As Day One investors, we make most of our decisions when there is nothing more than the founders. It requires a belief that extraordinary people do exist, and strong convictions about who they are and what makes them different. Our Ambition, Vision, Execution framework sums up ten years of learnings in this field.
But extraordinary people don’t all meet their destiny at the same stage of life. Zuckerberg was 19 when he started his company, Bezos was 30, and Kalanick was 32. Napoleon, for his part, was 24 when he made his first “coup d’éclat” at the battle of Toulon. And some get old before they meet with greatness.
From a historical perspective it’s not that big a deal: Most great people end up doing great things. But as investors, it’s much better if the founders we invest in make it in a few years.
This led us to think deeply about how to predict that such a moment is likely to happen. We think the answer is “When they have discovered a Unique Insight”.
Everybody lies, including founders
Successful founders often tell their story starting with a problem they identified, and say they designed a custom-made solution to solve it. Journalists love it (“start with a problem!”), but in most cases this is the opposite of what actually happened.
Most often, they started by getting intimately familiar with a technological breakthrough. Understanding it so well and deeply that it gave them an advantage over others. Paul Graham calls this “living in the future” and it conveys well how these people feel when they reach this state.
Finding an old problem to a new solution
Once one gets perfect intellectual command of a technological breakthrough, then it’s time to find something it’s useful for, a problem it can solve. Most often it’s a problem that long predated the technology, because the world is pretty good at solving problems and most new ones get solved quickly. Those worth solving often have been around for a while, waiting for a solution to become technically possible.
It’s Travis who understood the iPhone and discovered it was solving taxis. Bezos who understood ecommerce and discovered it was making books’ logistics so easy. Or Zuckerberg hacking everything that moves and discovering networks are great to connect with mates.
Even Napoleon’s success relied on this pattern of starting with a new tech and finding a way to use it: When the Siege of Toulon happened, the “Gribeauval” artillery system had been introduced a few years before. Lighter, more standardized, and far more mobile, it allowed him to concentrate firepower on decisive points instead of scattering shots across multiple targets, as old-school officers had been trained to do.
Your Unique Insight is what you are about
This is what we call a Unique Insight: The rare combination of a new solution with an old problem, rarely longer than a sentence: iPhone for taxis, ecommerce for books…
Once a founder has seen one and gets inhabited by it, it becomes part of his weltanschauung, of his worldview. The energy and conviction radiating from it is palpable for everyone around him: potential co-founders, investors, employees, clients, journalists… And other Unique Insights discoverers, who like nothing more than hanging out with their peers. It becomes what a person “is about”, a thing so few people are.
In our experience, this is the best predictor of soon-to-happen greatness for a founder. And this is all we need to invest.
