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The Winning Traits Every Successful Founder Has 💼 · Earn Your Leisure

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  Speaker 1: What are the specific characteristics that you look for in founders? Right? Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: you said some things like they got to build a
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  Speaker 1: big team, but like there's got to be something that
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  Speaker 1: you see when they're talking about their company, when they
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  Speaker 1: have the idea. What are some of those characteristics that
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  Speaker 1: successful ones have in common? They're a little bit crazy,
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  Speaker 1: tell us more to find that. Yeah, no, seriously, the
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  Speaker 1: archetype of a founder. You know, typically people like to
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  Speaker 1: talk about product market fit. I tend to also like
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  Speaker 1: to think about founder market fit, like what's your reason
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  Speaker 1: that you are the person to win this particular market
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  Speaker 1: right now? Right? So there's a timing question in that.
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  Speaker 1: There's an expertise question in that, but not just technical expertise.
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  Speaker 1: There's a question about go to market, like what advantages
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  Speaker 1: do you have when it's time to go get scalable
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  Speaker 1: customer acquisition? Right? Is it relationships with resellers? Is it
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  Speaker 1: relationships with CIOs? Is it relationships with media platforms? Like?
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  Speaker 1: How are you going to scale more efficiently than the
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  Speaker 1: next person? And really is this part of your life? Work?
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  Speaker 1: Startups take time? Right? So the last company I co
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  Speaker 1: found at Pendrop still privately held company. We just announced
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  Speaker 1: a few weeks ago, just reached one hundred million dollars
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  Speaker 1: of annual revenue run rate. We started that company in
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  Speaker 1: twenty eleven, right, so we're thirteen years in and still
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  Speaker 1: just getting started. Right. The company's two hundred plus people.
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  Speaker 1: VJ my co founder, CEO and runs the company. And
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  Speaker 1: you know that company. You think about your life work.
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  Speaker 1: Are you really willing to work on this problem for
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  Speaker 1: a decade? And you could oftentimes sense that out with
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  Speaker 1: a founder. Is this just something that they thought this
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  Speaker 1: a good idea, They think they can build something right
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  Speaker 1: quick exit in a year or two. We're not really
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  Speaker 1: interested as someone that really is devoting a chapter of
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  Speaker 1: their life to solving this because you know, entrepreneurship, as
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  Speaker 1: you all know, it has its ups and downs. Like
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  Speaker 1: one week I'm killing it, the next week is killing me.
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  Speaker 1: I'm killing it. It's killing me. And like someone that's
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  Speaker 1: going to stick through it through all the ups and
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  Speaker 1: downs its key. So a little bit of that perseverance,
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  Speaker 1: it's key. Someone who has that vision of what the
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  Speaker 1: future looks like. Are you thinking about what the world
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  Speaker 1: looks like three to five years from now, right, not
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  Speaker 1: just reacting to what you saw in the news. This quarter.
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  Speaker 1: But like, you have an independent point of view of
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  Speaker 1: the world needs to look like this, and I'm going
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  Speaker 1: to do the things to make that become true. Because
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  Speaker 1: that person can also attract talent and they can attract capital,
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  Speaker 1: right because part of it is not just the idea,
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  Speaker 1: not just the software, but to build that team, you
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  Speaker 1: have to be the type of leader that someone wants
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  Speaker 1: to follow and work alongside and they want to bet
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  Speaker 1: their career on you. And so a little bit of
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  Speaker 1: that charisma, a little bit of that perseverance, that leadership,
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  Speaker 1: that vision, it comes across and that's what you start
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  Speaker 1: to see consistently across successful entrepreneurs personally. What do you
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  Speaker 1: think as the industry that's most ripe for disruption over
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  Speaker 1: the next five years that many people are not paying
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  Speaker 1: attention to. Look, I like the really boring, unsexy industries, right,
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  Speaker 1: really boring stuff healthcare, insurance, healthcare, legal. Uh. You know.
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  Speaker 1: I tend to say, if if you're a business owner
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  Speaker 1: and you at the end of the year kind of
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  Speaker 1: just go back and look at your bills and like
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  Speaker 1: where did you spend money? And then what's your customer
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  Speaker 1: satisfaction level with that industry? Right? It starts to uncover
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  Speaker 1: places where there's high revenue but low customer satisfaction. Those
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  Speaker 1: are the industries that are begging to be disrupted, right,
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  Speaker 1: industries like accounting. Right, when was the last time you
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  Speaker 1: heard someone brag about their accountant? Never very rarely you
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  Speaker 1: spend a lot of dollars there? When was the last
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  Speaker 1: time someone said, oh, man, my lawyers. So there's a
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  Speaker 1: lot of disruption opportunity there. There's so many industries like
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  Speaker 1: that that they're they're necessary components of living life and
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  Speaker 1: being in business, but uh, they're antiquated. Right. They've thrown
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  Speaker 1: a lot of humans, uh and expensive humans at the problem,
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  Speaker 1: and so uh, you know, even you know, there's a
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  Speaker 1: we think about companies that we've invested in. Uh, you know,
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  Speaker 1: someone looked up and realized, you know, mom and pop
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  Speaker 1: pharmacies were being overlooked, no one was paying attention to them,
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  Speaker 1: and their software was aged and antiquated. And so, uh,
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  Speaker 1: there's a founder that we backed built a company called
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  Speaker 1: hill Now that's building software to help mom and pop
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  Speaker 1: pharmacies have modern software. Right. Are you know someone as
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  Speaker 1: another founder that we backed that realized everyone was chasing
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  Speaker 1: the big banks trying to build software for them. But
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  Speaker 1: there's all these credit unions and they're, you know, relatively small,
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  Speaker 1: but no one was building the software to modernize them.
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  Speaker 1: And so so Michael built a company called bank Joel
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  Speaker 1: and he's pot for excuse me, he's providing the software
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  Speaker 1: for all these credit unions and smaller regions banks. And
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  Speaker 1: so there's there's often these pockets where someone's running after
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  Speaker 1: the large enterprise, someone's maybe running after small and medium business,
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  Speaker 1: but the mid market is often overlooked. And so it's
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  Speaker 1: not just which vertical, but it's kind of which segment
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  Speaker 1: within that vertical are people not tackling right now