The most important skill in Startup Land: Drive
When I moved to San Francisco to become a founder, I had a golden, shining vision of what startup life would be like. I saw myself pitching a room of investors in a beautiful, sun-lit office; I heard myself saying “innovation” and “disruption” non-ironically; I imagined leading a massive team by being a little bit of a jerk but ultimately lovable; and, inevitably, amassing a generational fortune. As soon as I got to Silicon Valley, however, I was greeted by a harsher reality: Startup life is painful.The odds are stacked against you, so you’ll have more failures than normal. Each failure is objectively worse, as they’re all existential when your company is finding its footing. And, adding insult to injury, everything that goes wrong is your fault and your problem to fix. Even when you do succeed, the highs fade quickly — like the time, pictured below, when I nearly won $1,000,000 in a pitch competiton, only to have my co-founder leave me the very next day. Elon Musk famously said that running a startup is like “eating glass and staring into the abyss of death,” and he wasn’t kidding. Neither was Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator, here:
In order to brave the emotional rollercoaster of startup life, you’ll need one crucial skill: Angela Duckworth, author of Grit, defined drive best:
It’s that simple, and that hard; drive is way easier said than done. If you can follow those two steps consistently, you’ll be on your way to being a great startup employee — but if you can’t, startup life might not be for you. Part One: Do Hard ThingsBeing ambitious is scary. As social animals — and survivors of high school — we have internalized the Law of Conformity: individuality is scary, so it’s bad to be superlative in any way. “Safety in numbers!” Even when we set out to “innovate,” there is a natural human tendency to reason by analogy — i.e., to imagine what we’ve seen before, but with a new coat of paint. Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, wrote:
But, of course, copycatting sucks the oxygen out of a market and ensures mutual destruction; as Peter Thiel would say, competition is for losers. The lesson: if you want to find hard problems that are worth your time and energy, run towards the pain.Ben Horowitz, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, explained this concept vividly:
Horowitz’s example is written for a manager, but his advice generalizes well. You know what’s painful? Being a beginner. It’s embarrassing! I had the ambition to race a triathlon for years before I mustered up the courage to learn to swim as an adult. Even today, I can still only breathe in the water by turning my head to the right: I am procrastinating in becoming an ambi-turner because I don’t want to go back to flailing around in the water as a beginner. I’d rather just stick to “good enough,” even if it’s supboptimal. You know what else is painful? Starting from a blank page. It’s indescribably easier to follow in someone else’s footsteps than to start something new. I also know this from experience: in college, I joined existing club and rose to leaderhip positions and didn’t start anything new, delaying my entrepreneurial experimentation by at least four years. In both cases, should have run towards the pain. In the first case, there’s no alternative: if I don’t start out as a beginner, I’ll never become an expert. And in the second case, I never put myself in a position where utter failure was a real possibility, and didn’t test my drive in college. In short, you need to do things that others won’t to succeed in the startup world.Learn new skills. Build things from scratch. If you stay coast in the wide, well-defined path of social conformity, you’ll never test your drive to learn, to build, and to succeed. So venture out — and start now. Part Two: Don’t QuitSadly, venturing into the unknown is the easy part: anyone can set ambitious New Years Resolutions, but few actually follow them. The daily challenge that awaits you at an early-stage startup is to live to fight another day.As legendary angel investor Naval Ravikant said: If you’re a normal employee, you can quit and the startup will probably survive. But if you want to participate in the startup world to the fullest, your job as an employee is simple: be an energy-giver, not an energy-taker. You should leave every day knowing that your presence helped build the team’s collective perseverance and left you with enough gas in the tank to do it all again the next day. I realize that, again, that’s way easier said than done. It’s something that I personally struggle with — I’ll often burn way too hot, hit my limit, and spend a couple of days feeling angry or sad before I’m actually the happy, productive, gregarious Christian that gives his team energy. That guy is never going to quit, and he can even help others stick with it through the hard times. There’s not much more to say here: just don’t quit.If you need help, as everyone does, find activities outside of work that bring you energy, surround yourself with energy-givers, discover an accountability system that works for you (e.g., Silicon Valley peeps love Mastermind groups) and — no joke — read a self-help book. The latter helps me: if David Goggins can finish an ultramarathon on two fractured legs, I can definitely finish writing this newsletter every week. Part Three: Prove to an interviewer that you can do hard things and cannot quitAs all but my most recent readers will know, this is the first post in a new series, the Operator Skill Tree. That means I’m here to help you get a job at a startup.Unfortunately for us recruiters and you applicants, drive is hard to assess in an interview and even harder to assess in a resume review. How do I know that you won’t quit just by reading a few (inflated) bullet points? Alexandr Wang, co-founder of ScaleAI (a startup building artificial intelligence infrastructure that was recently valued at $8.7 billion), has a simple framework: hire people who give a shit.
So, for a first practical piece of advice, get obsessed about something! That’s admittedly a longer-term project, however, so here are three things you can do right now to prove you have drive in an interview.
The commonly-cited stat says that 90% of startups fail, but I’d put it differently: 100% of startups fail, but only 10% have enough drive to recover.There’s no better predictor of startup success than having a team full of ridiculously driven people — so if you want to excel in the startup world, you could do much worse than by improving your willpower. Thanks for reading Silicon Valley Outsider! Here are a few past editions that you might like if you enjoyed this one: If you want to join 450 folks in getting an email from me each Monday, I’ll help you understand Silicon Valley using normal-human words. Disclaimer: There are two reasons people write: to teach, and to learn. This piece is the latter for me. I love using this newsletter to put structure to my thoughts on hairy topics, and this one — exhorting people to try harder and not give up — is particularly hairy. I’m eager to hear what you liked and what you disliked from the above. Please reach out and let me know! If you liked this post from Silicon Valley Outsider, why not share it? |
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