The Pessimism of Founders
We tend to think of people as being one of the two: optimists or pessimists. At best, we are willing to concede the same person can be optimistic about some things while being pessimistic about other things . But founders of mega-successful startups need to be both: audaciously optimistic about their company’s prospects while simultaneously pessimistic that they could get wiped out by some new upstart who rises the way they did. Let’s see a few examples of the pessimism of such founders. Andy Grove, as CEO (and one of the co-founders) of Intel, wrote a famous book titled Only the Paranoid Survive . He calls events that can kill businesses as ‘strategic inflection points’. These happen at high speed; and don’t creep up on you incrementally. It could be technological advances (like what the iPhone did to Nokia), or a deep pockets player moving in (think of Reliance or Amazon entering any new market), or a regulatory change, to name just a few reasons. There is a ...