lack sufficient support (our rooting for them is an unconscious and/or conscious quest to try to equalize the playing field for everybody).
So by default, since every startup is an underdog when compared with established businesses, the world wants to see you succeed. That is the exact opposite of when you try to start a me-too kind of startup: there is no much novelty and ambitiousness and exuberance and enthusiasm necessary to attract the best supports and talents. If you must found a company, if you must start a startup, you must go for something grand and ambitious.
That is especially true if you hope to make a dent in the universe. It was how George Washington led the American Revolution to found the United States of America. It was how Henry Ford transformed the automobile industry. It was how Elon Musk became a living “Iron Man”. It was how Peter Thiel went from zero to one with Paypal and with Palantir Technologies and with Founders Fund.
4. The Strategic Founders believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.
The world is so hard for founders that if they don’t learn to be confident and have so much belief in themselves, they can’t succeed. Self-belief and self-confidence are some of the greatest conditions of being a great founder. In Twelve Against the Gods: The Story of Adventure, William Bolitho Ryall discussed this extensively.
You must believe so much in your idea and in yourself that people — the outsiders — would almost think you are being deluded (but you yourself would know you are not). You must believe that your startup will make a great meaning in the world and you must believe that you can make that happen.
You will meet a lot of prophets of doom, you will meet a lot of doubters and cynics (including “experts”), but you must believe that what you are working on will work, that you will succeed, that you will change the world. You must convince others – at least your team members, investors, policymakers, and early customers – to believe in that vision.
And since nobody was born with a lot of self-confidence (or we can say that people lose their confidence as they come into this world and they start learning all of the world’s negativities), you must learn to overcome your lack of self-confidence with great discipline, practice, and intentionality. The best way to do this is to start betting on yourself in little ways. Start acquiring data points through little wins. Start taking actions and seeing yourself succeed with little things. This would help bolster your self-confidence so that you can do greater things in this world. Once you have acquired enough data points and information that you can do greater things, increase your bets, and start taking on more ambitious projects. Fortunately, not many risks can wipe you out in this world; not many things can ruin you — so you are almost always lacking in courage.
Bill Gates’s first company wasn’t Microsoft. Steve Jobs’ first company wasn’t Apple. Elon Musk’s first company wasn’t Tesla or SpaceX or PayPal. Almost all the great entrepreneurs and founders you know today didn’t start from where you now see them. They would usually have first started out by acquiring data points with smaller things in life or in business. Then they will dive into bigger projects.
Gradually develop a high level of self-confidence and believe in yourself almost too strongly.
5. The Strategic Founders apply the law of leverage and compounding.
Every great thing in life or in business is as a result of leverage and compounding law.“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it… he who doesn’t… pays it”, as often attributed to Albert Einstein. Love, finance, fame, power, or company growth are all there because of the nonlinear features of leverage and compounding. A lone genius can create a great work of art, but he alone can’t build something that can significantly change the world. He needs scale; he needs compounding effects to work in his favor; he needs a team; he needs other people’s brains.
As a startup founder, you need organized systems and processes for your business success. Leverage helps founders to do more with less, to achieve more with less. One of the best ways to do this is to work on projects that can scale and that can have leveraging and compounding effects over time. Do economies of scale apply in your business? Does it have network effects or network externalities? Does it have enough branding power that can help you to significantly distinguish yourself from your rivals? Does it have growth-hacking features? Does it have virality characteristics? Is it so good that users would want to tell their friends about you and your products? Is it worth remarking about? Does it resemble what Seth Godin called “Purple Cow”?
Another great way to build leverage is to engage in system thinking. How can what you are doing today affect what you will do tomorrow or in the next 10 years? Does what you did yesterday make your work easier and better today? Can your work today help you replicate your results tomorrow? Apply leverage and compounding law. That is an essential part of building a great company.
6. The Strategic Founders are pioneers.
Pioneering is more associated with the early adventurous explorers who discovered continents and lands, and built cities and towns and nations around the world. But founders are pioneers, too. In their quests to overcome the uphill tasks they face in building great things out of nothing, they have created entire product categories and industries where there were none before. So, one of the questions you should always be asking yourself is, Am I a pioneer? Am I building something important out of nothing? Am I building a new product or an entire industry? Henry Ford asked this. John D. Rockefeller asked this. Bill gates asked this. Jeff Bezos asked this. Elon Musk asked this. Steve Jobs asked this. All great founders ask the same question; so should you. Be a pioneer!
7. The Strategic Founders are controversial and don’t follow the crowd.
All great founders are maniacs. They are eccentric and contrarian. George Washington was. Nelson Mandela was. John D. Rockefeller was. Henry Ford was. Steve Jobs was. Bill Gates is. Charlie Munger is. Warren Buffet is. Elon Musk is. All great founders are. They all say and do things that are opposed to what the masses think or believe in or do.
As the great strategist and management consultant of the 20th Century, Dr. Peter F. Drucker, put it: “All great decisions are controversial.” It is great decisions that make the great founders great. And great decisions, by default, are always controversial. One of the greatest tenets, for example, that great investors hold is that you ought to invest when the times are bad (when you have judged well enough though) – an attitude the masses abhor.
Most of your decisions about your company will be in stark contrast with what the masses believe in or go for. Otherwise, you can’t build a great business. If the masses didn’t disagree with you, they would already have been doing what you are doing – in which case the potential for rewards would have been substantially reduced, because the value would have been competed away by too many players. Moreover, part of what makes you a great founder is that you are unique, eccentric, and original, which are all qualities that herald controversies.
8. The Strategic Founders think for themselves.
It was the billionaire investor Charlie Munger who said, “My idea of being properly educated is being right when the professor is wrong. Anyone can just spit back what the professor is saying. It takes a really educated person to think for themselves.” And that is strongly supported by what the great B. F. Skinner said: “Education is what you have left when you have forgotten everything you were told.” Prof. Bryan Greetham also admonished us on that: “It’s worth reminding ourselves that the real joy and challenge of education lies not in how much we can remember, but in what we learn to do with our minds.”
It was the Apple founder Steve Jobs who warned entrepreneurs not to live by the results of other people’s thinking. Said Jobs: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. …Life can be so much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
Don’t live by what you were conditioned to believe and accept. You have to judge things and form your own unique opinions and perspectives about them. If great founders were to rely on received opinions and traditions, Ford wouldn’t transform the automobile industry in the early 20 Century. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates wouldn’t revolutionize the PC industry. Elon Musk wouldn’t build SpaceX or Tesla. Warren Buffet wouldn’t make a fortune by making contrarian investments.
Think for yourself and make decisions that are best for your enterprise, because that is a good part of what makes great founders great.
9. The Strategic Founders think from the first principles.
First principle thinking is a necessary skill for all great founders to have. It is how they spot problems and ideas to work on. The serial entrepreneur Elon Musk said that when he was a kid, he used to fear darkness a lot. But one day, he decided to demystify things: He thought about what darkness meant and discovered that it was just the absence of light. And that has shaped everything he does today. He has gone on to challenge popular opinions, proving the masses wrong in the process. From co-founding PayPal to founding Tesla to founding SpaceX, Elon Musk has shown that the best way to build your company is to demystify things and put them properly in perspectives.
The same applies to everyone. Everyone who wants to think more clearly and become more strategic in order to get the results they desire should do whatever they can to break things down to their basic levels, call things their true names, and put things to where they really belong – putting things in their right perspectives. You can’t build a great company if you don’t think from the first principles, if you don’t think from the basics.
10. The Strategic Founders think they can make a dent in the universe.
There is no reason you should be starting a startup if you think you can’t change things in the world. (Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Also, William Bolitho Ryall did something similar in his own book, Twelve Against the Gods: The Story of Adventure.)
It was Steve Jobs of Apple who said that only those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are those who eventually do. As I noted about the great Naval Ravikant earlier, if you are not ‘irrationally’ passionate about a problem, about a cause, about an idea, you can’t make a significant difference in this world. And realize that if you have no confidence in yourself, you are twice defeated in the race of life. It is not what you think you are that is stopping you from pursuing that ambitious project, it is what you think you are not that is really stopping you.
What problems do you understand best but are too afraid of fixing? What ideas do you have about starting a startup but aren’t confident of making a great difference in the world? Only founders who think they can make a dent in the universe, only founders who think they can change the world are those who eventually do. Be ambitious, be optimistic, be bold, and pursue that great goal of your life with all you have got — with high optimism, exuberance, fanfare, and energy.
11. The Strategic Founders ignore the “real world”.
As you go through life and business, you will often meet people who will (consciously or unconsciously) try to bring you down by saying your idea wouldn’t work – even when you haven’t tried. Don’t listen to them. Their failures aren’t your failures. If they failed at something, that doesn’t mean you will fail at it as well. You have a unique personality, experiences, skill-sets, timing, technologies, and contacts that could make what was considered impossible in the past “real world” possible now.
All you need in this world are an idea, a touch of confidence, and a push to get started, to say it the way the great Jason Fried of Basecamp would. If you have a startup idea, if you see a problem to be solved don’t be cowed by the stories of the “real world”. Go ahead and start your startup. Go ahead and solve the problem. You will learn the real truth about your idea by trying it out first (so long as it can’t ruin you, and the potential opportunity is truly worth it). Ignore the “real world”: experts’ propositions, your fears, inexperience, perceived inadequacies, and constraints. Just go out and try that idea that can’t just leave your heart!
12. The Strategic Founders plan ahead for decades (or even for centuries).
If you can’t envision the future from today, you can’t make a great founder. The value of a good business is in the future, perhaps decades or centuries from today. (Michael Porter discussed this extensively in Competitive Strategy.) And if you can’t clearly articulate your vision forward, you can’t capture the value of a great business.
Seeing the future can be hard for most people – that is, the outsiders to your vision – but for you who is an insider of your vision and of your particular field, spotting out what the future might look like shouldn’t be rocket science.
There’s no gainsaying as to whether you have seen the future. There’s no doubt as to whether you have seen the “game-changer.” As the great founder of Y Combinator, Paul Graham perfectly put it, “The future is not hard to see. You’ve already seen it. You just didn’t realize it, because you dismissed it as a toy.” The only thing that you should be talking about is whether you want to embrace and act on the future you have both seen and known. (Of course, you can be imperfect about the future, as in fact is the case with most great founders. But what matters most is that you have a point of view that is as clear as possible, about how the future might look like based on what you see today – even if you eventually turn out to be imperfect about that prediction — and how you are getting to that future.)
If you must remain relevant, if you must make a dent in this world, you must not only embrace change, you must trigger it intentionally, even at the expense of your own immediate comforts. You must embrace and act on the future you see. That is what all great founders do. That is what you need to do.
13. The Strategic Founders hack and beat the system.
Paul Graham said that one of the greatest factors they consider before selecting startup founders to invest in is the founders’ ability to hack. ( Paul Graham has something to say about being a hacker here.)
To hack is to improvise and to beat the system, to be relentlessly resourceful, and to make do with what you have in order to work around your constraints. If you applied to be funded by Y Combinator and you had never hacked or beaten the system before, it would be highly unlikely that you would be picked. And that is not peculiar to Paul Graham or to Y Combinator: All the other great founders and investors know the importance of beating and hacking the limiting system of this world. Most great investors, for example, would want to know how (effectively) you have been able to manage constraints and difficulties in the past before they decide to invest or not to invest in your startup.
Despite the inevitable constraining systems of the world, you must be relentlessly resourceful; you must always try to get stuff done. That is because there are too many problems in the world to stop you from succeeding with your startup. There will be IP lawsuits against you. There won’t be enough funds for you. You won’t have the perfect team you need. You won’t feel you are ready to start. Your product will never be perfect. Potential customers won’t always want to use your product. The press will mess around with you. You will be misunderstood. Your friends and family members will ignore you for leaving a clearly defined and promising path of climbing the corporate ladder to pursue an uncertain, fussy dream of a startup that may never materialize. But being a hacker can help. Only by being a hacker and beating the system are you going to get great things done against all odds.
If you can’t hack and beat the system, you can’t make a great founder. That is how all the great thinkers, all the great entrepreneurs, and all the great leaders of the past were. They were hackers. They were improvisers. They were skillful at applying some unique, unconventional skills to overcome limitations and to get their jobs done.
They all had limitations. They didn’t have all the connections. They didn’t have all the resources. They had some unnecessary laws that tried to limit them. They had oppositions. They lacked a lot of things. But they got their jobs done, nonetheless. Most of them accomplished so much that we wonder today how they were able to do it. It is true for George Washington as it is true for Winston Churchill. It is true for Bill Gates as it is true for Elon Musk. It is true for you as it is true for everyone who has passed through this world, making some important marks on it. To be a great founder, be a hacker; be an improviser, beat the system.
14. The Strategic Founders are open-minded.
The reason you can be a great founder is that you are open-minded. You can’t close your mind to opportunities and novel ideas and still make a great founder. (Ray Dalio of Bridgewater discussed the power of being open-minded in Principles. I also discussed it extensively in The Strategic Minds,.and here.) Only open-minded people spot out good ideas and act on them quickly. Only open-minded people see the future and act on it now. Only open-minded people are flexible and adaptive to change – a powerful quality of all great startup founders.
Don’t be the cynic or skeptic of new ideas or change. Don’t close your minds to breakthrough thinking, even if you are not comfortable with it (yet). You must learn to free yourself from your past misconceptions and preconceptions and inclinations. It was the great scientist, Isaac Asimov, who once quipped: “Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” Only by letting the light come in are you going to make a great founder. And to the extent you can be an open-minded founder, to that extent are you going to make a great founder. The lesson then is to keep learning important things as fast as you can — all the days of your life!
15. The Strategic Founders bet on things that don’t change.
Jeff Bezos, the great founder of Amazon.com, once observed: “I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two–because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.” In business, there are things that don’t change. Good human interactions, great customer service, low prices, easy and short process, are some of the things all great founders focus on. Users or customers will never want them to go away; they have never changed and they never will. Focus on them, if you hope to make a great founder.
16. The Strategic Founders make hard choices.
Angellist co-founder Naval Ravikant said: “Hard choices today, easy life tomorrow. Easy choices today, hard life tomorrow.” The reason great founders are great is that they are great at making tough but great choices. If you hope to make a great founder, you must learn to make hard choices that affect your startup both today and in the future.
When you quit your job to go into the startup world that is filled with uncertainty, you are making a hard choice. When you decide to leave what you studied at school or what your parents told you to do in life to start a company that is completely different from what you studied at school or what people expected you to do, you are making a hard choice. When you break ties to the past and chart a new course, you are making a hard choice. When you decide to create a powerful company culture that will outlive you, abide by great principles and values in building your visionary company, you are making a hard choice.
Steve Jobs, when he returned to Apple in the 1990s, made a hard choice when he decided to cut down the number of products the company made from 350 to just about 10. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook made a hard choice when he refused to sell Facebook to Yahoo for 1billion dollars. Paul Graham made a hard choice when he decided to espouse a new model of startup funding by launching Y Combinator in 2005, even though people laughed at and mocked him because of it.
All great founders are great at making hard choices. And if you can’t make hard choices, you can’t be a great founder. As the great Adrian Cadbury perfectly put it, “Shelving hard decisions is the least ethical course.” You must learn to make tradeoffs and be okay with their consequences. You must be able to bear the downsides of starting a startup – chief among them being that building a startup is extremely difficult and will consume your whole life. Learn to make hard choices if you hope to make a great founder.
17. The Strategic Founders ignore free lunch.
It was the Nobel Prize award-winning economist, Milton Friedman, who told the world that “There is no such thing as free lunch.” Since all great founders are good at the basic understanding of economics –demand and supply dynamics – they all know that there is no such thing as free lunch; everything in the world is paid for by somebody through some means; everything has an opportunity cost. As Scott Adams put it, “The study of economics is the study of opportunity cost”.
If you want to make a great founder, if you want to build a great company, don’t be tricked to believe that anything is free – everything is paid for. In the 1970s, the great founder, H. L. Hunt was asked what it takes to get what one wants in life, he said: “First, decide exactly what it is you want. Most people never do that. Second, determine the price you’re going to have to pay to get it, and then resolve to pay that price.”
Part of ignoring free lunch is making sure you don’t participate in perverse systems – where your gains are at the expense of the common good of humanity. It can also mean making sure your team members get their fair benefits and rewards of the company you are building together – don’t try to take advantage of them, whether they know about it or not. It can also mean taking enormous risks and owning the consequences.
There are only a few other places where being accountable for all of your actions matters more than in entrepreneurship and company-building. You should own your decisions, actions, and results completely. You must be ready to make all the needed sacrifices. You must learn to pay your dues in advance and in full. That is what defines great founders. That is what should define you.
18. The Strategic Founders take risks.
It was Jeff Bezos who said that if you only do the things you are certain will succeed, you will leave a lot of opportunities off the table. Great startup founders are known to constantly take acceptable and calculated risks. Their abilities and strengths are rooted in their drive to take risks and explore the unknown. It was Peter Drucker who said that the essence of a decision is uncertainty. In other words, if there were no uncertainty, there wouldn’t be any need to make decisions.
One of the first risks all great founders have to take is thinking and acting differently from the accepted norms of their industry or of their society, a great risk on the founders’ parts. (Realize that you can’t make a great founder if you are waiting for the masses to tell you what will work or what will not work.)
Be comfortable with taking risks that can’t ruin you – that is, the ones that can’t wipe you out if something goes wrong. Getting involved in illegal deals, for example, is a bad risk; it can and will ruin you; don’t take them. But risks like systematically and constantly testing your idea in the marketplace with potential users, or speaking your mind at meetings, or going against the tides of the day, or ending bad business relationships, are all acceptable risks – you should be ready to attempt them. To the extent that you can take great risks, to that extent are you going to make a great founder.
19. The Strategic Founders create prosperity.
The essence of a startup is to create prosperity, to create wealth. Wealth creation is equivalent to the depth of the problem your startup solves times the number of people it solves the problem for. So, if you want to make a great founder and reap the rewards for doing so, think in terms of value and in terms of the number of people you provide such value for. You don’t start a startup because you want money (even though money is very important and will always come to you if you have done something really good for customers long enough); you start a startup to help customers perform their jobs or solve their problems.
One of the ironies (and problems) of starting out with money in mind, instead of wealth or value creation for customers, is that you often end up not making the money and not creating wealth for customers. That is because money is a means to an end and not an end in and of itself — value creation and problem-solving are the ends. For this reason, your first goal as a startup should always be about creating prosperity for your customers — and for yourself eventually.
From John Rockefeller to Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mo Ibrahim to Elon Musk, creating prosperity has been demonstrated to be the only way to build great companies. That is how all great founders are made. Clayton C. Christensen, Efosa Ojomo, and Karen Dillon discussed this idea extensively in their celebrated work, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty.
20. The Strategic Founders are relentlessly resourceful.
Paul Graham said that the greatest quality of all successful founders is that they are all relentlessly resourceful. To be relentlessly resourceful means to get stuff done with relentless creativity and ingenuity. When you give resourceful founders a cue to something, they usually surpass the cue to do something more creative. Relentlessly resourceful founders take initiative. They don’t wait to be told what to do. They save their money, time, and resources – so they save their startups! They get things done effectively and efficiently.
The best way to be relentlessly resourceful is to learn a lot from first principles and be persistent in getting stuff done. That was what Elon musk did with Tesla and SpaceX. That was what Mo Ibrahim did with telecommunications in Africa. That was what Jeff Bezos did with Amazon. If you hope to make a great founder, you must be relentlessly resourceful.
Being relentlessly resourceful is probably your best strategy in the startup world where daunting odds and forces are against your survival. There will be too many rejections. They will be too many government regulations. There will be too many industry restrictions. There will be a lack of all the necessary networks and contacts. You will not have all the things you will need. But only by being relentlessly resourceful are you going to hack and improvise your way to glory.
21. The Strategic Founders commit totally.
It was W.B Murray who said: “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” The great Raph Waldo Emerson even put it more succinctly “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.”
A startup is an all-or-nothing venture. So, if you are going to do it, you must do it to the exclusion of all other distractions – you must commit yourself totally. Sam Altman correctly (and shamelessly) said that the startup world isn’t a place for work-life balance. There is no halfhearted effort in building a great enterprise out of nothing. All the great founders throw themselves wide open in the battlefield of the business world to build things meaningfully great out of nothing, for themselves and for the world.
If you hope to make a great founder, you must commit totally. Quit distractions. Don’t do too many things when you are building your startup. Steve Jobs wouldn’t have built Apple if he had spent his time doing other things while working at Apple on a part-time basis. Bill Gates (alongside side Steve Jobs) wouldn’t have revolutionized the PC industry if he had been halfhearted with Microsoft.
It might be disheartening to let you know that your startups will consume your entire life, but that is the only way to get something mightily important built out of nothing in this hard, distractive world. In Founders at Work, (a fine startup book written by the co-founder of Y Combinator, Jessica Livingston), Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal, told a story of working 120 hours (5 days!) at a stretch, without ever sleeping, just to make sure he was able to get funding for PalmPilot that would later become PayPal. That is an extreme dedication. Your startup story won’t be any different: You will have to extremely commit in order to build something of immense importance out of nothing. As T.S Elliot put it, “Commitment requires nothing short of everything”. Or as the late Clayton Christesen put it, “It’s easier to hold your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold them 98% of the time.”
22. The Strategic Founders are emotionally and socially intelligent.
Starting a company and making it successful requires that you know many things that aren’t apparently related to each other (even though everything is inherently related to each other – since the universe is singular and compartmentalization is our human making, in our quest to simplify our world). One of the things the wide knowledge of the world helps you to achieve as a founder is that you naturally become highly emotionally and socially intelligent.
As a founder, you will be dealing with human beings – co-founders, employees, investors, customers, regulators, competitors, and partners – and your success in all of these relationships is highly dependent on how you are able to utilize your emotional intelligence and social intelligence.
To have and maintain the emotional balance and strength of character required to build a great business, you need emotional intelligence and social intelligence. To convince people to join your company, you need emotional intelligence and social intelligence. To get investors to back your company, you need emotional intelligence and social intelligence. To sell yourself and your products, you need emotional intelligence and social intelligence. To negotiate great deals, you need emotional intelligence and social intelligence. As all experienced founders know, all jobs – founders’ jobs or “salespeople’s jobs” or any role at all – are all sales jobs, since they all require some elements of persuasion. And no better skill is needed to make a great persuader than that of emotional intelligence and social intelligence.
Emotional intelligence and social intelligence skills are probably the best skills all founders need. The reason is that they cut across all aspects of the company-building process – building a company is about building a team that builds products that customers use. Virtually all of the stages of company-building, from idea conceptualization to product development to launch to growth and so on, require human relationships and interactions.
To the extent you can deploy emotional intelligence and social intelligence, to that extent are you going to make a great founder. See how Dale Carnegie put it, “When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.” The emotional intelligence and social intelligence researcher, Dr. Daniel Goleman, even put it best: “If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”
23. The Strategic Founders are builders.
The main reason you are can be a great founder is that you are a great builder. Anybody can have ideas. Anybody can talk about their ideas. Few people can launch. And fewer people can build real, successful companies.
Company-building requires so many things. From ideation to product development to launch; from hiring to fundraising to sales and marketing; starting a startup that thrives is all about being good at building things. The most important aspects of company-building are team building and product development. If you can get the two right, you can win the game of starting a successful startup, assuming you don’t experience misfortune and bad luck.
Once you can get the right team built, the right team can then build the right products, which, in turn, can be loved by the right customers. All founders must learn to build an effective and efficient team. All founders must learn to transform ideas into products. All founders must learn to gather the right intelligence and brains around what they are building. Henry Ford couldn’t have built the Model T if he had no in-depth knowledge of the industry and the ability to gather other brains around the same idea. Bill Gates couldn’t have built Microsoft if he didn’t understand people and the industry well enough. And that is true for Elon Musk as it is true for every other great founder. Naval Ravikant likes to say, “Learn to build; learn to sell. And if you can do both, you will be unstoppable”.
24. The Strategic Founders are good salesmen.
Great founders are all known for their salesmanship. There is no company without salesmanship. No matter how smart you are, you need to enlist others who share the same vision with you. A lone genius can create a great work of art, but not a great, world-class business. You need to strike deals. You need to enlist investors. You need to recruit employees and build a great team. You need to persuade the government and regulators. All of these are salesmanship at its peak. You need to understand the art of persuasion.
Whether you are building a political party or a company, you need the soulful art of persuasion, to say it the way Jason Harris would. Elon Musk is a master salesman. He had to convince Obama’s Administration to loan him hundreds of millions of dollars to build Tesla Motors even when the market was yet unproven — an act of courageous salesmanship indeed! Rockefeller wouldn’t build Standard Oil if he had no power of salesmanship (even the word “Standard” is very much organic for sales, as you could easily find out should you research the circumstances surrounding his naming the company “Standard Oil”).
It is was what Steve jobs did to turn Apple into a great company again in the 1990s (even after it was 90 days from insolvency!). It was what Bill Gates used to secure a contract with the great IBM (at least, then!) which eventually helped Gates to form Microsft. To be a great founder, you must possess the skill of salesmanship and marketing to a great degree. Otherwise, your business would be a fiasco.
You don’t have to take sales courses to sell your idea and products ( even though taking sales courses isn’t bad if you need to). The reason is that it is your idea: you are so much passionate about it, and you understand it more than any other ‘professional’ salesperson. So you should be able to persuade others about an idea you are so much passionate about. That is not to say you don’t need professional salespeople at some point in your company-building process, but it does mean you can and should sell your own idea and product initially — when starting out. Salesmanship is a great trait of all great founders. Do whatever you can to learn how to sell your idea, your mission, and your business.
25. The Strategic Founders follow the Pareto’s Principle.
In 1896, the Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, published his first work, Cours d’economie politique. In it, Pareto showed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the Italian population.
Later on, in the years that followed, more and more findings have turned out to help us accept Pareto’s work as an axiom for almost everything about productivity. For example, it is an axiom in business that about 80% of sales come from about 20% of clients.
When starting a company, there is always the urge to do so many things at the same time. Take so many meetings. Build so many products. Hire so many people. Talk to so many investors. Talk to so many potential customers (even though this is rather great and encouraged!). However, as experiences and countless research have clearly shown, only a few things – a few products, a few rules, a few investors, a few customers, a few employees, and a few activities – cause the disproportionate results you get in business and in life.
So, your goal, if you hope to win at the great game of company-building, is to focus on those things that matter most. Of course, you would have to try so many different things since nobody can actually predict the future, but the secret to building a great company is to choose to focus only on those things that, if successful, would give you disproportionate outcomes. If you are raising money, focus on those investors who are good and whose expected value is high. If you are talking to partners or acquirers, focus on those whose impacts can actually move the needle if the deal happens. Steve Jobs had to cut off many products from Apple when he returned to the company in 1996 because he understood the power of Pareto’s principle. So was Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or the other great founders you know.
26. The Strategic Founders are starters.
That is because they know only those who actually start really create anything in this world. It is all too easy to think and talk about starting a company, but it is rather hard to start one. Realize that customers don’t pay for mere ideas because ideas aren’t worth much: Execution trumps everything else.
One of the major reasons why people have great ideas but they never turn them into great businesses is because people lack courage and are easily cowed by the merciless world around them. Most people with great ideas are waiting to be clapped for before they work on such ideas. They are waiting for the perfect time. They are waiting for when their products would become perfect so that they wouldn’t be criticized. But you must never allow yourself to be tricked like those people!
If you wait until you are sure you can’t fail or be criticized, you will never move forward. If you wait for a perfect time, if you wait for when you will “feel ready”, you will never get anything done in this world. In the great book, The Great CEO Within, Matt Mochary et al, made a case for why great founders aren’t people who say they are going to start their companies sometime in a far distant future; instead, they are the ones who always want to start today or next week. The great management thinkers, Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Walterman Jr., in their celebrated work, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies, also extolled the importance of being biased for action as one of the greatest pillars of excellence in business. All great founders are known for their biased-for-action philosophy. This philosophy should be your great ally if you hope to make a great founder.
27. The Strategic Founders take initiative.
They know that the only way to have initiatives is to take initiative. Part of what makes you a great founder is your willingness to always be the leader of your company (as long as you are still in the helm of affairs). And you can’t lead without the willingness to take initiative. This is true even when you haven’t figured out all the answers yet (as you never will, anyway!).
The risk of taking initiative for how you run your company and lead your team, is part of what makes you a great founder. You can’t succeed without taking initiative. You can’t lead anybody without taking initiative first. You can’t get anything done in this world without taking initiative. To make a great founder, learn to always be taking initiative. Be proactive.
28. The Strategic Founders are highly organized and disciplined.
They know that the only way to execute their ideas is to get organized and disciplined and put up some systems to help them reach their goals of creation. It is true that great ideas often come unplanned, it is true that you don’t need to get disciplined and organized to get highly creative or have a startup idea, but it is equally true that you can’t successfully execute on any idea, no matter how great, without being well-disciplined and organized, putting systems and processes in place to have your ideas well-executed. This is the difference between those who have great, awe-inspiring ideas but never execute on them and those who build great companies even with ordinary, simple ideas (since ordinary ideas, like all ideas, always evolve into greater ideas during execution).
The idea of starting a business is nothing more than getting systems and processes to realize the commercial values of your idea. This can’t be done without some high levels of self-discipline and organization. The more you need your company to scale, both in products and in human resources, the more you need systems, processes, organization, and discipline. Without discipline and organization, you can’t build a great team, or build a great product, or sell to customers for long. To the extent that you can get disciplined and organized, setting up systems and processes in place, to that extent are you going to get important stuff done in this world and have your name in the book of great founders.
29. The Strategic Founders are finishers.
They know that only those who finish what they start actually get the results and rewards for their work – whatever work!
Many people start so many projects in their lifetime but they finish so few — usually the ones of trivial value (since it is harder to finish projects of immense value). It is true that you will never finish everything you start for so many obvious reasons, one of which is that some things aren’t worth finishing in the first place. (This is exactly why we need to think hard first before starting anything important, to ensure we get more involved in things worth finishing and less in things not worth finishing.) But let the truth be told: most of our unfinished projects aren’t unfinished because they are not worth finishing; instead, we leave them unfinished mainly because we become lazy at working on such projects, especially when they become ‘uninteresting’, as is often the case in the middle of most important projects.
Nevertheless, to the extent that you can get over this inevitable resistance to human action, to that extent are you going to make a great founder. Great founders aren’t simply great at doing things that interest them: they are also great at doing things that have to be done, even if those are uninteresting on the surface.
There are many metrics by which we can know when we have “finished” things. In the startup world, a major one is when you ship – when you launch, when you deliver products to customers as promised, when you hold an important meeting as promised, and when you do what can take you to the next important step in your company-building. Shipping is so much important to startups that it deserves to be discussed separately as done below.
30. The Strategic Founders ship.
They even ship lousy products (at first) – because they know that the more they ship, the more they get information and feedback necessary for improving their products for customers or users. Until you ship, you won’t know if your hypothesis about your potential customers is true or false. Until you ship, you won’t know if investors will sign you a check or not. Until you ship, you won’t know if your competitors will kill you or not. Until you ship, you can’t get to the next learning phase of your startup building. Until you ship, nothing (positive) happens in your company – although negative things are can be happening because chaos and degeneration are the default, natural state of every business.
Shipping is very essential to startups because you are in a tight race against time, against resources, against the market, and against your competitors. Only by shipping as fast as possible are you going to increase your odds of winning these inevitable contests. Great founders always ship. You should always ship, too. Always do whatever you can to “finish” things and ship.
31. The Strategic Founders are highly determined.
They know determination is the number one thing you need, after character, to make a dent in the universe as a founder. See how the great Calvin Coolidge (the 30th president of the United States) put it: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On!’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
32. The Strategic Founders adopt a lifestyle of lifelong learning.
They know that what is true today won’t necessarily be true tomorrow. They also know that the greatest impediments to effective decision-making processes, as required by all founders for their company-building, are their ego and blind spots.
So, the only way a great founder keeps at pace with all of the other attributes discussed above and how they can be applied in specific contexts is by maintaining open-mindedness and an attitude of lifelong learning.
Great founders keep learning. They keep improving and adapting their methods, tactics, and strategies. See how the great investor, Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., put it: “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Systematically you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. Nevertheless, you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.”
That is exactly what you should be doing if you hope to make a great and strategic founder. Never stop learning.