[javajosh]

There is a sense of sustained confidence, of inevitability, of capability, that investors must look for in their founders. A person like this is bound to have a history of success, large and small. They can't help it. And none of these qualities are correlated to personality type or financial status. Such people are simply incessant creators. They cannot stop creating. You might try to stop them creating, and they would still find a way to thwart you and create anyway.

My sense is that most wannabe entrepreneurs do not have these qualities. And without these qualities, it will be difficult to succeed even with a world-class idea, or with all the money in the world, or even with great intelligence and capability.

The helpful words from you, then, would be the ones that change the would-be entrepreneur into an incessant creator.

Let us assume that such words exist, and that the supplicant (and I use that word advisedly) implements them. I reckon it would take a year (or possibly less) to demonstrate that a sustained change has occurred, thanks to those words.

The question arises, of course: do such words exist, and if so, what are they?

Note that if you discover these words, then they will be worth, literally, many billions of dollars.

[rexreed]

What I usually say:

Think big. Start small. Iterate often. If you aren't failing, you aren't learning (or trying).

Money from customers beats money from investors. See if you can get that. And if you can't, find another metric for success.

[javajosh]

Personally, I'd go more Zen. We are talking about inspiring deep, abiding, personal change after all.

More often than not we get in our own way. This is not something that you can consciously change, even if you are aware of it. There are several kinds of beliefs, and some of them are ingrained deep-down inside of you. We often make the mistake of thinking that our minds are like machines, which can be constructed in different ways - but minds are more like life - growing, changing, in lots of ways.

So the words must be seeds. It is easy to describe the outcome that you want, but very hard to construct a seed that will get the person there. So difficult, in fact, that it may not exist, or if it does it may take years to grow.

Learn to meditate. Learn to accept reality for what it is, learn to stop fighting reality. Learn to accept yourself and love and laugh and work with a vigor that you've only barely tapped.