Stop Being a Wimp
blog.wepay.com
blog.wepay.com
Or, to put another way, he's taking "tough" and using that word to mean a whole bunch of other traits: resourcefulness, perseverance, endurance, motivation & ambition -- and smashing them all into the word "toughness". Echoing swombat & enjo in this thread, yes, toughness can help you get things done, but it isn't what lets you get things done. Nice but not sufficient.
For example: "I don’t think there is anything particularly new here. PG says that the definitive description of good founders is “relentlessly resourceful.” I’m pretty sure that “toughness” is a big part of that. Can you take care of yourself and get (sh)it done, or are you a wimp?"
I'm pretty sure that "relentlessly resourceful" and "tough" are largely disjoint. Likewise, taking care of yourself & getting shit done, and folding in the face of adversity, are not as related. Why did he choose those things as either/or? It's a strange choice. So it's not wrong, really, but it's not really right, either.
Being "tough" can help founders be successful, but i don't think it's causal, just highly correlated with what are actually the good predictors. So the author banging his chest and talking about how he can just hear you describing his company as so damn tough is -- while not false -- not very useful.
or how about this: "Tough people choose decisiveness over diligence." That's just terrifying that he would present this as a choice, and i would run away from having him as an operator. First, it's a false dichotomy, but more problematic is that it doesn't matter how decisively tough you are -- if you're shooting from the hip, you'll miss. Is he trying to address analysis paralysis? Because if so, that's a very strange choice in language he's used.
Put another way: In the post above by jiu-jitsu practitioner where he is describing grit, i think he's absolutely right to say that grit is something incredibly useful in non-physical arenas. As a boxer, i've watched a lot of people get through some really brutal places. However, that 'grit' emerges from some very different internal motivations, such as a) raw ambition to be the best, b) a deep fear of the shame of failure, c) for the sheer hell of it, d) because a girl is watching, and even it looked like e) from a sublime appreciation of the present moment. (Zen boxer, totally weird) -- but they all were able to push through places where I watch a lot of people quit, stop working, stop pushing themselves, etc.
When Mr. Godin is talking about the importance of actually shipping software, and the difference between people who ship, and people who don't -- he's not framing that in terms of tough vs. wimp. Those words are pretty loaded with anthropological baggage.
Actually, i'm finding myself repeating what api is saying upthread, so i'll join in up there :) My real contribution is that if 'grit' is the observed behavior, i think 'toughness' is the wrong trait to look for that produces it.
I'm pretty sure that "relentlessly resourceful" and
"tough" are largely disjoint.
As I went on to say, where they're not disjoint, they're probably correlated, not causal, and i cite some examples where people i know exhibited Relentless Resourcefulness WITHOUT demonstrating the OP's definition of toughness. (Although, perhaps they meet your definition of tough, which is why you're quickly judging my claim as false, and we're having a miscommunication on terminology).
I can't use your definition of tough, so i responded to his. Look at his third sentence:
"These guys (and gals) were not the young, sheepish,
technical founders you’d expect. These guys are
operators – savvy, confident, operators."
Is that definitive? Is it always true? No, of course not -- we're talking about human properties that vary as much as humans. But I wouldn't want to look for relentless resourcefulness by looking for toughness.
He's looking at confidence & poise as indicators of toughness. He saw the demo day, and he's dividing people into operators and sheepish 'technical founders'.
You may say tough as a shorthand for relentless resourcefulness. He's saying tough to mean the opposite of geek.
So the question, i suppose, is how do you, pg, evaluate people for toughness? The OP seems to be using a mix of posture & anthropology combined with business benchmarks.
"Wimps don’t really get anything done – they don’t release
a product, they don’t make sales, they don’t raise money,
hey balk at big problems, they quit before they should."
Finally, his definition of wimp/tough might be "true" -- whatever the hell that means -- but i find it useless, and maybe worse than useless if it leads you disqualify many people who are RR. True/False is easy, but useful/useless is much harder to evaluate.
A useful statement about the mental traits of founders would be nice to have. A useful test would be even better. That's what i'm trying to get at.
I believe in theory this might be possible, but it seems like it would be vanishingly rare. And if so, then anyone who disagrees with something ought to be able to find some sentence in it where the writer goes wrong.
So take this blog post. The entire meaning of it hinges on the meaning of "wimp" and "though". And while the reader could fill in a meaning of these two words that makes the blog post make sense, many readers here seem to have interpreted it with a different meaning than was probably intended by the author. For these readers the blog post reads like bullshit.
A sentence in a text can influence the meaning of another sentence. For example:
"I don’t think there is anything particularly new here. PG says that the definitive description of good founders is “relentlessly resourceful.” I’m pretty sure that “toughness” is a big part of that. Can you take care of yourself and get (sh)it done, or are you a wimp?"
This partially establishes what the author means by "tough" and "wimp". But in my opinion it's not clear enough what he means by "though" and "wimp" to conclusively say that the blog post is correct or to say that the blog post is incorrect. It depends on the preconceived notions of the reader.
p.s. so a simple example would be:
"Tough people don't cry"
"Good founders are tough"
Even though both are not false in isolation (but not true either!), the combination is false.
I.e., a successive series of observations of white swans, written with a strong narrative, to strongly imply that all swans are white.
This sort of definition of "tough" seems a bit insulting to bouncers, cops and cage fighting champions. Like how the nerd definition of "risk" is an insult to soldiers, parachutists, and Evel Knievel.
When I wasn't outside working in the below-freezing weather, I fed a coal stove through this past winter because we didn't have a modern heater in our workplace. The ash turned my snot and phlegm consistently gray. Things are a little cozier now, but I still don't run the air to save on money - and Beijing is hot in the summer.
Adopted a dog?
I don't dispute that you did would take more grit than most people would be willing to put up with, but for heavens sake man a mask is what $0.5? If your phlegm changed color, what do you think happened to your lungs?
I've seen many different people train over the years, and I think grit can be acquired. Hard training encourages it. But, on the other hand, I think some people start out grittier than others. I have some training partners who never really acquired much grit. Those without much grit in training tend not to have much grit off the matt.
This is a long way of saying that while those examples aren't particularly impressive, I still think grit matters in areas that don't require physical exertion.
Startups (and other intellectual and business ventures) are not sports though. This is a double-edged sword.
Sometimes "grit" means that you push through the tough parts. This is good, and absolutely necessary for success in anything. But sometimes it means that you fail repeatedly by making the same mistake repeatedly because you mistake self-reflection and course correction for weakness and refuse to learn anything.
This talk about startup founders having to be "tough" just seems like an ego boost to make the whole startup experience feel heroic and epic, which I think is OK because a little self-aggrandizing is probably good for motivation.
I've seen plenty of people who are very tough on the axes you mention but were unable to deal with the stress of starting a startup.
My entire world is consumed with interactions with business owners (lead generation for the service industry). We work with thousands of small businesses, some "tough" and some not so much. To me the defining characteristic of a successful business man is always "obsessively analytical", not simply "decisive".
Every successful business person I've ever encountered can tell me (to the number) the key metrics for their business on demand. They know that our program is generating x% return on their spend. They know that we're +- y% better than a competitor. They know everything about their business.
When you've aggressively instrumented your business and have a lot of data, it's easy to be decisive. I've also encountered a number of business people who are decisive, but are more or less always shooting from their gut. They don't tend to do very well. For them everything is a guess, even if they're really sure that they are right.
Toughness is overrated. Great businesses are built by constantly trying to assess and reduce risk. You don't do that by being tough, you do it by being fascinated with data.
If someone very "alpha male" thinks the world is flat, it is still round. The universe doesn't give a shit about your status.
Neither does the market, really.
Business... or at least business done well... is a science. It's about minimizing and maximizing and optimizing and iterating. It's about building a good fit to a market, and lots of details.
Machismo can be beneficial in certain contexts, but it's not fundamental. You're spot on about analytics and data-driven rational thought.
It does have some value, but the excessive machismo is not particularly appealing. Yes, you get shit done. Yes, getting shit done is a prerequisite to getting a startup done. No, that doesn't make you some kind of super-human being. There are plenty of others out there, outside the world of startups, who get tremendous amounts of shit done.
With a bit more life experience, you may learn that there's more to effectiveness than being "tough". You can get a whole lot more done with intelligence than with mere bullishness.
If this article was written by PG about WePay, that would be one thing. Even if its 100% true, it sounds less impressive when the author is telling others how great someone else thinks he (or his company) is. It just came off a bit too self-congratulatory to me. And that's saying a lot in the already narcissistic world of startups.
I think you may be right. The guy that's best to start the business is not necessarily the best person to run it a few years later. I'll let you know in a few years ;)
I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm saying you're doing something wrong. You're not. It's just how it works. It was the "burn the bridges" line that nudged me to write this comment.
But that would increase their own value as well. YC and WePay are in this together, there's never really a situation where something is good/bad for one and not for the other.
I understand that things are blurrier with YC than they are with VC firms in general. I know about and admire Wufoo. I know Graham has repeatedly stated how happy he is with the Wufoo outcome. I can see plain as day the network effect YC has created with the large number of operating businesses it has started and with its (even larger) alumni network. I am not picking on YC with this comment.
Stereotype much?
In general this sort of post is vapid bullshit. Success in business comes from:
1) Having a product or service that people want.
2) Having a way to let people know that you have it and persuade them to try it or purchase it.
3) Having a way to deliver that product or service that costs less than the amount you take in as payment.
That's it. Everything else is bullshit, including whether or not the founders are "sheepish" or are "operators."
Business is actually very superstitious. There are so many factors that go into success in business that it makes rational analysis from hard data or from first principles hard, so people fall back on superstition. A lot of this superstition revolves around this almost mystical notion of having "what it takes," which tends to reduce to some notion of alpha maleness combined with luck.
I actually had an investor type tell me once that one of the things he looks for in potential founders is a "prominent jaw line." It was the funniest fucking thing. I am not making this up. Very very hard not to laugh out loud...
It reminds me of the Superbowl winner who wears the same pair of socks that he won the Superbowl in for every final game he plays... without washing them of course. Correlation != causation.
Superstition always causes people to make bad decisions. The big one I see in business is that amazing amounts of money gets thrown at superficial correlates of success and at empty cargo cultist alpha male types. Ever wonder how CueCat got funded? Why, it was going to <buzzword buzzword buzzword> and the founder I'm sure had a square alpha male jaw line and was very assertive.
Yes, sure, all you have to do to make a successful company is make something people want and charge for it. In the same way that all you have to do to climb Everest is keep walking uphill till you can't anymore.
The real issue here is that doing these things is in practice very hard, at least the way startups have to do them. Doing them at the level of a service business like, say, a sandwich shop, is easy. Doing them at the sort of scale required in a startup is so much harder that in practice few can bear it.
We have a huge amount of data about this after funding over 200 startups. We think constantly about the problem of how to predict which startups will succeed. And nothing is so clear as that toughness is the deciding factor.
Do you mean some mixture of perseverance, ability to make decisions, and willingness to take a few lumps? Or do you mean narcissism and alpha male characteristics?
I went back and re-read the blog post, and I can sort of see how I might have been misinterpreting it a little. But I still dislike "toughness," and I think using that term invites the sort of misinterpretation that we're seeing here. Here's why.
I have met quite a few folks in business who seem to think... well... they would never use this term or say it like this, but they basically think that it takes a sociopath or someone with narcissistic personality disorder to start a successful business.
I've seen several examples of this in action... of people who put up with or even fund downright abusive off-the-charts-narcissistic personalities because they were convinced that those are the sorts of people who will be successful.
The thing is: this doesn't match what I've seen in terms of actual success. Granted, I don't have 300 examples. I have about five. But what I've seen is that success is determined by good market research, good analytics, iteration, perseverance, intelligence, and a bit of luck. There are lots of factors, but those seem to be the big ones.
In the narcissistic world of startups, the term "toughness" is going to bring to mind narcissism and sociopathic behavior. There are just too many bad examples. Use another word, like "perseverance" or "resourcefulness" and your point will be better taken.
Toughness comes in different qualities and colors. Do which do great founders wear?
It's in your best interest to promote the 'heroic' model of startups, that don't charge but grow huge and sell -- a hopeful one-time sale model -- rather than incremental sales like I do.
If the top of the mountain is earning a lot of money from your business, there are still different ways to reach that peak. Every mountain has multiple faces.
Some faces are easy and well-known, like creating a product that creates business value, and then capturing that value by charging. Other faces are considered "ballsy" because they are so difficult -- the model of growing big while free, and then the one-time liquidity event.
The easy face can still get you to the top, and, bonus - it's easy!
As someone who runs a service business, and who spends a lot of time working closely with a large number of people who also run service businesses ... I'd really like to know if your opinion here is based on any actual facts.
Traditional businesses have to deal with local ordinances and licenses, real estate, advertising & marketing, and one-on-one customer relations, all with higher expenses and lower potential revenues. They are wickedly susceptible to both local and national economic trends; when customers stop spending money or coming in the door, it's very, very hard to get them to come back. "Startup" businesses more often have these wonderful markets of millions of customers; if half of them walk away, you can still have a viable business.
And of course, startups have things like YCombinator (and TechStars, and...) that are putting a lot of effort into helping them be successful. Traditional businesses? Their best bet is their local SBA, and those guys are not helpful at all.
Hell, I just brought on another person to manage my service business so that I can begin to ease out of the nightmare of running that thing and slip into the wonderful world of coding all day.
Your overlooking all the tremendously difficult and gutsy things you have to make a business sucessful: 1. Quit a well paying job which affords your family food,shelter and clothes. 2. Work 14 hours a day on a service that people may not buy even though they have given you letters of intent that they will. 3. Partner and work with people (devs, designers, customers) who you've known for less than the guy who works at your favourite pizza place. 4. Work on something which at the end of the day might be useless because the whole industry could change. (Launching a new mp3 player on the same day as the ipod) 5. Cold call hundreds of potential customers of which 90% will slam the phone on you. 6. Work with no health insurance (if you dont get funding) to save money for your startup.
I dont think you could even think of attempting a "real" money making startup unless you have brass balls.
One thing I find interesting is that people often call me very tough and direct, while most of the time that's not how it feels. I always hesitate on whether I'm being too wimpy, and I still get amazed that it doesn't come through in conversations. I don't know if it's because I got lucky and have a good pokerface where my emotions don't easily come through, or whether I am actually not wimpy and the state of hesitation goes hand in hand with toughness.
For those of you who are Buffett fans, regarding this there's a great quote by him on page 293 of "The Snowball" (bio written by Alice Schroeder):
"Intensity is the price of excellence."
This is also probably why Andy Grove penned his book "Only the Paranoid Survive".
This can be good for getting the ball rolling and keep it rolling. There are several problems with a team like this: 1) Leads to lots of arguments and falling out. 2) The team in unbalance, it may lack creative elements. Might produce stuff but nothing world changing.
Start-ups have seen traits that they see as necessary for them to win. For instance, Shopify has identified the Resource Investigator/Plant team.http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2378-profitable-proud-shopify . They only hire creative programmers. What they have seen is that creative programmers might be slower but they make up for it by reducing the amount of code written. The problem with this team is that rarely creativity people follow through with stuff to the end. They like the creating part but once that is gone they don't want any part of it.
Just a side note Shopify team would whip the shit out of wePay team any given day. But they don't have the tough guy act going for them(Data taken from belbin's book).
The main thing I think start-ups should realize that a lot of studies have gone into what makes a good team. Belbin Team Role Theory is a must: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Management-Teams-They-Succeed-Fail/d....
The best team is a mixture of people, not a unbalance team.
In Rich's blog, he has the fight part right. You have to fight for what you want and what you believe in. True entrepreneurs know this, because if you don't fight for it, what you get in return is near nothing, or zilch. You get railroaded and sidetracked.