| Thinking of this as startup founder... > “People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” Huang said during a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.” People with family money need much-much less resilience than those without family money. Compare... serial founder who always has not only ready-made seed investment (plus all the connections that come from parents helping line up your ducks to go to a rich-kids school) to fail repeatedly with a safety net and do-over each time... ... with the scrappy kid who's barely clawed their way into those echelons, has put everything into their startup push, and if it fails, they might be out homeless on the street. (See the moral at end of "Gattaca".) One of these things is not like the other, in terms of need for resilience. (Granted, a rare person might get far enough that being a hardened fighter a la (to choose one kind) Sam Altman might be a quality that then makes stratospheric success possible. But AFAICT you haven't needed that to be successful enough with VC growth startups: you just need to have money flowing through you repeatedly until some desired condition is achieved, hopefully without all the stress costs of grueling, existential adversity.) |