Relentlessly Resourceful -->
Want to start a startup? Get funded by<br>Y Combinator.
March 2009
A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down<br>to two words: relentlessly resourceful.
Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down<br>to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But<br>the dictionaries are not doing a very good job. A team that outplays<br>its opponents but loses because of a bad decision by the referee<br>could be called unlucky, but not hapless. Hapless implies passivity.<br>To be hapless is to be battered by circumstances — to let the world<br>have its way with you, instead of having your way with the world.
[1]
Unfortunately there's no antonym of hapless, which makes it difficult<br>to tell founders what to aim for. "Don't be hapless" is not much<br>of a rallying cry.
It's not hard to express the quality we're looking for in metaphors.<br>The best is probably a running back. A good running back is not<br>merely determined, but flexible as well. They want to get downfield,<br>but they adapt their plans on the fly.
Unfortunately this is just a metaphor, and not a useful one to most<br>people outside the US. "Be like a running back" is no better than<br>"Don't be hapless."
But finally I've figured out how to express this quality directly.<br>I was writing a talk for<br>investors, and I had to explain what to<br>look for in founders. What would someone who was the opposite of<br>hapless be like? They'd be relentlessly resourceful. Not merely<br>relentless. That's not enough to make things go your way except<br>in a few mostly uninteresting domains. In any interesting domain,<br>the difficulties will be novel. Which means you can't simply plow<br>through them, because you don't know initially how hard they are;<br>you don't know whether you're about to plow through a block of foam<br>or granite. So you have to be resourceful. You have to keep<br>trying new things.
Be relentlessly resourceful.
That sounds right, but is it simply a description<br>of how to be successful in general? I don't think so. This isn't<br>the recipe for success in writing or painting, for example. In<br>that kind of work the recipe is more to be actively curious.<br>Resourceful implies the obstacles are external, which they generally<br>are in startups. But in writing and painting they're mostly internal;<br>the obstacle is your own obtuseness.<br>[2]
There probably are other fields where "relentlessly resourceful"<br>is the recipe for success. But though other fields may share it,<br>I think this is the best short description we'll find of what makes<br>a good startup founder. I doubt it could be made more precise.
Now that we know what we're looking for, that leads to other<br>questions. For example, can this quality be taught? After four<br>years of trying to teach it to people, I'd say that yes, surprisingly<br>often it can. Not to everyone, but to many people.<br>[3]<br>Some<br>people are just constitutionally passive, but others have a latent<br>ability to be relentlessly resourceful that only needs to be brought<br>out.
This is particularly true of young people who have till now always<br>been under the thumb of some kind of authority. Being relentlessly<br>resourceful is definitely not the recipe for success in big companies,<br>or in most schools. I don't even want to think what the recipe is<br>in big companies, but it is certainly longer and messier, involving<br>some combination of resourcefulness, obedience, and building<br>alliances.
Identifying this quality also brings us closer to answering a<br>question people often wonder about: how many startups there could<br>be. There is not, as some people seem to think, any economic upper<br>bound on this number. There's no reason to believe there is any<br>limit on the amount of newly created wealth consumers can absorb,<br>any more than there is a limit on the number of theorems that can<br>be proven. So probably the limiting factor on the number of startups<br>is the pool of potential founders. Some people would make good<br>founders, and others wouldn't. And now that we can say what makes<br>a good founder, we know how to put an upper bound on the size of<br>the pool.
This test is also useful to individuals. If you want to know whether<br>you're the right sort of person to start a startup, ask yourself<br>whether you're relentlessly resourceful. And if you want to know<br>whether to recruit someone as a cofounder, ask if they are.
You can even use it tactically. If I were running a startup, this<br>would be the phrase I'd tape to the mirror. "Make something people<br>want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how<br>you get there.
Notes
[1]<br>I think the reason the dictionaries are wrong is that the<br>meaning of the word has shifted. No one writing a dictionary from<br>scratch today would say that hapless meant unlucky. But a couple<br>hundred years ago they might have. People were more at the mercy<br>of circumstances in the past, and as a result a lot of the words<br>we use for good and bad outcomes have origins in words about luck.
When I was living in Italy, I was once...