5min chapter

Meditations with Zohar cover image

Michael Gibson: Charisma and Its Discontents S2 E5

Meditations with Zohar

CHAPTER

The Importance of Character in Investing

When it comes to character people will tell you stories like how they persevered I mean every college entrance essay has got to be some someone told me there's a J curve story. What we learned that quickly was that you can have all the IQ in the world or the technical know-how but if you don't know how to interact with people and understand people then then you're not going to go far. The best teams where okay maybe the CTO type is it gets to zone out and code or build in the CEO is more of the Huxter people person who can happen.

00:00
Speaker 2
just to emphasize the point like there's a lot of things that people look for when they're looking for talent whether in investing or any field how much weight do you give to character relative to the other things that people might wait let's say technical ability or track record or I don't know whatever the sort of taxonomy is like do you think you give more weight to it than then your typical venture capitalist or like what is the the secret that you know that nobody else knows to sort of refund you when it comes to character
Speaker 1
so we give it we give out yeah we place a huge emphasis on it every every investor will use three main elements to evaluate an opportunity the first would be the character of the founders the second would be what's the potential market here how big can this get and the third would be the current state of the product or or maybe even the product vision in each investor will sort of establish their style based on which one of those they put the emphasis on like Steve Jobs was fanatical about product I mean this man was a intuitive Zen product master would meditate upon product features user experience and I think he certainly had to think about where let's say the iPod or the iPhone would fit in the larger world I think he knew the market size would be big enough but he was obsessed with the product which is a natural because he's you know the CEO or the founder I guess there's a sequoias you know the Yankees of Silicon Valley they they they really care about that market size that's something that they're paying attention to but they're much they're a little they're later staged than we are so we focus on the team because and the character of the people because when we invest were when we did the tail fellowship that was you know a grant to an individual now when we make investments as a fund we're still the first money in so it's typically two people in a garage or at a coffee table and some prototypes so we really have to know that they have the right stuff to to see this through and not that we're perfect in judging that but I think maybe you know we've learned a lot over the years so when we started the the tail fellowship we were too imitative of colleges we had an application where people listed their GPA their test scores what school they went to we even had AP exams on that stuff and and in the event pretty rapidly we discovered that these actually weren't great predictors of success when it came to doing something out in the wild you know starting a company and getting things going so we so we had to start developing you know the traits so you know writing down or thinking about the traits that what that we look for in people now the the first and obvious one that we learned that quickly was that you can have all the IQ in the world or the technical know-how but if you don't know how to interact with people and understand people then then you're not going to go far so that could be can you work with customers to learn their needs can you raise money from investors can you make hires can you find co-founders like these social as emotional social intelligence became very very paramount and so as you might imagine the Venn diagram of people who have the technical chops to invent something new that overlaps with the people who also have the emotional intelligence to manage a team is vanishingly small what what we see sometimes though is that if there is a founding team to three people then then you see a great division of labor and the best teams where okay maybe the CTO type is it gets to zone out and code or build in the the CEO is more of the Huxter people person that can happen but but that that was something we learned and then and then what's more is we learned that the application itself is just a time slice view of someone and it's incomplete because you know they're just trying to where it could be full of deception or you're not quite sure is like this information not that people lie about their test scores but when it comes to character people will tell you stories like how they persevered I mean every college entrance essay has got to be some someone told me there's a a J curve story where okay you start out with some kind of setback and then you talk about how you you you triumphed after that so what we decided was to borrow Aristotle is that character is revealed in action meaning character is what you habitually do on average and and you know if you talk to sports scouts and any sports they'll say the same thing as you can't

Get the Snipd
podcast app

Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.
App store bannerPlay store banner

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode