From the entrepreneur’s corner (16): Traits of the founders and thoughts

Company founders usually play sports, respond to emails within the same day (sometimes minutes,) are original and optimists; as Sam Altman (of YC) puts it, the winners are “upper-middle-class, pretty smart people that have grit and drive and creativity and vision and edge and a different way of thinking about the world”. And the startups that succeed are usually agile, focused and willing to make non-consensus bets.

Entrepreneurs need also to be great communicators, as they have to convince so many people. In terms of determination and drive to win, it’s really important to be internally driven; driven to compete with themselves, striving to be, day by day, the best versions they can.

When facing a VC, an entrepreneur might have maximum 10 minutes to articulate a vision for their product/service, and although it may be hard to assess, do your best and get that next hour meeting.

Founders shouldn’t try to be somebody else, copying the stuff some others have been good at, or even trying to take too much inspiration from someone else’s life path. “Mimetic stuff is always super dangerous”, Sam Altman says; “shoot for something that no one has done yet”. Unfortunately, many of the smart people tend to be super mimetic, so they work on new versions of some old problems.

But what do you do when the surrounding ecosystem is not favorable? At the beginning of 2016, I didn’t think it was actually going to happen again; and now we have these two forces, name them right and left, good and bad, or “normals” and thieves, “fighting” each other… again and again, and the fight never stops. I’ve updated myself to thinking that things can actually get much worse here, and more quickly than I thought; in fact, day by day the bad news impact the startups’ ecosystem. There are so many idiots, and I don’t think it will end up well. Emigration, particularly high-skill emigration, will continue as long as the class of nobodies rules; this is a negative for the whole region. Add the climate change disaster, and all’s burning down to the ground and humanity will have to solve some fundamental issues to survive.

The sustainable economic growth model is embedded with technology. Elon Musk and others are trying to tack on devices to people. Be aware though, AI is/will be beating humans at everything, and a human assisted AI can even change the course of life.

No matter what, tech is going to have a lot more influence over our lives than we’d like. And when some 50+% or so of the workforce will be displaced by AI and the like, and some would even merge with the AI at the biological level, we’ll all realize that love, creativity and how we treat each other are important “works” of the humans. Unfortunately, that’s not the story that most people want to hear; at least in my region. If you think at wealth as something more than money, then startups are the best way to generate “survival“ solutions and social capital. From this angle and as I’m thinking at moving back home (as an option,) Constanta, on the border of Black Sea coast, is an awful city for a sense of (startup) community.

In a city and small geographic space dominated by a few industries only, we have this unbelievable wealth displaying, in a small period of time, some generated locally and rest “imported” from the politicians mainly in Bucharest. No one has been particularly thoughtful about the effects of that on the local community. We have an incompetent city management (and country management as well,) people unwilling to stand up and because of all the local problems, most people just choose not to think about the fresh/new economy we need, and they just accept this status. The result: just a small number of tech startups, and no sense of community.

To survive, the city needs powerful community leaders and people willing to embrace the change — whatever this means.

My question is: should I move back home or emigrate? You see, I’ll never get used to people not saying hi to each other on the streets.

My today’s preferred: Haven — Open Bazaar’s recent mobile app is a marketplace, social, private chat and a powerful cryptocurrency multi-wallet, all in one place. You can shop, chat and send cryptocurrencies privately from mobile phones. Over 250k nodes have been created by people, there are tens of thousands of listings, and the p2p network accepts Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and Zcash (Ethereum coming soon).