Brian Halligan: preference

Transcript context

…Going back to the conversation around CEOs, a lot of people listening to this podcast, just a lot of people in the world want to be founders, they want to be CEOs. At the same time, you look at Elon, you look at Jensen, you look at Steve Jobs, you look at you, a lot of people are like, I can't. I'm not this person, I'm not going to be as good as them. There's no world where I'm this good. Do you feel like there are specific profiles or just traits that you have to be born with to be a successful CEO, or do you think it's earnable, anybody can be successful if they really work hard? Go ahead and meet all these CEOs coming in, and I have a little algorithm in my head, and I look for four things. I call it my LOCK algorithm. L is for lovable, and Steve Jobs you would say is kind of rough and maybe not lovable, but he would inspire followership. You would want to follow him. And so, could I envision a 28-year-old me, graduating from business school, going to work for this person? Would I crawl across broken glass? That's question one. Two is just obsession. Are they deeply obsessed with this problem? I'm a little negative on people who came up with this problem to solve six months ago and started a company, I like people with deep founder market fit, who've been thinking about it for a long time, and have evidence in their lives of going deep down, obsessively down a rabbit hole because that's kind of what it takes to be a founder/CEO. The C is something I wouldn't have thought of, but this is a Sequoia thing, like chip on the shoulder. Pretty much all of them have a boulder on their shoulder, and I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder too. And the K is just for deeply knowledgeable about the domain. And so, I look for that. If I were to stick an S on it, I would say student. I look at Winston Weinberg from Harvey, or James from Profound, or Gabe from Rogo, some of these new very fast growing companies, they're students of the game. They're not just learn it alls, they're deep, deep, deep students of the game. And they're like LLMs, they're constantly, constantly learning, and it's not just learning stuff for me and their peers, but they go way back in time, and have a lot of history on stuff. So, those are some of the, kind of my little criteria I use when I'm evaluating CEOs. What do you look for, by the way, you've interviewed a ton of folks like me, what do you think is in common? Of what successful founders? Oh my god. I wish I had the... My succinct answer, I would go to Lennybot.com, and be like, what is the common pattern across these folks? One that you didn't mention that I think is interesting, I did some research on this recently, with Terence Rohan, one is just extremely ambitious. Just trying to do something really wild that most people are like, that's crazy. You're not going to get a subscription service for all music in the world, that's just... What are you doing? [inaudible 00:19:38]-…

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