Lean into your Opportunity

In our post Calling out to the Fearless, we asked: What will the world look like in another 10 years? Who will build the next great startups — the next ‘Atlassian’? And who will fund these opportunities?

The answers to these questions are in front of us.

One of the hardest things to do in economic (and health) shocks is to look ahead. As humans, we find it very difficult to look beyond short term factors in periods of immense stress.

Our brains are wired to react to the immediate, and to switch off consideration for the future — this is the same wiring that tells a hunter to run away when the bushes start rustling, and not to check whether it’s a lion making the noise. It’s a powerful tool in the human toolkit, and it works to keep us safe.

But this very mechanism that saved us back in time, can also constrain us right when we don’t need it to.

In the midst of protecting our families, suppressing COVID-19 and the short term challenge of supporting our businesses and our teams, we must keep looking for opportunities, and to the journey ahead. But it's hard.

Ask any investor when is the best time to invest, they will quickly shoot back a Buffett one-liner about being ‘greedy when everyone is fearful’, but in practice and when that time comes, it becomes very difficult to act. When we are scared, action is not seen as a range of options that are available, it becomes an absolute choice, and inaction is argued away on the presumption that we “can't see the bottom”, or it’s not the right time, its “too early” and then later “too late”.

It doesn’t matter who you are, research proves that the bad days feel-bad, far worse than the good days feel-good. This goes for investment and every other endeavour. Humans simply magnify the effects of pain, and this magnification increases our aversion to the intolerable risk of more pain.

Ironically, ask anyone who has had severe health issues and pain how they pulled through, and invariably they will respond by describing a mix of support they received, internal grit at the time, and most importantly by looking ahead to the future. Our experiences now need that very same perspective.

In times like these, we require a bigger push (internal or external) in order to make the type of risk-based business decisions we previously would have made easily.

We’re not suggesting that everyone should be reckless and ignore the impact of COVID-19 and the uncertainty of what is to come — that would be a self-inflicted mean-reverting ride to obscurity. But have you spent your life avoiding things because you didn’t know the exact outcome? No, that’s how you have learned, grown, and become an adult.

As you learned, you tested the water, tested your skills, took a leap, measured your competition — whatever — and acted. Those experiences didn’t kill you, you became stronger.

Good times do not have a monopoly on good ideas.

It is human nature to believe that something can’t be done before we believe that it can, but if history has taught us anything, it’s that we shouldn’t underestimate those that overestimate themselves.

Whilst good times do not have a monopoly on good ideas, the biggest opportunities still need funding, and that need at this time places us at an inflection point for venture capital in Australia.

Right now is the opportunity to test new ideas, build new products, create new companies. The time to do this is whilst everyone is scared, waiting for the bottom, hoping that things will ‘just come right’.

It is time to lean into the opportunity, steal the march from those who’d prefer the certainty of crowd confirmation. It’s time to capitalise on our talent and build for the future.

Tempus firmly believes that this generation of fearless Aussie founders have the opportunity to create the next great success story, during this period of immense difficulty.

It won’t be the next ‘Atlassian’, it may just be something even more special.

Tempus believes great ideas and great founders thrive in the most difficult times.

Stay up to date with the latest from Tempus. Subscribe to our mailing list.