Meerkat teaches Entrepreneurship

Lessons Found in the Wild

Part of the mongoose family, meerkats are small mammals in South Africa characterized by large eyes, long snouts and bodies, and of course being so famously adorable that this description of them is likely unnecessary. That said meerkats aren’t just cute, they’re also perfect reminders of a critical ingredient successful entrepreneurs often demonstrate…the inclination to not only acknowledge threats as they arise, but actually welcome those threats with curiosity!

Consider a typical day for a pack of up to thirty meerkats, playfully tussling with each other while digging their burrows or catching beetles, when a king cobra slithers into their midst. You can easily find mind-blowing footage of this situation, showing several of the meerkats standing up on two legs insatiably curious about this new visitor clearly hoping to devour one of them. The CEO of the pack actually gets so close to the cobra that, after several failed strikes at the dazzlingly quick mongoose, he literally kisses the cobra nose to nose!

Masterful entrepreneurs tend to intuitively understand this — it’s not enough to accept high risk in order to build something revolutionary, for you to sustainably take those levels of risks over time you must find ways to welcome and even enjoy them.

Of course it’s also extremely helpful to be so exquisitely responsive to each moment that he isn’t instantly gobbled up by such risks, but that’s a topic for another blog post!

If you and your team happen to be experiencing a cobra or two showing up in your startup ecosystem, we at Prime Movers hope you continue finding ways to enjoy these intense visitors with curiosity and the spirit of adventure that had you found a startup in the first place.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and agriculture.

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