Flock Theory #22
Most founders tend to exhibit impatience or structure, which leads to pace without progress, or progress without pace. Structured impatience is rare and when you see it, you realise its special
A thought:
To the literal handful of readers of Flock Theory, it will be no surprise that I spend a lot of time thinking about the characteristics of successful founders. The evolving frameworks I maintain on product, market, timing and fund, are somewhat easier to analyse companies against. What remains the single most fascinating and the most slowly evolving, is my framework on how to think about founders. I suppose this is the fundamental challenge of early-stage investing, as it requires you to develop strong conviction on people. So the obvious thing is to draw upon your experiences working with successful founders (and their teams) and see if you can isolate characteristics that appear to be common amongst them. One that struck me last week, reflecting on some time spent with one such person and seeing it happen with other teams, is the concept of “structured impatience”. Most founders have some innate level of impatience - they tend to be bursting with energy, full of ideas and enthusiasm to change something about how something is done. That change needed to happen yesterday, so in order to feed that impatience, they work at ferocious pace. Structure, at first glance, might clash with impatience. Structure means thinking strategically; having a detailed product roadmap which you build against, a robust go-to-market strategy and a hiring plan that allows you to execute. Structure might mean rigorously testing those plans with data, so you know when those best-made plans aren’t working and what to try next. I think most founders tend to exhibit impatience or structure, which leads to pace without progress, or progress without pace. Structured impatience is rare and when you see it, you realise its special. I think it manifests itself in the form of intense yet thoughtful leadership, an aversion to accepting the status quo of what’s been built (even if its objectively working), a repeated upscaling of ambition and creation of space for continuous experimentation to happen, even at scale. From what I read and hear, Revolut, Palantir and Amazon have these characteristics. Structured impatience might be one difference between great and exceptional, which is indeed all that matters.
A read:
A quote:
“I quickly recognized that my strong performance resulted in large part from precisely that fact: I was investing in securities that practically no one knew about, cared about, or deemed desirable.” Howard Marks
A meme:
