Founder Virtues, per the Thiel Fellowship
What sorts of character traits should you aspire to? Or select for, as you decide to hire, partner with, or invest in someone?
I appreciate articulations of such virtuous traits. Some that come to mind are Paul Graham’s Relentlessly Resourceful, Michael Nielsen’s Principles of Effective Research, Sam Altman’s How to Be Successful or Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Twelve Virtues of Rationality.
In the book Paper Belt on Fire, Michael Gibson describes eight traits that he and his team selected for when evaluating Thiel Fellowship applicants. They are “edge control”, “crawl-walk-run”, “hyperfluency”, “emotional depth & resilience”, “sustaining motivation”, “tensive brilliance”, “egoless ambition”, and “Friday-night-Dyson-sphere”.
I found these distinctive, with an unusual focus on tensions between opposing values. And I couldn’t find a list of them published anywhere online. Thus here follows an excerpt from the book describing the virtues.
Edge Control
The best possess something we call “edge control,” which isn’t so much about thrill-seeking, as it is about a willingness, day after day, to defy the boundary between the known and unknown, order and disorder, vision and hubris. It is the rare person who can handle and even relish the skid and spark of being ever-so-slightly out of control.
Most are either too tentative or too deluded and reckless. On the one hand, a new business can never grow if it makes a comfortable home within the safety of the tried and true. Only by setting forth into the unknown can anyone make new discoveries.
On the flip side, however, experiments probing that dark territory can prove too costly. Bankrupt, a team may return with nothing. Maybe they were deluded all along. Others with high pedigree and vast wealth—see, for instance, Quibi and Magic Leap—light a billion dollars on fire and never make a single product.
The knowledge found at the edge of experience is not easily won. The only way to discover the limits of what a company can build and sell is to test those limits. It takes edgework to chart that barrier, to test it, to respect it. To venture back and forth from the known to the unknown in an ascending S-curve of real growth, up and to the right on a graph, and to do it in a way that doesn’t destroy the company, but rather punches a hole in the sky—this is to carve the edge. It takes a tricky bastard to do it.
Crawl-walk-run
If it is working in high technology, a founding team needs to have the smarts to build what they say they’re going to build. Maybe a psychologist can test for that in a single sitting. But the most important things that matter at the birth of a startup, none of them can be communicated credibly in a one-off meeting as on Shark Tank or in reading a transcript. Like baseball scouts, we think the best way to screen for these traits is to see them at play in the wild.
It takes some time to see their evolution. Moreover, the person on the way up is not the same person ten years later when the company has scaled to dominate an industry. The best have to know how to crawl, walk, and then run. (Danielle will sometimes call this “acorn to oak.”)
What this means is they have a knack for learning the different skills required to meet the different challenges at each stage of a company’s life as it grows up. From a startup with five employees to a corporate giant with ten thousand employees and five product divisions—it is difficult to find people who can hit the mark at each growth phase. In the past, Silicon Valley investors simply assumed these stages had to be managed by two different people. The founders were often removed from the company and a seasoned CEO was brought in, as John Scully was brought in to replace Steve Jobs at Apple in 1983. Even Larry Page and Sergei Brin were not able to escape this dogma and settled on a compromise with their investors. They agreed to bring “adult supervision” into the CEO role at Google, which is why Eric Schmidt was hired.
Whether the founders are the best at running a company, in the long run, remains a hotly contested debate. Perhaps Sundar Pichai and Eric Schmidt have managed Google better than Larry Page ever could have. The company’s competitive advantage still looks invincible. But when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was near bankruptcy and on life support. It is now worth more than $1 trillion thanks to his leadership. Schmidt and Pichai both inherited an unassailable monopoly on cruise control. Jobs built the future from a wreck. We side with the founders.
Hyperfluency
The best founders have the charm of a huckster and the rigor of a physicist. There is often a strong, even uncanny sense of fit between founders and the market they’re operating in. They speak with fluent competence about why past efforts in an industry have failed; what the competition doesn’t know now; and how they’re going to move from a few customers to thousands.
This we call “hyperfluency.” It’s like hearing the crackle and pop of a fastball hitting a catcher’s mitt. The whole experience is animated by a love and infectious excitement which we can detect in their voice and speech patterns. They are thrilled to explain the intricacies of complex technologies to experts and newcomers alike. (Sometimes, if it’s a particularly formidable subject, we pause our meetings by saying, “Please speak to us as you might the dumbest golden labrador you’ve ever met.”) The ability to scaffold information so as to communicate it clearly to everyone, no matter who they are, is one of the unconscious tells of a great leader.
Emotional depth & resilience
They don’t have to be the life of the party or a compassionate therapist, but the founders of a company have to have the social and emotional intelligence to make hires, work with customers, raise money from investors, and gel with co-founders.
The complexity of this total effort is incredibly demanding and emotionally exhausting. It is a job that involves engaging with a variety of different people, undertaking uncertain goals, and having no rule book for how to achieve them. It requires a constant stream of decisions on matters of life and death for the company, putting the livelihoods of employees at risk and leaving investors’ capital hanging in the balance. Sometimes these decisions must be made in minutes. To say that all of this is emotionally taxing is an understatement. The base rate for mental health issues for founders is higher than the average for the wider population, so attention and care for their emotional life is of paramount importance.
Sustaining motivation
Above all, the best work for neither fame nor fortune. Greed is not good. We look for what we call the sustaining motivation.
The initial motivation for starting a company is often the excitement of doing something new and risky, which might bear some resemblance to the thrill of sky-diving, but the sustaining motivation to keep going year after year, through all the twists and turns, has to be tied to something deeper, something richer in meaning. It can be a sense of mission about a cause or pure intellectual curiosity or even about pulling off a caper with a few best friends. In some cases, it is the awe felt before a private vision of a future that might be.
But what it can’t be is money, thrills, or fame, because that garbage won’t carry anyone through a dark night of the soul at 2 a.m. when the doubts creep in. Pressure is hellfire. As Elon Musk told CNBC when they interviewed him during our 2012 finalist round for the fellowship, “Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. If you feel like you’re up for that, start a company.” All the talk in pop psychology books about the importance of grit is meaningless unless you can find the reason to persevere. Grit is merely the surface of a soul committed to meaning.
Tensive brilliance
Remember that girl in high school whom the schoolmarm would pick on because she was daydreaming a lot? Or the otherworldly geeky guy who was obviously smart but never got good grades? That’s the person we’re looking for. (Psychologists have found that teachers are more likely to identify as “gifted” those students who are achievers and teacher-pleasers than those who are creative.)
Raw high IQ, straight As, and perfect test scores are the tokens of a cardboard elite. It is true, they are strong predictors of future success, but from our point of view, it is a rather conventional success. To invent new things, some kind of creative dynamism is required beyond the expected. What we’ve noticed, inspired by Thiel’s observations, is that creative people tend to have a unity born of variety. That unity may have a strong tension to it, as it tries to reconcile opposites. Insider yet outsider, familiar yet foreign, strange, but not a stranger, young in age but older in mind, a member of an institution but a social outcast—all kinds of polarities lend themselves to dynamism. This is in part, I believe, why immigrants and first-generation citizens show a strong proclivity for entrepreneurship. They are the same, but different.
One of the strongest findings in the psychology of personality is a link between openness to new experience and higher levels of creativity. A wandering, free spirit is advantageous for creativity, as discovery requires the exploration of novel ideas, feelings, and sensations. It is also true that many inventions are the result of combining elements from two or more domains that no one had thought to connect before. But a tornado can’t stack two dimes. While we see this openness in great founders as well—they have a wide set of interests, some that appear irrelevant to their main research—we’d add a twist in that most combine two personality traits that tend to be inversely correlated. Many would score high on openness to new experience, but also high in conscientiousness. A rare combo in the wider population.
Egoless ambition
This is another instance of a dynamic contradiction, a perpetual tension between antithetical attitudes. It has a Zen-like nature to it in that it embodies and expresses a paradox. On the one side, there is an intense commitment to doing great things. There is a sincere dream and a plan for making history, a gusto for being a star player in a larger arena of ambition. But on the other side is an element of detachment, a footloose, untroubled attitude that treats triumph and disaster just the same. The team’s conviction is strong, but the startup does not define their life. If the whole enterprise ends in failure or must change course, it is not a soul-crushing matter.
This should by no means be interpreted as an acceptance of failure or a stoic refusal to feel grief and sadness. Failure shouldn’t be celebrated for its own sake. While great founders learn from their losses and mistakes, they tend to learn even more from their wins. Nor should this be mistaken for simple adaptability or equanimity. It’s different because the best teams have simultaneously an emotional commitment to the greatness of the goal, and the ability to put the thought of achieving it out of their minds.
One encounter in literature that beautifully captures the spirit of the paradox is when Krishna admonishes Arjuna on the field of battle in the epic Bhagavad Gita:
You have a right to your actions, But never to your actions’ fruits. Act for the action’s sake. And do not be attached to inaction.
Or, as T. S. Eliot famously condensed it, “Not fare well, but fare forward.” What most people overlook is the last line. They tend to think the paragon of detachment is an ascetic sage who lives in a cave in the mountains. A wise monk with no possessions. No, Krishna commands, do not be attached to renouncing life. The epic battle must be joined. Act for the love of the game, and only for the love of the game, but also acknowledge that the game must be played and is worth playing. And, maybe, have some fun doing it.
Friday Night Dyson Sphere
The physicist Freeman Dyson once imagined a sphere of light-absorbing material surrounding our entire solar system on its periphery. In science fiction these power systems have come to be known as “Dyson Spheres,” and they represent a civilization’s ability to harness all the energy of a star. Practically every photon. Certainly not your typical science fair project. One of the most electrifying moments for us is when a team convinces us, through a series of plausible steps backed by evidence, that they are capable of growing a lemonade stand into a company that builds Dyson Spheres. What’s more, it’s clear this is the thing they’d rather be tinkering on during a Friday night when all the cool kids are out partying.
Now, that nutty ambition may sound deluded, like someone climbing a palm tree and saying they’re on their way to a moon landing. But it happens. Think of Facebook starting at Harvard, moving on to the whole Ivy League, then all colleges, then all high schools, then the planet, influencing elections and undermining democracy (according to some). The best teams can tell these kinds of gripping stories, not as pure fantasy, but as a series of steps anchored in reality, which it is our job during the vetting process to assess. Some people fall short on vision. We often work with great teams who have a solid business model: a niche of customers love the product; revenue starts to accumulate. But then the team stalls because they don’t know how to connect that initial stream of revenue to a sweeping vision that will fundamentally change an industry.
The other extreme is represented by Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork. He convinced many investors that WeWork, a mere real estate company, was capable of changing consciousness, the future of work, and the way people relate to each other. Like a conman, Neumann appears to have been a masterful storyteller. But storytelling without evidence is as fragile as glass cracked into a spiderweb—difficult to see through and fragile to the slightest touch. Investors were foolish not to test the veracity of Neumann’s claims or to put them in the proper context. WeWork was always going to be a real estate company.
But I digress. To tie it up then, the best founders do have a chess master’s ability to plan six moves ahead, and to weave credible claims into a story about how each move will take the company from the small to the great. This is the Friday Night Dyson Sphere. It’s about those who dare to be unrealistic.
Schools, sadly, have no idea how to impart these virtues. They don’t even know they exist. So it is no surprise that the twenty-year-olds who belong in the Venn diagram overlap between having the technical chops, the know-how, the edge control, the emotional intelligence, and all the rest of it is a vanishingly small group. As with all virtues, there are mistakes of too little, mistakes of too much. The perfect founding team would be perfectly balanced everlastingly on the golden hinge between each extreme. But no one can achieve that balance all the time. We exist—all of us, most of the time—in a state of perpetual aim. Back and forth we go, learning to be less, learning to be more. We can only hope that the days are not rare when we hit the mark.
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