Clarity of Vision +

 “The trick to being a great founder… is your ability to be presented with a problem unlike anything you’ve seen before and solve it very quickly.

When Sam Altman was CEO of Y Combinator, they were looking at 20,000+ companies per year and tracked the founder qualities that correlated with certain startup outcomes. In no particular order, Sam believes the following qualities matter most:

1. Clarity of vision. “Can the founder explain what they do and why? If the founder can’t explain it clearly to us, then (a) they’re not going to be able to recruit, hire, sell, talk to the press; and (b) it means they’re not the kind of person who is a really clear thinker in general and that’s so important to a business.”

2. Determination & Passion. “There are founders who don’t take no for an answer and bend the world to their will and those are the ones we want to fund. Then there are founders that every time they run across a small impediment just turn around. Unfortunately you run into so many impediments every day that if you’re the kind of person who just turns around, that’s really a problem. You also have to really believe that what you’re doing is important. The best companies are always mission-oriented.”

3. Raw intelligence.

4. The ability to get things done quickly. “It’s not entirely accurate to say that speed and quality of decision-making correlate exactly with startup success but it’s not a bad first approximation. Being quick, decisive, and getting things done quickly—if you look at our data, that would just correlate almost exactly with all of our successful founders. And other founders that look on paper like they should be really successful but fail are often missing this one trait.”

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On the Non-physicality of Software

 

This is a relic from the times when software had a physical form, you could hold it in your hand.

In this new age, software comes streaming into your device, nobody touches anything, it has no physical form whatsoever.

The photo is a recent ad on eBay, for the Mac version of a product I wrote in 1985 which (humblebrag) just happened to turn out to be the first of a new class of software, called CRM, Customer Resource Management for people with a PC. Boring, I know, but at the time it was interesting to me.

There was one event that brought into sharp focus this concept that software has no physical form...

I was selling my product, the software I called TeleMagic, to a man in London. He was buying the right to sell my software in the UK. It was a very informal event. We sat at a table at a local café and crafted a handwritten agreement without lawyers involved. We signed, he gave me a check.

And then, for the true magic moment, I opened my briefcase and removed a stack of 10 "floppy diskettes" that contained the source code to the product, and copied them one by one onto the customer's hard drive.

Then I took the diskettes back. The customer had nothing physical at all. I went on to sell a few other countries on that trip, and it was just so delightful to get big checks for something that had no physical form.

Software is pure thought made real, just not real in the sense that you can sense its physicality.

The idea I had for the product was transferred from my brain through my fingertips onto the keyboard and into the computer. I used a specialized language called dBase II to get the computer to understand what I wanted it to do.

That first session of programming TeleMagic into existence was followed by thousands of others, addictively debugging, improving, inventing, throwing away long hours of work after rethinking, and overthinking, all these insane purely mental hours to create something that doesn't exist in any physical form.

Software is an entity that can take thousands of hours to create but can be eliminated in an instant with a simple Delete keystroke.

A product without a physical form has enormous advantages over all other products. It doesn't wear out or break down, it doesn't cost anything for transportation or storage, and it can be reproduced infinitely for almost zero incremental cost. It's this last one that is why software companies are so profitable.

In the pre-internet years, software needed a physical form so you could buy it and put it into your PC to make it do what you wanted. That's what the diskette was for: backup, storage, transportation.

That's all gone now. The software business is now even more profitable without all the mess of a physical product.

I keep having thoughts about getting back into the software business. It was fun...