Intelligent resilience
In my prior post I discussed my motivation for co-founding a start-up. Today let’s discuss the importance of ‘intelligent resilience’. To give you an idea of what I mean by 'resilience', let’s look at one simple metric: 76/80 or 95%.
When I co-founded symphonie, 95% of my pre-seed conversations with investors concluded with them declining to invest a single dollar. I wrote this metric as 76/80 instead of 4/80 to emphasize the vast majority of conversations were unsuccessful. About 6-mo after our successful pre-seed raise, I had a (random) conversation with the first VC who did invest in us - an accelerator - about those 95% of conversations that failed to yield anything. I brought up that many of them had commented “what you are doing is very hard”; the VC explained that what they meant was “80% of founders who try to do what you are doing are dead in 6-months” because most of them would simply give up.
We are now 18-mo into our journey, so we’ve gotten a lot farther than most founders do already. For context, symphonie is building a platform to autonomously maximize the contribution margin for e-commerce brands on every SKU, every geography down to every sale. This is a very hard problem - it’s the difficulty of the problem that makes it attractive to me. Otherwise, I would simply take another role with a Big Tech company - doing an easy problem would not interest me.
There were days during my pre-seed raise that I would get eight “no” in a row. Imagine what that feels like... if you lack resilience you will give up. There were days when I did feel emotionally drained; I still pushed on to the next call, the next rejection, and then repeated that again and again. But resilience without introspection is just “stupid stubbornness”.
In addition to “resilience” you need to actively listen to the feedback you receive, filter the good from the bad, and modify what you are doing to improve for the next iteration. You need to check your ego and learn from each failure. If you are convinced that “its not you; its them” then you will not succeed at founding a start-up. I sometimes look at my early pitch decks and laugh at them… they were not very good and neither was my voice track. With each “no”, I iterated on my pitch deck and the voice track that went with it. I varied aspects of both and kept track of how the outcome changed.
Gradually with each attempt I improved. I went from rejection by junior associates, to rejections by senior associates, to rejections by partners, and finally rejections from the Investment Committees (ICs). With each rejection, I pushed on to the next. That is what it takes to be the co-founder of a start-up. You will encounter problems every day; every day you need to work around them and not give up. And you need to do this while having a deep willingness to listen and learn. This is what I mean by 'intelligent resilience'.
