The Winning Traits Every Successful Founder Has 💼

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2:04What are the specific characteristics that you look for in founders, right? Yeah, you said some things like they got to build a big team, but like, there's got to be something that you see when they're talking about their company, when they have the idea. What are some of those characteristics that successful ones have in common? They're a little bit crazy. Tell us more. define that. Seriously, the archetype of a founder, you know, typically people like to talk about product market fit. I tend to also like to think about founder market fit. Like, what's your reason that you are the person to win this particular market right now?

2:45Right. So there's a timing question in that. There's a expertise question in that, but not just technical expertise. There's a question about go to market. Like what advantages do you have when it's time to go get scalable customer acquisition, right? Is it relationships with resellers? Is it relationships with CIOs? Is it relationships with media platforms? Like how are you going to scale more efficiently than the next person? And really, is this part of your life work? Startups take time, right? So the last company I co-founded, Pindrop, still a privately held company. We just announced a few weeks ago, it just reached$100 million of annual revenue run rate.

3:28We started that company in 2011. So we're 13 years in and still just getting started. The company is 200 plus people. Vijay, my co-founder, he's CEO and runs the company. And that company, you think about your life work. Are you really willing to work on this problem for a decade. And you could oftentimes sense that out with a founder. Is this just something that they thought is a good idea? They think they can build something right quick, exit in a year or two? We're not really interested. As someone that really is devoting a chapter of their life to solving this, because entrepreneurship, as you all know, it has its ups and downs.

4:10One week, I'm killing it. The next week, it's killing me. I'm killing it. It's killing me. And someone that's going to stick through it, through all the ups and downs is key. So a little bit of that perseverance is key. Someone who has that vision of what the future looks like. Are you thinking about what the world looks like three to five years from now? Right. Not just reacting to what you saw in the news this quarter, but you have an independent point of view of the world needs to look like this. And I'm going to do the things to make that become true because that person can also attract talent and they can attract capital.

4:42Right. Because part of it is not just the idea, not just the software, but to build that team, you have to be the type of leader that someone wants to follow and work alongside. They want to bet their career on you. And so a little bit of that charisma, a little bit of that perseverance, that leadership, that vision, it comes across. And that's what you start to see consistently across successful entrepreneurs. Personally, what do you think is the industry that's most ripe for disruption over the next five years that many people are not paying attention to? I like the really boring, unsexy industries.

5:17Really boring stuff. Um, healthcare insurance, healthcare, legal. Uh, you know, I tend to say if you're, if you're a business owner and you at the end of the year kind of just go back and look at your, your bills and like, where did you spend money? And then what's your customer satisfaction level with that industry? Right. It starts to uncover places where there's high revenue below customer satisfaction. Those are the industries that are begging to be disrupted. Right. Industries like accounting. Right. When's the last time you heard someone brag about their accountant? Never. Very rarely. You spent a lot of dollars there.

5:57When's the last time someone said, oh, man, my lawyers. So there's a lot of disruption opportunity there. There's so many industries like that that they're necessary components of living life and being in business, but they're antiquated, right? They've thrown a lot of humans and expensive humans at the problem. And so, you know, even, you know, there's, we think about companies that we've invested in, you know, someone looked up and realized, you know, mom and pop pharmacies were being overlooked. No one was paying attention to them and their software was aged and antiquated. And so there's a founder that we backed who built a company called Heal Now that's building software to help mom and pop pharmacies have modern software, right?

6:43are, you know, someone, there's another founder that we back that realized everyone was chasing the big banks, trying to build software for them. But there's all these credit unions. And they're, you know, relatively small, but no one was building the software to modernize them. And so Michael built a company called BankJoy, and he's providing the software for all these credit unions and small and regional banks. And so there's often these pockets where someone's running after the large enterprise, someone's maybe running after small and medium business, But the mid-market is often overlooked.

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