How do you identify great founders?
When you work at YC, you become an LLM for founders. You work closely with so many founders and observe how they go from 0 to greatness.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned at YC: If you want to achieve great things, only work with great people. This is especially true for startups because median outcomes in startup world equals, death. Founders need to be outliers to even have a shot at building a big company.
In my view, the single biggest predictor of startup success are great founders. There are no long-term moats in Silicon Valley — except for great founders.
After observing some of the best, here are some personality traits, attributes and lessons that pattern-match to the great founders in the early days (many borrowed from my colleagues).
(1) They have strong clarity of thought
Great founders are clear-thinkers. They are also high-quality thinkers — they have clear mental models, assumptions. You might disagree with them, but you have a clear sense of what the founders are talking about.
(2) They move fast
Great founders move and execute fast — product velocity, learning, hiring, experimenting, responding to important emails. You can sense their urgency, which then percolates into the entire company. “It’s better than to be wrong, than slow” — great founders embody that.
(3) They are outlier individuals
Great founders tend to be outlier individuals. You meet them and you are impressed by them as people, not just as founders. There is something about them that convinces you they will be super-successful in their career, no matter what path they pursue.
(4) They seek the ground-truth
Great founders tend to constantly seek the ground-truth. And they will ask everyone around them (eg — employees, investors, friends) to give them the unfiltered truth. They are not in the clouds or in hypothetical la la land.
(5) They hire great people
Great founders somehow convince great people to work for them.
What counter-intuitively doesn’t help in identifying great founders:
(1) Tenacity
Yes, great founders need to be tenacious. You have to be gritty because startups are a shit-show. But, tenacity is almost impossible to judge from a few meetings. Tenacity comes from hardships and life experiences — it’s impossible to figure out who is tenacious — because you don’t have full context into their life history.
(2) Technical Skills
Technical skills alone don’t make a great founder. Though you need a co-founder or hire a team with strong technical skills.
(3) Domain expertise
Domain knowledge helps, but it’s not sufficient. The Airbnb, Facebook, Zepto founders were not domain experts. Ten years of experience means nothing if you’ve been learning the same thing every year.
(4) Storytelling
Yes, many great founders are amazing storytellers. But many great founders I’ve met are not amazing storytellers — some are more introverted and factual in their communication style. Silicon Valley also over-values storytelling.
(5) Wanting to build a big company
You need to have some innate desire to build a huge company, but its a hard trait to test for in the early days. Several successful founders I know, who went on to build large companies, were initially uncertain about wanting to create something big. Sometimes, their desire to build a large company developed only after they had already started.
(6) Elon Musk and Steve Job personalities
There’s a perception that great founders need to be like Musk or Jobs — intense, obsessive, larger-than-life. A lot of great founders are like that. But I’ve seen great founders who are the complete opposite — introverted, soft-spoken, yet absolute killers.
