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What Traits Do the BEST Founders Share? Tommy & Cameron's Reflections · Giant Ideas

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back to Giant Ideas, the show where we talk about the ideas that have changed the world and the leaders behind them.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: But today it's just Cameron and me.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: And we figured that we've been doing this now for well over 50 episodes.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: We've interviewed a lot of leaders and we've particularly interviewed a large number of entrepreneurs.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: And our day job, of course, at Giant is backing the brightest and the best entrepreneurs that we can possibly find.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: So today we're going to focus on the characteristics of the best entrepreneurs that we have observed and backed and interviewed.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: And also talk a little bit about some of the insights that the investors we've had on the show have shared with us, about what they look for in amazing entrepreneurs.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, Cameron, are you ready for this?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to talk, I think, first of all, just about our experiences as venture capital investors.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Our job is to identify what it is about people that is going to make them build really, really, really good businesses.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Have you distilled it down?
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Done my best to.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking about this on the way here in the taxi.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: To distill it into a simple format.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there are probably four key characteristics and qualities I look for.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the first and foremost is resilience.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think across all the entrepreneurial journeys, the through line, bar perhaps maybe Google, is that they are bloody hard.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's a reason Elon says it's like chewing glass and staring into the abyss.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: You will have ups and downs, things will go wrong.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think just the ability to uh withstand that and keep going and find a creative way through.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's always a way through.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's always a creative solution to the problem, I think is the trait I see across all the entrepreneurs that we back and that succeed.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's uh sufficient uh on its own, but I think that is a core characteristic across everyone.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: So that's something we would always look for.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think resilience can take many forms.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it doesn't have to be loud, it can be very quiet.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I also think uh different different experiences in life can create resilience.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: But I think we're looking for resiliency and persistence.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I would think you, I've worked with you for a long time, you have both those qualities.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think the second thing I would look for is communication or storytelling.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think to be able to recruit resources and marshal resources to your vision, and that's talent to join you, that's customers to be, you know, early, early evangelizers of whatever you're doing.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, it's being able to raise capital.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: You need to be a clear communicator and you need to tell a compelling story of why people should take this risk, come on this kind of wild journey on your pirate ship and uh try and sail across the ocean for glory.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think on that one, we've had definitely examples where we've had brilliant founders who have a lot of the other characteristics, but they can't tell a story particularly to investors, they just can't raise the capital to go do it.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it kind of doesn't matter how what other characteristics you've got, how great your business is.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: If you can't tell the story and particularly to raise capital or hire people, I think we've been burnt by that in the past.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I do think if you know they can build the business to such a point, such an undeniable point that um the story, the business tells the story itself, it can still work.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I think you're you're hobbling yourself, right?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I think all the fantastic kind of legendary entrepreneurs are great storytellers in their own ways.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um Steve Jobs obviously being the best like product storyteller out there.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think the third one for me would be obsessiveness uh with the problem and obsessiveness with the subject matter, whatever that might be.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: It could be building uh micro-nuclear reactors like Dargot Radiant.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it could be, you know, reinventing uh, you know, how enzymes are built, but like obsessiveness with the problem and I think domain expertise um, you know, with the with the problem set they're trying to solve.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then the final thing is just like I think a degree of self-awareness, which I think is not one you would hear many people say.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: But I think whether they're um overt about it or not, I think the best entrepreneurs are incredibly good, like 0.1% of the world at something.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that can be product, that can be storytelling, that can be um, you know, persistence, that can be whatever it is, they're incredibly good at one thing, at least one thing, like world class, and we're trying to figure out what that is, but they also have these just enough the awareness to know the other things that they're not good at, and they are very capable of then surrounding themselves and complementing themselves with people who have uh the strengths that they don't have.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that would be my four.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think you know, not everyone's gonna have all four, but we're looking for people just to score pretty high, at least three out of four.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: How about you?
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: So mine are persistence, obsession, and control.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Control.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: The first two we share persistence and uh obsession.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: I say we share, I mean in terms of what we're looking for, but hopefully we also share a bit of it in ourselves.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: But the other one I would add is that I kind of added, I would say, in the last couple of years is control.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's it sounds weird and it's it's it's probably not the most uh 21st century school of management type of thing that people want to hear from leaders, but I think it's really important.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And by control, I mean control of every single aspect of the organization, control of how you are in the meeting with them.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Where, in my experience, when we're we're being pitched by founders, the best ones are in full control of how that meeting is going.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, in other ones, we've got to make the running, we're gonna suggest how the meeting's gonna happen.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: The best entrepreneurs come in and it's very clear that we are lucky to be in the room with them.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna run the meeting, how they want to run the meeting, they're gonna make sure they hit all the points, they're fully in control of it.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they're also in control of who's on their cap table.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: They have full control about which shareholders are owning bits of their businesses and why.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they are in control of their own destiny.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: They never, never allow their business to, you know, risk going out of running out of money or whatever it is, and just a kind of maniacal control of every single detail to an extreme degree.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the the word I was looking for to describe all of that, I found in the book that Mike Moritz, who we had on a couple of weeks ago, the legendary Sequoia Investor, that he wrote with Alex Ferguson.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and Ferguson basically taught the great Manchester United manager that was his approach.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when he had to really just still down why he was the greatest football manager of all time, it was a brutal, very old-fashioned, relentless control over everything.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: And famously, for example, David Beckham, when he, you know, stepped out of line and was no longer controllable, he was immediately removed.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so I think control is the other one.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I want to go back to some of the first couple of things you talked about, perseverance and obsession, because I think it's really interesting, like the type of perseverance.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because I was thinking about it uh as well on the way over, and you could for it, I've been today with a whole bunch of different leaders from law and finance and uh musicians and so on.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of them have a lot of perseverance.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I was with this um very tired looking uh corporate lawyer, and he has persevered for like 30 years in a brutal job, just going every single day with his clients, making a lot of money, probably, um, but ultimately just enduring.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think entrepreneurship is about perseverance, but I think crucially it's like under fire, relentlessly always producing and sort of surviving, not just surviving, but also producing under pressure and producing just like when it's on you to make something happen and pull a rabbit out of a bag consistently rather than sort of passive survivorship, which I think you can do in other form other walks of life and still be really successful.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'd agree with that.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think you have to also have a creative, uh, as I said, creative approach to problem solving.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you are enduring, things are happening, but you're not just, as you said, sitting there passively.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's you know, just because you can endure more than the other person, if you're not making forward movement on building your business, you're you're not going to succeed.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And to your point about control, I think, yeah, I believe, um, particularly in early stage companies, I believe in benign dictatorship.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's a group, but there should be a clear uh decision maker, a clear leader.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, hopefully he's benign or she's benign.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, they have the authority of a dictator.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: We've had some guests on the show, I think, have had quite different approaches, some legendary investors who I think think very differently about what they look for.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Mike Moritz, we had from Sequoia, I think, agreed with us about a lot of the things he was looking for.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: So we say tenacity, grit, persistence.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Grit and persistence.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: But others were very different.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: So Mike Maples, we had on from Floodgate, who's one of the best seed investors of all time.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so, unlike some other venture investors, you know, Mike, like us, is looking for entrepreneurs right at the beginning of their journey.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And he talks about looking for founders who are living in the future.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and and I think that's really interesting.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: And probably his most successful, some of his most successful investments, like Twitter, for example, those founders, I wouldn't necessarily describe them as necessarily fully in control or like brutally per uh uh persevering.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was more that they were just living in the future.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and and and Mike saw that, and that's what he was looking for.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I'd argue you could tie that to the storytelling communication quality, right?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: They are storytelling a version of the future that is super compelling.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think he broke it down into like plausible futures, like fantastical futures, and different entrepreneurs.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think Elon's version of space is like a fantastical future.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: It takes a certain kind of entrepreneur to be able to tell that story and then marshal the resources to make it come to reality.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: But you I think they're living in a future, they're future-oriented people.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think you have to be as an entrepreneur, but they can articulate that version of the future, both in their product and how they communicate that being built, but also to the investors.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: So one thing that uh comes out a lot, I think, is is this idea of trauma.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: So uh buzzworld, bit of a buzzword, buzzword invention these days.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and but you know, there's a quite a lot of people who I think believe that the a lot of the best entrepreneurs have survived some kind of childhood trauma in particular and are amazing entrepreneurs because of it rather than in spite of it.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think it's become uh the sort of show we we now kind of talk about trauma showcasing, where unfortunately entrepreneurs have you know watched endless podcasts like this and they're so much more kind of well trained uh than we were when we were startup founders.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so we get this kind of slightly comical thing in venture now of founders who've read that these moronic venture investors are looking for trauma.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: So within four minutes of many calls, people are talking about how you know their their grandmother ate their dog in front of them and you know, just kind of trauma showcasing.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it's less less easy to detect what's real and what's not.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I do think it's interesting, and I I think it is somewhat true.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Not necessarily like obvious um uh sort of stereotypical trauma of like really deep poverty new grow up or something like that.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: It could be, you know, you're the son of a president who never respected you, or you know, things which don't seem like trauma on on paper, but actually are fundamentally making people very insecure as children, and that drives them on to greatness.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I I do think there is something there, do you?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think there's a lot to it.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was somewhat popularized by my my former firm Hummingbird and the the piece on the matter.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think it's an overused word, but I think basically, you know, it's not a hugely novel insight that was shaped by childhood, and what happens to you in childhood often creates certain drives, generative drives, drives to escape something, drives to not have something happen to you again, uh, drive to be in control, um, drive to prove someone wrong.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think trauma is kind of a catch or word for figuring out like what is the why of why you are driven.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, what are you trying to prove?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've had, you know, something traumatic happen to you, it can often lead you to have outsized drive or want to do something outsized to try and fill the hole or try and prove something to someone.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if we look at kind of the famous examples, you know, I think um, you know, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos were both adopted, and of course, that that can create some some real psychological wounds.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, that's that's probably the most famous one.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Jensen Huang obviously you know had a had a kind of tough upbringing as an immigrant, you know, cleaning cleaning toilets.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's been pretty open about that.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Elon severely bullied in in South Africa in the 90s, I think never wanted to go back to being the kid in the playground who could be bullied, and so clearly wants to control every dynamic of what he can around around his his kind of being and his world.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's um, you know, there is some truth to it.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: That being said, I have met and I have seen very successful entrepreneurs who, on the surface of it, would have no um clear trauma, but they clearly have drive.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And to that point, I think that can come from things that you wouldn't necessarily deem trauma, but perhaps um, you know, have have created some desire to do something meaningful and important.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, lots of like the best entrepreneurs of all time come from very comfortable, you know, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, exactly Paul Allen from Microsoft.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: There's lots of lovely lives, lots of examples to the counter as well.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the day, I think if you have deep trauma, um, it won't be filled by building a trillion dollar company.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because that's not the root cause, and you've got to go uh do the work.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: But um, some people probably uh, you know, never come to that realization.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: An interesting uh candidate outside of tech is Ari Emanuel, who's the founder of Endeavour, kind of took that from a like a very small talent agency in in LA called WME to Endeavor to like bought UFC to take it as a public company.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and he talks a lot about uh the fact that he wish he'd done kind of therapy earlier because uh clearly so much of his behavior has been driven by like deep, deep trauma.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't think it uh it can be solved by that.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I guess that it could be that is a useful kind of um, I guess, metamorphosis of trauma to go do something productive, like build an amazing company that makes the world better and delivers a product.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: One of my favourite moments on the podcast is the philosopher Alan de Boton, who said that when successful people retire, often they're they're forced to stare into the dark abyss of their soul because they realize they're trying to fill a hole that will never be filled.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I heard a brilliant story today about the British explorer Hillary, who was climbing all these mountains when it was impossible.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he spent months and years leading up to his greatest ascent of this very tall mountain.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: I forget which one.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he's the first man to climb Everest.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it was Everest.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe he gets to Everest or whatever it is, gets to the top of the mountain, and he comes down, and you know, they said, What did you think?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: What did it feel like to achieve your life mission?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, I got to the top of the mountain, I turned left, and I saw a taller mountain.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, they carnivan Everest then.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Carnival Everest.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's a great story about so many successful people, and I think so many of the amazing successful people on our podcast.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, people like Tom Blomfield from Monzo have talked very openly about the mental health issues uh that you know he was probably trying to resolve through building these companies.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: And uh yeah, chase chasing success doesn't necessarily bring happiness.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think the fallacy too is that if you arrive at a destination, if the company becomes a certain valuation or whatever, that that suddenly solves it.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to be enjoying the journey, not the destination, or then it it definitely isn't uh it's a it's a temporary bomb.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: So this leads me on to wonder before we get back to some of the other characteristics, would we want our children to be entrepreneurs?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: I was talking about this today at a at a gathering I was at, and uh people were wondering about that.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: And and I do think, you know, lots of the most successful entrepreneurs in history are basically unhinged at some level because you have to be that unhinged to to sacrifice that much.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and often it comes from trauma or it comes from some deep drive to prove something.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think taking it away from our own children, children in general, would you advise people to to raise entrepreneurs?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Not that you really can raise an entrepreneur anyway, but yeah, I don't think it's I don't think that's something you can really, it's like saying let's you know raise a raise, well, I guess I guess the Serena and Venus Williams father did it, but it's like saying raise a Wimbledon final winner or something.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I don't think it's really something that the parents have too much say in.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'll talk from from my perspective, I would never be so prescriptive to my own kids as to say go go be an entrepreneur.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because then that typically backsfires when parents do that anyway.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there are a number of qualities of like the entrepreneurial journey, which I would want my kids to impart to my kids and which I hope they would absorb, you know, creativity, uh, resilience, um, optimism, you know, in the face of in the face of kind of challenges.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the entrepreneurial journey and that mindset, I think is hugely valuable for all children.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, particularly in this world of rapid, rapid change, um, I think having that mindset is something I would want to impart to all children.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: The idea of like go be a venture-backed uh CEO, that is not something I would be overly prescriptive of, but being an entrepreneur, you know, being your own boss, learning how to sell a product, um, and and therefore having a lot of independence, I think is a broadly positive message that as I think as many people should do that as as as can.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: We've had uh some some an amazing range of guests on the podcast talking about the sacrifice involved in in building what they bid have built.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um we had Cassar Yunus, uh founder of Applied Intuition, saying, you know, you only get four burners, you can really only focus on um three out of those four things.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: He listed them as health, family, work, and social life, and said basically he's had no social life, hasn't gone out for an evening, hasn't gone seen friends for almost a decade or something like that.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Quite quite extreme.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we had my good friend Jeremy Chan, the the founder and and chef behind Akoi saying you have to fight to the death, you have to sacrifice your lifestyle and your friends and your family if you really want it to work.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, those are just a couple of the of the statements we've had.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Does that resonate with you?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think you have to sacrifice to build something enduring like that?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think to build the really big ones, the companies that really last, I think those founders tend to be completely maniacally obsessed with just that company.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and that's that's their life's work and they're at peace with that.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: So some what someone like Casa Yunes, you know, with his comment about having an active choice of having no social life, I think it's because he is not content with building a billion dollar business or a$15 billion business or whatever it is, he wants to build the physical intelligence company of all time.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think he's probably been up close and personal enough with the true greats of Silicon Valley, because he ran Y Combinator to realize that you know, the jobs, the masks, this is all they do.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: They just work all the time.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, Elon Musk recently, even after everything he's achieved, I think was seen like in a in a trailer van on one of his manufacturing sites to make sure that things were being done properly and just like extreme, extreme sacrifice.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the crucial thing there is I think those entrepreneurs don't really see it as a sacrifice because that is their purpose in life and that's what they want to do.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: It gives them a competitive advantage for that doesn't feel like sacrifice.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: I do think there's a thing, not actually just with entrepreneurs, but with a lot of the very successful people we've we've interviewed.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: It is a recurring theme, this idea of at the intense periods of your work life sacrificing basically either family or health or um or friends.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of them, I think, have chosen to sacrifice friends and they just do family and work, and that's it.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of them get quite unhealthy at the height of their 100%.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Nick Clegg was talking about you know, him and his wife, she was also a very high achiever, is a very high achiever.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: And the two of them were like when he was running the country as deputy prime minister, they just do work and and uh and and family themselves, and that's it.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just a reality of there's just so many hours in the day, and when you need to get through that many things or pull out that many fires, there's just not the time to potentially see friends or family or you know take care of your health.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the added stress can lead to kind of unhealthy habits.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, 100% agree.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I do think with us, when we start we started Giant uh 2019 and then it went into COVID.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: I often think that um we were able to accelerate quite quickly quickly with Giant because of it was COVID and we had no kids at that point, and we just worked all day, every day with no distraction.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we were very fortunate when others were, you know, had obviously really horrific COVID.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: But for us, I think that ability just to like relentlessly focus on work was very important.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think I was pretty unhealthy though, deeply unhealthy.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think I I remember days sitting at the table for you know 14-16 hours, you know, about barely moving, um, just in front of the laptop.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I think definitely uh health, health took a hit.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'd also say uh, you know, on on the on the sacrifice point, oh, there's a great story.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um I by Baiju Bat of Robin Hood, when I interviewed him, told a quite funny story of you know, there's the classic case of the the cheery kind of seed founder comes comes in with his like full head of hair looking fairly like you know, in good in good health.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: By the time the series B rolls around, there's like a massive pot belly and the the hair he's lost half his hair.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then if they make it through to the IPO, which is a very, very small contingent, they re-emerge full head of hair, fully baffed, uh, you know, Jeff Bezos' reinvention.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's kind of the journey um many of them go on.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: The what the episode I'd recommend people listen to if they want to, if they're not an entrepreneur or a tech founder or whatever now, but are thinking about building any type of business, could be any type of business.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: I would just listen to the the Tom Blomfield uh episode, the the the guy who founded two unicorns, including Monzo, um, which is is is in talks this week, uh uh allegedly about being sold for sort of well over$10 billion or$15 billion to Nubeck.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um and he he said in in the episode we did with him, the last two or three years at Monzo, especially took just a massive, massive toll on my mental health.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: I developed pretty bad insomnia that led to pretty massive anxiety disorder and depression.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think he's probably more open about this type of thing than a lot of founders who understand we might not want to talk about that publicly or with us or whatever.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it is, I think we witness it with a lot of entrepreneurs.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: It is brutal.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's like existential missiles uh metaphorically being fired at you every single morning when you wake up and it's very lonely, which is why I think it's so important that what you're working on is something you care deeply about.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: You care about the product, you care about the mission, so that you can be anchored by that.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I have found that with the work that we've done at Giant over the years, you know, because otherwise, if you're just doing it for the sake of you know being an entrepreneur or building a company, I think that's uh that's a terrible way to spend your time, and that will feel very, very painful because it's not a good why.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, um, sort of like you know, trying to uh win Wimbledon, but actually not really enjoying tennis.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Not not it's not a particularly sensible strategy.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Totally, totally agree.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: We've had uh two two venture greats on the pod.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Mike Moritz saying um founders without wit and intelligence don't create great products, and then we've had Barry Eggers, uh co-founder of Lightspeed, saying intelligence is becoming commoditized with AI.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you stand on that?
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Is intelligence critical to an entrepreneur success?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what kinds of intelligence?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think there are many different types of intelligence as well.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think you've got to be clearly smart to build a big business, for sure.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I think I had to I had to race basically retrain myself away from like a classic British education understanding of sort of intelligence when it came to entrepreneurship.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, in I was kind of brought up amongst school teachers and lawyers and like the really smart people who you looked up to were the really, really brilliant doctors or the brilliant lawyers.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that kind of searing intelligence, I sometimes looked at entrepreneurs when I first started as a founder and then an investor, looked at entrepreneurs and thinking, this person is nowhere near as smart as, you know, some amazing doctor I met or whatever, or some really clever lawyer who would just be forensic with the detail.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and actually, I don't think that intelligence is probably even in the top three.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think without, you know, all the stuff we talked about, perseverance and obsess, perseverance, obsession, um, it's nothing, but particularly it's nothing without ultimately you've got to be driven by some deep commercial savviness at some stage, right?
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: At some point, you've got to make people part with money.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think a giant, you know, we've backed sometimes academics who've never had any experience selling anything.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we've kind of come to the conclusion, haven't we, that even if they've been a restaurant manager, like some experience of making people part with money for a product or service is really, really important.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think there are examples of people who have pretty big businesses who are really not that smart, but are just so commercially savvy and good at making money, basically.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, which means they're smart in a way.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I mean, intelligence can be judgment, it can be commercial intelligence, it can be creative intelligence, it can be political intelligence, which is important for some types of businesses.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I basically agree with you, but I think what I've um evolved my thinking on is like intelligence is a very broad word, a bit like trauma, you know?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like going a level deeper and figuring out what kind of intelligence uh are they exceptional at.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's I think the more important question.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if you look at the biggest businesses ever, um there are some maybe who where the where the founder is, you know, what you would describe as academically brilliant, like a Bill Gates or someone, who's clearly really Which is an edge and in some businesses critical.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're not going to build a biotech company, for example, that without you know searing academic brilliance in bio.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: But I think there are like some of the biggest ever, I would look at OpenAI with Sam Altman.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: I would say his core thing is amazing deal making and storytelling and political intelligence, political intelligence savages rather than necessarily being you know the most brilliant academic mind ever.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think there are quite a few other examples.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: Steve Jobs, I think, is another example of bringing together different strands of from different walks of life, right?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: Design with marketing.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think if you looked at like Jensen or um as another example, he brings technical intelligence, he's a brilliant engineer, brings, I think, real emotional intelligence from what I see him speak, right?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: And clearly commercial intelligence.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the very best combine different types of intelligence in in one person.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think one conversation we had, I remember back in 2022 or something, just before the the sort of bubble burst back then.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: It seemed like at that stage there was a new wave of entrepreneurs who were not at all technically savvy, and they were just kind of, you know, uh MBA types who'd gone right, tech is the thing to do, and they were building these, I would describe them as tech-enabled businesses.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: And some of those got really big really quickly.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: That that bubble burst and it went back then now into an era of deep technology where the biggest companies are at their at their core, like deep technical companies.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think still it holds true today that it's such a massive advantage to be a technical co technical founder.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think oftentimes the type of founder that thrives in that moment is the right fit for that moment in time for a bunch of different reasons.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think founders will look like 10 years from now?
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's so much going on with AI.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, paint us a picture there.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot younger.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think why so I've always had this thing about um repeat entrepreneurs backing older entrepreneurs.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: I've always thought it's a kind of ageism in Silicon Valley and in venture capital generally, um, where because of a few outliers like uh Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, all of whom basically started their companies before turning 2020, before turning 22, um, there was this kind of lionization of youth.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that actually does not uh bear up in the data, where if you look at the data, your likelihood of building a very large company in the US goes up and up and up until you're about your late 50s.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: And most of the studies say, I think like the the optimum age to have the mass the best chance of building a unicorn is like 45 or something.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: So actually a lot of the best entrepreneurs are very experienced, which makes sense because you've learned from your mistakes, you've got a better network, more judgment.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: I I think that in the past has been very true.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that's definitely my experience.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like I um I grew up uh on the on the street with an amazing Irish entrepreneur called Brian Meean, and um I watched him build his first business, which was the first organic food chain in London, which Whole Foods bought for$40 million.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: And all of us were like, this is insane.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: I can't believe someone you know did that.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: His second business he started with Bono's wife, Bono from U2, and they did a skincare brand called Nude, which they sold to LVMH.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: And we were like, wow.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then he did it a third time, um, and he wasn't gonna do the third business, but he moved to California and built a coffee company called Blue Bottle Coffee, which he eventually sold at a value of$800 million to Nestlé.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: And when I talked to Brian, his thing was just like, I just got better and better and better and better.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I almost didn't do the last business.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: And if I hadn't, I wouldn't have built the biggest business of all of them by a long, long distance.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there are so many examples of like um the experienced entrepreneurs who crucially remain hungry.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like I, you know, I worked with one of the Twitter founders, Biz.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Zuckerberg called the Twitter founders the clowns who fell into the gold mine and couldn't get out.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it seemed to me that all the Twitter founders were like desperate to prove again that they didn't get lucky.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, Jack Dorsey did Square, which I think at some point was like an$80 billion company we've had his co-founder on.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh, you know, Ev did did Medium with Biz.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so like this drive to do it again.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: And if you can tap into that and get second-time founders who are still hungry, I that's always, as you know, what I've loved to get behind.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: It can go wrong when they're they're not actually that hungry or they were not the one who built the successful business before of the of the co-founding team.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, long-winded way of saying um I've always loved backing older entrepreneurs.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now we are seeing we've been pitched by like 16-year-olds in in Sweden.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's just it is like really remarkable how much younger the the founders we're seeing are getting, basically because they've got you know this toolkit, right?
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: Of just unbelievable intelligence at their fingertips.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I think they'll be much younger and much smaller teams.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like we're we're seeing 10-person teams build multi-billion dollar revenue streams.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's hard to know, but I think what obviously we're seeing that the founders are getting younger and younger.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a lot of talk in Silicon Valley and elsewhere about agentic founders these days, people who show high agency because that's the number one thing you need in a in a in a world where there's very little moat to the technology or products that you build because Claude can build them in 20 minutes.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so the one differentiating quality is like, oh, how agentic are you?
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: How quickly do you move forward?
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a lot of truth to that.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think also people who uh you know have I think intertwined disciplines looking for in the future will really thrive because I think um that will give them a differentiated view and a differentiated edge.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I think people who have understand the technology can can play with that, but have some other discipline they've gone really deep on, whether that's art or music or you know something else entirely, I think that will create differentiated products and a differentiated view.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that will be very useful.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I think also finally, I think like empathy for other humans, because I think as technology does more and more, what do we have?
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: What do we have left that's differentiated?
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's understanding the human experience.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: And in many ways, much of business and art is that, but I think that will be even more um kind of extenuated.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: Very good.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, I hope everyone's enjoyed this unusual episode of just the two of us.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, for those who didn't, I can reassure them we'll be back next week with a very exciting founder.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for tuning in.