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March 2009  
  
A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two
words: relentlessly resourceful.  
  
Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one:
hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But the dictionaries are
not doing a very good job. A team that outplays its opponents but loses
because of a bad decision by the referee could be called unlucky, but not
hapless. Hapless implies passivity. To be hapless is to be battered by
circumstances — to let the world have its way with you, instead of having your
way with the world.  [1]  
  
Unfortunately there's no antonym of hapless, which makes it difficult to tell
founders what to aim for. "Don't be hapless" is not much of a rallying cry.  
  
It's not hard to express the quality we're looking for in metaphors. The best
is probably a running back. A good running back is not merely determined, but
flexible as well. They want to get downfield, but they adapt their plans on
the fly.  
  
Unfortunately this is just a metaphor, and not a useful one to most people
outside the US. "Be like a running back" is no better than "Don't be hapless."  
  
But finally I've figured out how to express this quality directly. I was
writing a talk for [investors](angelinvesting.html), and I had to explain what
to look for in founders. What would someone who was the opposite of hapless be
like? They'd be relentlessly resourceful. Not merely relentless. That's not
enough to make things go your way except in a few mostly uninteresting
domains. In any interesting domain, the difficulties will be novel. Which
means you can't simply plow through them, because you don't know initially how
hard they are; you don't know whether you're about to plow through a block of
foam or granite. So you have to be resourceful. You have to keep trying new
things.  
  
Be relentlessly resourceful.  
  
That sounds right, but is it simply a description of how to be successful in
general? I don't think so. This isn't the recipe for success in writing or
painting, for example. In that kind of work the recipe is more to be actively
curious. Resourceful implies the obstacles are external, which they generally
are in startups. But in writing and painting they're mostly internal; the
obstacle is your own obtuseness. [2]  
  
There probably are other fields where "relentlessly resourceful" is the recipe
for success. But though other fields may share it, I think this is the best
short description we'll find of what makes a good startup founder. I doubt it
could be made more precise.  
  
Now that we know what we're looking for, that leads to other questions. For
example, can this quality be taught? After four years of trying to teach it to
people, I'd say that yes, surprisingly often it can. Not to everyone, but to
many people. [3] Some people are just constitutionally passive, but others
have a latent ability to be relentlessly resourceful that only needs to be
brought out.  
  
This is particularly true of young people who have till now always been under
the thumb of some kind of authority. Being relentlessly resourceful is
definitely not the recipe for success in big companies, or in most schools. I
don't even want to think what the recipe is in big companies, but it is
certainly longer and messier, involving some combination of resourcefulness,
obedience, and building alliances.  
  
Identifying this quality also brings us closer to answering a question people
often wonder about: how many startups there could be. There is not, as some
people seem to think, any economic upper bound on this number. There's no
reason to believe there is any limit on the amount of newly created wealth
consumers can absorb, any more than there is a limit on the number of theorems
that can be proven. So probably the limiting factor on the number of startups
is the pool of potential founders. Some people would make good founders, and
others wouldn't. And now that we can say what makes a good founder, we know
how to put an upper bound on the size of the pool.  
  
This test is also useful to individuals. If you want to know whether you're
the right sort of person to start a startup, ask yourself whether you're
relentlessly resourceful. And if you want to know whether to recruit someone
as a cofounder, ask if they are.  
  
You can even use it tactically. If I were running a startup, this would be the
phrase I'd tape to the mirror. "Make something people want" is the
destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how you get there.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Notes**  
  
[1] I think the reason the dictionaries are wrong is that the meaning of the
word has shifted. No one writing a dictionary from scratch today would say
that hapless meant unlucky. But a couple hundred years ago they might have.
People were more at the mercy of circumstances in the past, and as a result a
lot of the words we use for good and bad outcomes have origins in words about
luck.  
  
When I was living in Italy, I was once trying to tell someone that I hadn't
had much success in doing something, but I couldn't think of the Italian word
for success. I spent some time trying to describe the word I meant. Finally
she said "Ah! Fortuna!"  
  
[2] There are aspects of startups where the recipe is to be actively curious.
There can be times when what you're doing is almost pure discovery.
Unfortunately these times are a small proportion of the whole. On the other
hand, they are in research too.  
  
[3] I'd almost say to most people, but I realize (a) I have no idea what most
people are like, and (b) I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability
to change.  
  
**Thanks** to Trevor Blackwell and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of
this.  
  

