Mercenaries 1, Missionaries 0
I met Anthony Scaramucci in 1999 when he was an angel investor in one of our portfolio companies at Flatiron Partners. I remember talking with him a few years later when i was considering starting a bridge fund for startups that were hitting the wall in 2002. He was awesome and energizing. and so it didn’t surprise me when he went on to become a hugely successful hedge fund impresario, and then rode that wave of success into the upper echelons of the wall street / white house power nexus.
But this is just fucking insane.
It’s like we have turned our cheek to a generation of brazen entitlement where the only church that matters is the hustle and the only temple is chutzpah. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate what makes America… I mean I appreciate what made America… the land of the free and the home of entrepreneurship.
But I also believe that ambition without a broader sense of inclusiveness and inner peace is worse than doing nothing at all.
So we are left with a generation of late 40s/early 50s masters of the universe that managed to launch the right fund at the right time; and get into the right startup at the right time; and remain detached and hands-off enough to hit the bid when it came; and move money into safer channels that could generate more and more liquidity to fund the lifestyle they felt was their right in the first place as the best and brightest of “their” generation.
It makes me sad to see these self-made startup mavericks who should be role-models for our children behave worse than the worst self-dealing, cynical, robber baron capitalists to grow up in the USA.
I think that there are two kinds of entrepreneurs: missionaries and mercenaries.
MISSIONARIES are driven by discovery, by inventing a solution to a problem that is getting bigger, by binding a team of people to a shared goal that is larger than any one of them can reach alone.
These missionaries have not only imbued their life with meaning (and the lives of their families and their friends and co-workers who have benefited from their conviction), but they have also built amazing companies that have grown to become sustainable economically, even on the shifting plates of the internet and its many tributaries.
They are headliners like Amazon’s Bezos, and eBay’s Omidyar, and Google’s Larry and Sergey, Facebook’s Zuck, Salesforce’s Benioff and Airbnb’s Chesky. And they are friends like Heiferman who took the bait of the Internet’s promise of bringing people together, and who has spent more than 15 years devoted to bringing it to life socially and economically at Meetup.
MERCENARIES are different: they may end up achieving the same fame and fortune achieved by missionaries, but it is of a different timbre. instead of an empathic and inclusive techno-futurist-capitalism, its is more opportunistic and transactional. their careers are distinguished less by a single over-arching theme (like “connect the world”) than by a series of extraordinarily well-timed, expertly-played moves that helped them get ahead, stay ahead, and move further ahead.
Ahead of what? that is the question. Ahead of who? Another good question. It’s like the adage, “when you don’t know where you are going, any path will do.” These mercenaries are so secure in their ambition that it is beyond us to question the value of their decisions; since according to them, the evident ends of their “success” more than justify the means of achieving it.
But then at some point, even before it shows strain economically, this world view starts to buckle culturally, socially, emotionally. Take Uber. These mercenaries feel the need to apply their wealth towards shaping the world in their own image because they think that we need more mercenaries like them (when the fact is we need fewer). They are not really rallying us to anything greater; instead they seem to be just running away from some hurt in the past that they are not willing to face. It’s as if they need to prove to the world around them how (smart, rich, privileged, successful!) they have become.
While there are many of these mercenaries in our midst, it probably does not help to single them out since the only hope of change would need to come from a deep and genuine moment of self doubt — the same self-doubt and introspection, unfortunately, which they consider anathema to their definition of our American dream.
And so, in the recent case of Anthony Scaramucci, the score is clear:
Mercenaries 1, Missionaries 0.
Congratulations.
You won?
