Rahul Vohra: belief

Transcript context

…I'm curious if you'd say this has to be the case, but in your case it certainly is the case. You have this engine and it is a mixing metaphors.The engine is the transmission of the startup, but the true engine of the startup is like your passion, like this is your destiny, right? You do that nine month process. There was no other company that you would start. I would imagine that it’s, in many ways, given you the perseverance, the drive to look at your 15%–25% score on that rubric and say, “Okay, we're going to make that better,” versus, “Ooh.” I think so. I suspect I may just be on the far end of persistence compared to most people. We had a very interesting debate as an executive team over the last year about redefining our company values. This idea of persistence kept coming up over and over again. I was like, “You know what? Maybe we should have persistence as a value now.” Ultimately it didn't end up becoming a company value, but I do believe that even if it's not a company value, every single founder needs to exhibit unnatural levels of persistence. Again, to quote Paul Graham, he talks about grimly determined founders and how during the days when he was operating YC, he would see these people come out of college and they're the super nice and bubbly, and then a year or two later, they're just these grimly persistent people who will stop at nothing. They've got the battle scars from running through brick walls over and over and over again. I do genuinely believe that if you're a cofounder, if you're a founder, especially if you're a CEO, this is your job. You have to run through the brick walls over and over and over and over again. When it's time that other people might be thinking of giving up or backing out, you have to be the person say, “Nope, we're going to keep on going.” Also resonates.…

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