Daniel Gross: evaluation

Transcript context

…In the quest for talent, do you think we are overvaluing smarts? It depends for what role. I definitely think for the role of founder — the one I specialize in — looking for someone to start a business that has a chance of becoming the next Thermo Fisher or the next Facebook or the next Apple, yes, I think intellect is very much overpriced or overvalued. I think it’s extremely important and definitely in the mega success scenarios — if this was a kind of Gartner two-by-two, you would have high intellect and high power or energy or ambition, pick your word. But if you had to pick, you actually probably need energy because what you want is multiple shots on goal from the individual. It is really difficult, basically impossible . . . I have not heard a story of someone never having to course-correct, and all their ideas were right from day one. They just launched and got there. For the most part, you try a lot of things. You spend most of your day getting negative reinforcement from the system until something starts working. The reason most companies fail is, with enough negative reinforcement, the actor stops participating. What you actually want is someone who has a lot of energy, who’s just going to keep on going. People, I think, tend to discount that in favor of intellect. But in your world, Tyler, is it any different? I could make the case, actually, that in academia, maybe intellect matters much more. You guys are solving real problems versus us just pounding away at keyboards, and you’re trying to make numbers get bigger. Doesn’t intellect matter a lot? Are we always solving real problems? I look for energy and durability in that combination. Then here’s another thing I look for. I think it’s very important, especially in academia but in many spheres — does that person understand which are the correct hierarchies to be climbing? This may be influenced by my own background as a chess player when I was quite young. I knew a lot of super-talented young chess players — just brilliant people — young kids, full of energy to play chess. But they always were just stuck on the notion that winning at chess was the game they should be playing. For Magnus Carlsen, that’s true. That’s the game he should have been playing, and he is, still. But for most of those people, if they stayed in the chess game, their lives are miserable. They’re now old. They don’t have health insurance. They’re not top players anymore. Their lives are wrecked, so you can have durability and energy at the wrong thing. The people who can understand this is the right path to get to some higher point where that higher point actually makes sense — I like to see if a person has that. Also getting them talking about drama, you get a sense of how they organize hierarchies of status or achievement in their minds. Those would be my top things. Along with smarts, energy durability, do they understand the hierarchies they should be climbing?…

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