Traits of a Founder pt . 1
During this year I’ve begun to read a series of books which their main storyline is the foundation of a business. In this series of articles I want to highlight some of the key characteristics that each founder has and exploits so the company can survive and flourish. I will also point out the book, podcast, or video in which I got to acknowledge how the Founder really is. Before I tell you each attribute of the founders, I want to say that I really enjoy reading this type of books and truly recommend the following list of books to you fellow reader…
So without further ado, here are the TRAITS OF A FOUNDER:
“PASSION” — Phil Knight ( Founder of Nike )
So I began reading Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator Nike and about the time I was finishing the book I was lucky enough to be in Portland, Or and had the chance to visit the Nike HQ and actually related a lot of stuff from the book. In the memoir I saw how Knight being a track runner ( Bill Bowerman his co-founder was his track coach), knew the needs of the customer but most importantly he knew about the PASSION in sports and especially in his market. In this autobiography you get the feeling that you are having a conversation with him and talks you from the beginnings of a company not called Nike and actually called Blue Ribbon Sports to the complicated times that all startups deal with. I truly recommend this book to those romantic entrepreneurs who like a story of passion for anything.
This, I decided, this is what sports are, what they can do. Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about. — Phil Knight,Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
“EXPERIMENTAL/RISK TAKER” — Jeff Bezos ( Founder of Amazon )
I wanted to first point out the greatest of all Jeffism’s (Things Jeff does and term written in Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon) which is his laugh:
So there is no autobiography from Jeff Bezos, but Brad Stone’s book as reviews say is the most recommended of all books. Brad actually made a fictional press release of this book, which is an Amazon custom of presenting new products. In Amazon they don’t allow employees to make PowerPoint presentations, they actually write six page papers because Bezos believes doing that grows your critical thinking. Which is my first out of two traits in Jeff and the only FOUNDER in this article with two because of this:
Pretty cool huh?? Well that is actually not the reason why Jeff has two traits, but really the reason is that these traits kind of come together. Jeff has always been a RISK TAKER even before Amazon, I mean who would give up a top job in a hedge fund company which is worth over $40 billion dollars to found a company which sells books over the internet?! Well back in the 90’s that seemed pretty far-fetched. What Jeff saw back then was an opportunity and a vision to something he called an “everything store” on the internet. What he couldn’t do was build the store with everything in it, as the famous proverb says “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, so he went on to make a list of possible product categories that went from computer software to apparel and office supplies. He decided to focus primarily on books because books are a commodity to a customer, a copy of a book sold in Texas was the same copy sold in Alaska. Jeff knew he could never build an “everything store” so he being EXPERIMENTAL decided to try out one category at a time. After books came music and movies, then everything else.. they are now even on the Cloud business ( and doing great by the way…). One step at a time experimenting and taking risks on markets he was not an expert of was how he came to build his store.
“CORPORATE CULTURE”- Yvon Chouinard ( Founder of Patagonia )
Yvon can have many traits which made the business endure all the rough stuff. Some of them include caring for the environment, repairing worn-out products, or having high quality products, but there is one trait which stands above all of these and it’s the one that binds together all of them. That characteristic is the ability to transmit CORPORATE CULTURE throughout the whole company. Yvon has always been an adrenaline junkie, in his autobiography Let My People Go Surfing:The Education of a Reluctant Businessman( special shout out to my girlfriend for recommending it) he says that during his youth years he never considered being a businessman when he grew up, in fact he hated businesses and the “consumer culture” that surrounded them. He began selling climbing gear so that he could afford his mountain trips to many parts around the globe. In one part of the book he mentioned that he used to eat squirrels because all the money he raised went directly and foremost to his climbing trips. Right now a guy who used to eat squirrels has a net worth of over $1 billion dollars according to Forbes…
The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to “have it all”, the sooner it will die- Yvon Chouinard
But what has made Yvon and Patagonia so successful in spite of almost going bankrupt back in the 70s? In my opinion perhaps is how he transmits his vision and way of thinking to other employees and more importantly to Patagonia´s customers. The clearest example on the passing on of his teachings is something Patagonia’s CEO Casey Sheahan published in the cover of the New York Times back in 2011:
So, a company is telling me on the biggest consumer day of the year to NOT buy their products and instead recycle worn-out products? That’s clearly the opposite of how a business should be managed, and the best part is that the CEO was not the successor of Yvon Chouinard in fact that was maybe the 4th or 5th successor of Yvon. That tells you something about the CORPORATE CULTURE which has transcended along generations of employees and started with a climber who just wanted to do things differently with a corporation. Lastly I want to leave you with how Yvon thinks a product is ready and how he applies Zen to his catalog.
“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. Studying Zen has taught me to simplify; to simplify yields a richer result. The rock climber becomes a master when he can leave his big wall gear at the base, when he so perfects his skill that he can climb the wall free, relying only on his skill and the features of the rock.” — Yvon Chouinard , Let My People Go Surfing
Honorable Mention:
Mimic and Adapt— Peter Diamandis( Founder of XPrize Foundation)
Entrepreneurship has always been linked directly to innovation,but to innovate is not always linked to creating a whole new idea. Sometimes you need to MIMIC AND ADAPT an idea and add a twist in a whole new market for it to work. In his book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think , Peter Diamandis talks shortly ( that is why I added an honorable mention to this one ) about how he funded the non-profit organization called X Prize Foundation. X Prize manages a public competition with a group of teams in which they compete all for the benefit of mankind. What Peter did was merely MIMIC AND ADAPT, in his book he describes how he as a child he dreamed of a day when space flights were open to public. Many years later Gregg Maryniak, co-founder of X Prize Foundation, was the one who gave the book “The Spirit of St. Louis” to Peter and the sole inspiration for the creation of X Prize. In the years post World-War II Raymond Orteig a fan of aviation came up with the idea of an incentive competition to the plane who could cross the Atlantic without stopping, that plane would win a prize of $25,000 dollars. Long story short, it was Charles Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis” who won the prize and the total investment in the nine teams who participated was over $400,000 dollars 16x the amount of the prize. But what matters the most is that the competition made by Orteig gave aviation a great public image, the passengers grew 3ox, the number of pilots in the United States grew by 3x, and the number of airplanes grew by 4x. That competition was how aviation flourished to a $300 billion dollar industry.
So Diamandis didn’t invent incentive competitions or space rockets, he just grabbed some pieces and put them together to form his non-profit organization. X Prize Foundation started as a spaceflight competition but morphed to other types of competition from ocean health to helping accelerate the process in the human genome project. Sometimes we just need a change of scenery of an idea for it to become a success.
That concludes the first part of the series of articles called TRAITS OF A FOUNDER. What I’m trying to do is emphasize on particular characteristics that founders have and transmit them to you so that hopefully you keep them in mind while starting a company. Stay tuned for more updates!
PS: I’ll leave you the list of books that I mentioned in the article and my last article I wrote on Medium in why I started learning to code!
- Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler
- Let My People Go Surfing:The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouniard
- The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
- Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator Nike by Phil Knight
- De ¿ Por qué decidi meterme al mundo de la programación?… y ¿ Por qué tú deberías de hacer lo mismo? by Juan Carlos Garza R
