[karmakaze]

> It’s not as simple as “founders are optimists, scientists are skeptics”, though.

It's not much deeper either. There's having a skeptical yet positive mindset which is somewhere in-between. I once made a complex toolkit of runtime query optimizations that was a hodge-podge of kludgy things, which worked out well in practice. Someone asked me how I ever came up with the whole thing. I said I just started out and made one new improvement after another. They said that it was so fraught with obstacles (listing them off) that they'd be daunted to even start. I said I wished I'd talked to you sooner, you just gave me a roadmap that I didn't have while I was figuring out the pieces. Note that he was a high-level chess player (unlike no-rank me), but perhaps not as much of an optimist or risk-taker.

If I had to say what a good founder mentality is, I'd say that they have experience navigating uncharted territories and finding success, whether on small or large scales. That kind of practice makes them good at sizing up risks and rewards. Related to this might be of a kinesthetic learner type--learn by interacting.