Casual observations of founder thinking in 2023
There is a delightfully Gandalfian quality about being in non-building mode and intellectually rambling around different landscapes. At this point I’ve replaced a lot of previous meeting time allocation with reading (and writing) and am working pretty hard to broaden my queue from ‘interesting’ to ‘esoteric’ (current status: ‘weird’). Somewhat surprisingly, I’m seeing Substack’s inbox rapidly become one of my most used reading apps (relatedly, if anyone is working on a better Goodreads, please just tell me where to wire the money).
My other meeting substitute is conversation. It’s a fascinating moment to be talking to both founders and investors. Post-Covid, post-Zirp, post-meme stocks, post-Tiger, post-metaverse, I haven’t met anyone from the general company-building ecosystem who doesn’t think everything is changing all at once (I have some views on this).
In general, nobody is talking about the present, everyone is asking what’s next. As if the next thing will be easier than the current thing. I’m not entirely sure about that.
For founders, I think increasingly it’s not even so much about what to build next but how to build. There is a lot of talk about holding companies or vaguely similar models e.g. building a Citadel for x or a Constellation for y1.
The last few years of venture capital investing (which includes re-invention, re-labelling and in some cases just outright fraud) have been a very useful, LP-sponsored education for the entire ecosystem. In the same way that funds have become multi-stage and multi-strategy, I think founders are also becoming better capital-matching machines. In fact, it’s striking how many founders I’ve spoken with are perfectly comfortable in aspiring to build something either very big OR very niche.
“A lot of founders, instead of thinking that venture investors invest in companies that become big, think that companies become big because venture investors invested in them. You can see how there’s the correlation there, but businesses don’t become big because venture investors invested. That’s not how it works. Venture investors choose companies that can become big. I think people have an idea that, if they want to be big, they have to get venture capital, which just elides the fact of whether or not they can become big at all.”
Jerry Neumann (Source: interview with Annie Duke)
Jerry’s description2 is excellent and the only modification I’d make is that I think many more founders (certainly those in the serial category) understand this cause-and-effect point today.
On one hand, yes that’s preposterous. But on the other hand it’s wonderful to hear people speaking like empire-builders. We need more empires built!
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I have not yet read his and Elizabeth Zalman’s new book but based on the former’s historic writing, I am confident it will be good
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