Many startups look successful, but this post will tell you how most founder really feel. It will tell you how humans are different from other animals, and why this difference distinguishes the best founders from normal people. Most importantly, it will explain what good crazy is. Good crazy is power. Cherish it.
One day in 1982, a group of researchers at Georgia State University experienced something unexpected. A two-year-old chimpanzee by the name Kanzi suddenly started talking.
Kanzi wasn’t being studied. Instead, the researchers had been trying to teach another chimpanzee to communicate via a pad. But they had failed. The chimpanzee had nothing to say.
The experiment was suggesting that apes don’t think. That conclusion would have ended the long-standing dispute: Do animals possess human-like thinking?
When Kanzi accidently picked up the pad and started communicating, we got an answer to the question. But the answer was not: yes or no. It was both.
The difference between humans and animals
The interesting part wasn’t the fact that Kanzi communicated. It was what Kanzi said.
It turned out that Kanzi mostly expressed fundamental needs. Like, give me food.
Kanzi was clearly thinking. However, Kanzi never expressed ideas. And that fact is immensely important for understanding humans.
Human cognition is unique because we are the only animal who have ideas. Only humans imagine things that don’t exists in the physical world. Like God or Harry Potter.
We can describe these ideas and infect other people. When many people have the same idea, it becomes a shared idea.
Shared ideas might be the most powerful phenomenon in the world. Shared ideas power Christianity, capitalism, and the $700 billion market cap of Apple.
A shared idea is immensely powerful because of its intersubjective nature. It exists among people and not just within people. This means that even though you abandon the idea, it still exists and governs everyone else infected by that idea.
Shared ideas create communities of people. Like the urban consumers, Harry Potter fans and the Apple evangelists.
Members of communities want success in their community. Urban consumers want to own and experience more things. Harry Potter fans want more people to read their fan fiction. Apple evangelists want to be first to get the latest upgrades.
Success in communities is defined by ideals. All communities have an ideal that shapes the hierarchy within the community. Ideals describe what a perfect manifestation of the idea would look like.
The perfect consumer eats sushi, owns designer furniture and weekend travel. The perfect christian is virtuous, attends church and lives in a nuclear family. The perfect Harry Potter fan writes fan fiction, plays quidditch and can dress up like a Gryffindor.
The closer you fit the ideal, the more successful other people in your community perceive you to be. The community upgrade your position in the hierarchy. Ascension feels good.
For this reason, most people spend their entire life attempting to fit the ideal of their community. But as you will learn, startup founders are different.
The difference between startup founders and normal people
For most people in developed countries, the biggest community is the idea of the urban consumer. And this fact can course great misery for startup founders.
The problem is that startups require founders to do things that break with the ideal of urban consumer.
Most founders in our portfolio are in their 30s. And for urban consumer, these are the years when the adult hierarchy sets in. The ideal is to buy the first house or apartment in a respectable neighborhood. Fill it with designer furniture. Drive an Audi and go skiing in winter. Kids in designer clothes, cooking gourmet food and keeping a dog give further plusses.
But for founders who choose the path of startups, life is very different. Most startups fail and all startups struggle. Founders usually scramble for two years before raising their first round of institutional capital. Even after raising funding, they still get very little salary.
The financial reality of most founders means that they actually descend on the hierarchy of urban consumers. They live on half the space, drive an embarrassing car and rarely fine dine.
Most founders occasionally feel the sting of inferiority and doubt. It happens when they meet old classmates, park their decade old Hyundai or check their Facebook feed.
To most people, this scenario is so scary that they give up their startup dream. They think it’s too risky. The risk is descending the social hierarchy. It doesn’t mean dying.
But this is where founders are different. They feel the sting, but they don’t succumb to the pressure of the ideal. Instead, the best founders we see have overwritten the ideal by the force of their startup vision.
To reject a pervasive intersubjective ideal is incredibly hard to do. And those who do are often regarded crazy. But at Accelerace, we call it being good crazy.
Conclusions made:
- Only humans share ideas.
- Shared ideas create communities.
- Communities have hierarchy defined by an ideal.
- In the developed countries, one of the biggest ideas is the urban consumer.
- Startup founders often descend on the hierarchy of urban consumer communities.
- Startup founders are special because they don’t succumb to the pressure of the ideal.
- At Accelerace, we call it being good crazy.
Also visit Accelerace. We invest in startups.
David Ventzel 