I increasingly think the prerequisites for becoming a founder would look mildly alarming on a psychological assessment.
Obsession. Delusion. Stubbornness. An unusually high tolerance for rejection. The ability to talk about the same idea for five years without becoming bored. A willingness to risk public humiliation in pursuit of something that may not work.
In almost any other setting, we’d stage an intervention.
In business, we call it entrepreneurship.
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I’ve been thinking about this because so much of what gets written about founders focuses on the respectable traits. Resilience. Leadership. Vision. Adaptability. All true, I’m sure. But since building businesses from the age of 22, I think some of the more useful prerequisites are considerably stranger.
They’re traits that can be liabilities in one context and enormous advantages in another. Useful dysfunctions, I like to call them.
So, in no particular order, here are my 24 unofficial prerequisites for becoming a founder.
Thick skin. Not because criticism stops hurting, but because you need to recover quickly enough that somebody else’s opinion doesn’t become your new operating system.
A slightly delusional relationship with probability. You need enough rationality to understand the odds and enough irrationality to believe you might be the exception.
An unusually high tolerance for embarrassment. Selling before you’re established. Posting to nobody. Asking for money. Following up again. Launching something people might ignore. Being publicly enthusiastic about something that currently exists mainly in a Google Doc. Entrepreneurship requires an extraordinary willingness to be seen trying.
Obsession. Interest gets you started. Obsession is what makes you notice the tiny things nobody else thinks are worth noticing, and continue caring long after the novelty has disappeared.
Selective deafness. You need to listen extraordinarily closely while simultaneously developing the ability to completely ignore certain opinions.
A weird relationship with rejection. You don’t need to become immune to it. You need to metabolise it quickly enough that a no becomes data rather than identity.
Comfort with being misunderstood. Particularly at the beginning, when your ideas make perfect sense inside your head and sound mildly insane once released into the atmosphere.
An inability to leave things alone. I think this might be one of the great founder tells: encountering something perfectly adequate and being disproportionately irritated by how much better it could be.
The ability to manufacture momentum from nothing. There will be periods when nobody is emailing, buying, funding, inviting or validating you. Nothing is happening unless you make something happen. So you do.
A short memory for pain. Cash-flow crises. Manufacturing disasters. Hiring mistakes. Launches that nearly kill you. Six months later: Anyway, I have another idea.
The ability to hold contradictory truths. This is absolutely going to work and I could be completely wrong need to occupy the same brain without cancelling each other out.
Resourcefulness bordering on audacity. Not I know how to do this, but I have absolutely no idea how to do this, but give me until 3pm.
A high tolerance for unfinishedness. Something is always broken, late, underperforming, being rebuilt or approximately 70% as good as you want it to be. The fantasy of eventually getting everything sorted is one I personally remain very fond of.
A strange appetite for responsibility. Eventually you realise that almost every problem can be traced back to a decision you made, didn’t make, hired someone to make or should have noticed sooner. Fun!
The ability to care deeply without becoming precious. Your company can be deeply personal to you while the product, campaign, hire, strategy or idea still needs to die when the evidence says it isn’t working.
A willingness to repeat yourself. By the time you’re painfully bored of saying something, the market may have heard it twice. You need to resist confusing your own over-exposure with everyone else’s.
A high tolerance for looking stupid before looking smart. Most interesting ideas become obvious retrospectively. Before that, they often look questionable, unnecessary or weird.
The ability to create certainty for other people while carrying uncertainty yourself. Not false certainty. Conviction. The ability to say this is where we’re going while privately knowing there are seventeen things you haven’t figured out yet.
A fascination with problems. The best founders I know don’t simply tolerate problems; there’s often a tiny part of them that becomes energised by one. Interesting. Why is that happening? A problem is irritating, yes. But it’s also something to solve.
The ability to regenerate your own energy. Nobody is coming every Monday morning to make the founder interested again. You need to know how to find your way back to curiosity, conviction and momentum after they’ve temporarily left the building.
Comfort with asymmetry. You can spend three years pushing something uphill and then have one conversation change the trajectory of the entire company. Founder life has a terrible relationship between effort and reward in the short term. You need to keep playing anyway.
The instinct to know when to be stubborn and when to change your mind. Possibly the hardest one. Persistence and delusion can look remarkably similar from the inside. So can adaptability and giving up too early. There is no framework that completely solves this. Eventually you have to develop judgement.
A tiny chip on your shoulder. Not enough to build your entire life around proving somebody wrong. Just enough I’ll show you to pull out of the emergency cupboard when intrinsic motivation is having the day off.
And finally:
You need to enjoy the game more than the trophy.
I think this might be the prerequisite that overrides all the others.
Because the trophies are incredibly brief.
The launch lasts a day. The revenue milestone becomes the new baseline almost immediately. The article gets published, the award goes on the shelf, the investment lands in the bank, the business sells… and then, eventually, it’s Tuesday again.
Most of entrepreneurship is just a very ordinary Tuesday.
It’s figuring out why conversion dropped. Finding yet another new manufacturer. Rewriting the email. Having the uncomfortable conversation. Moving money around. Looking at the same problem from a seventeenth angle. Getting excited because you found a 4% improvement nobody else on earth could possibly care about.
If you need the trophy to make all of that worthwhile, entrepreneurship will be a painful experience.
The founders who seem happiest doing it are often the ones who genuinely enjoy the peculiar intellectual sport of building something. They like the puzzle. The movement. The possibility. The constant requirement to figure shit out.
Maybe that’s why so many founders sell one company and, despite knowing exactly what they’re signing themselves up for, eventually start another.
They miss the game.
The trophy is the moment everyone sees. The game is the life you actually have to enjoy.
