Speaker unverified: belief

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…It's funny. On the founders' thing, I was having a conversation with my dad about a potential angel investment recently. He was like, I know people always say the founder is the most important, but what is your view of what that actually means? I just barfed out this answer. Howard, sounds like your earlier story, it just came to you and I was like, are they a weirdo? In particular, are they a weirdo at something where they're four standard deviations from the mean at that thing? It could kind of be anything. But if this person can't be in the middle of the distribution at everything, or else, this startup will never be successful. Yeah. I think what's interesting also is that there are so many ways to succeed by being amazingly good at the conventional thing by being the best at going through the map, following the map, or whatever, and sort of hacking whatever the process is that everyone's done before you. With startups, there's not much of a map. There might be some general principles, but in any given area, you're doing what you're doing for the first time. If someone else is doing it, you're trying to do it differently, and better, and whatever. You have to be able to think for yourself, and you have to have real conviction in yourself. I think, to your point, the people who are more unconventional, are people who are willing to do things based on what they think is right for them in their own views, versus just being the best at what's conventional. My last memo came out a couple of weeks ago. It was called I Beg to Differ. It was all about the need to be different. It's exactly what you're saying. The path to exceptionality cannot come through doing what everybody else does. The advantage of the things we do, especially Andrew does that we've been discussing, is the fact that there is no clear roadmap. There is no simple algorithm, which will produce a consistently correct outcome. But we are dealing with challenging concepts here. The person who sees differently and better is the one who's going to win. David Swensen, who ran the endowment at Yale, used to talk about the need to do things that are uncomfortably idiosyncratic. You have to be idiosyncratic to split tax and to win. For many people, it will be uncomfortable, because they'll be out of step with so-called common sense, but you got to do it anyway. One way that I intuit for myself about this point about why founders are everything, sort of the question, I guess, your dad asked is, think of the best startup idea you could possibly imagine. I don't know. Someone gave you Google's PageRank algorithm. It's literally what I was thinking of, too.…

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