| HN Mirror

So I'm an entrepreneur, and a native-born American citizen, so I'm obviously not talking my book here. My source is simply what I've observed trying to recruit co-founders. Folks with actual tangible skills and a realistic outlook would generally rather collect a paycheck for their skills.

But I also don't consider lack of venture capital or mentorship to be an important barrier to my success. When I look at what I do daily, as a founder, there is very little that more money would help with. And their advice is generally pretty cookie-cutter; if you follow it blindly, you will look like every other company they fund, which will be the death of your company. The good ones recognize this, and what they look for in a founder is someone with an independent perspective who will do the legwork to verify their hunches with data, on their own, and don't trust anybody else's ideas of reality. The bad ones, you don't want to do business with.

The hardest core competency for any company to develop is innovation [1], which is literally "doing that which everyone considers to be a bad idea, with tiny variations that make it a good idea". Good entrepreneurs look for how you can change systems, because if you can't leverage some external change in the environment that other people haven't noticed yet, you're competing with everybody else who wants to start a company. If anybody else knew about those loopholes in the system that have opened up, then the opportunity would be gone - and that includes the VC. They'd just fund somebody else to take advantage of it.

[1] https://a16z.com/2010/04/28/why-we-prefer-founding-ceos/