Many times in my interactions with founders I get asked – what are the traits which make a good founder or CEO? what can I work on improving? what do investors look for in a founder?
Over the years a lot of qualities have come up in these conversations such as trustworthiness, visionary, resilient, problem solver, self-disciplined, passion, perseverant, risk taker, natural leader, analytical, customer-centric, continuous learner, relationship builder, financial wizard, storyteller, confident.
But most important of all, the quality that determines a founder’s success is being UNDENIABLE. How?
Being undeniably passionate about the problem is more important than being somewhat passionate. If the passion is undeniable, the founder will dedicate months and years to researching its root causes, or will work in the industry to see it from all angles or talk to hundreds of people without losing steam to try and find out how many people it affects, and will do what is necessary by pushing themselves, not simply doing the bare minimum that they can to find a solution to it. They will fail forward multiple times, pick themselves up, and try again.
This drive will lead to undeniable confidence that they know how to solve this problem. During investor conversations I see a lot of founders falter when questioned about their startup, they lose confidence not only in their startup but in what they are doing simply because a person questioned a part of their very-well-put-together pitch deck. This lack of confidence is never seen in founders who have spent time and effort doing what they are doing, and not hopping on to the latest trend.
Founders who have spent undeniable amount of time in working on a problem leave a trace of their work that speaks for itself. Their social media, their LinkedIn connections, their research papers, their media consumption, their friendly nicknames, their google search history, their deep knowledge of the subject matter, and their conversations with anyone they meet are all reflective of their passion for solving the problem.
To this day, I can be exhausted after a long day, ready to go to bed at 3 am, but if you ask me a question on robotics or something related to hardware I will spend the next 2 hours talking about it with all traces of sleep suddenly vanishing. If however tomorrow I woke up saying I have been an astronaut with NASA for 10yrs and spent 5yrs on the moon, without having any trace of being affiliated with a space agency of any country, or showing side-effects of low gravity on a human body, or never having talked about being an astronaut with anyone in my life, without have the slightest knowledge of rockets, no newspaper articles written about me ever being launched to the moon, no records of a launch with my name on the team, or knowing anyone at NASA, no one would believe me or think I was crazy and respond with a “Yeah, sure buddy”.
I had the idea in Feb 2019 to transition from serial founder to venture capitalist. There was a massive problem and it needed to be solved. If I had said I was a VC out loud back then I would have laughed at myself. Instead, I did research into EVERYTHING!
Where are most VC firms located? North America. So I moved to Canada in August 2019 giving me proximity and the ability to travel to the US more frequently than I had done since 2017.
What is the most common educational background of VCs, in other words, what makes them educationally qualified? The answer: MBA. So I got myself a second Master’s in Executive MBA in 2021-22. Besides the core subjects, out of 11 specializations, a minimum of 3 are required to graduate that program. Most people do 3, some do 4, I did 8! Because they were all related to various aspects of startups, or venture capital, and I needed to fill all possible gaps in my knowledge as quickly as possible.
How do VCs judge startups? By looking at various aspects like product, market, founders, team skills, deal, pitch deck, marketing, sales, financials, etc. So I spent all my free time since 2020 coaching startups, mentoring in incubators, sharing my knowledge, watching it work for other founders, pursuing programs like Draper University and RippleX which are built for founders from all backgrounds, pursuing almost 40 online courses on Linkedin, and learning about business models that are common in all kinds of different industries that I had never been in or cared enough about as a founder, even learning to distinguish good founders from bad by sharpening my skills to the extreme through spending time with highly manipulative sociopaths.
How does one get better at investing? By practicing. So I started to invest even more than I had done previously. From research teams and crowdfunded products to startups, I’ve done it all.
What kind of returns do VCs usually offer their investors? 2x~10x. So I built an AI that gathers millions of data points and throws out recommendations based on the data. This helps me make better decisions using real-time data. Not only based on what I know, but from what is out there in the public domain. I thought about converting this AI into a separate startup while I was pursuing my EMBA and even used it as my capstone, have a 50+ page business model laid out for it which I spent months researching and writing by myself, but if I did that it would take time away from the ultimate goal so I decided to keep it as an internal product.
What does it take to start and run a VC firm? A lot. So I talked to dozens of Managing Partners at new and old VC firms, gathering massive amounts of insights into their thought process.
I pursued programs like Venture Institute, Venture Cooperative, and VCLab one by one. Was even accepted to GoingVC but it was the wrong program for me so I dropped out before it even began only to later show up at the same batch’s graduation with my firm looking to hire from the talent pool.
All of this took almost 5 years. 5 years of my life that I could have spent on anything else while running and growing my highly successful startups in India. I knew the problem could only be solved by someone like me, but I don’t think there are a lot of dating coach turned serial hardware entrepreneurs with deep backgrounds in multiple fields of engineering who are business-driven, have intense user understanding in the sector, are psychology-loving AI coders out there in the world. If I waited to find them, I might have waited forever. And it is not the first time I have done this. I did this with every startup I started. My 1st startup came almost 5 years after I had the idea for my first robot. And then 2 more came in quick succession every 6 months because I had planned for 3 of them right from the beginning.
An undeniable resilience, passion, and confidence automatically lead to self-discipline, patience, and trustworthiness. People will rarely ever question such a high level of confidence, and if they do, they will get an answer that satisfies them completely. Storytelling becomes easy because they live the story. Pitching at events is easy because they don’t need to think too much, it is not a forced conversation. Financial acumen develops naturally even if they didn’t have it before, because they will do everything in their power to exceed their limitations. Once they are on their journey, they will undeniably delight their customers. They would not want their customer to face the same problem they have faced.
They will undeniably start to embody the qualities of a CEO, not simply a founder. They will embrace and enjoy the chaos of uncertainty and failure along the way rather than being scared of it because they are undeniably focused on solving the problem and will not let anything get in the way.
So if you’re wondering how to be a good CEO of your startup, start by being undeniable.