Doin’ This
A wise man told me recently that the best founders are ones who are have an all-consuming passion for their problem - it’s their life’s work. They were put on this planet to figure out how to build microchips, or organise the world’s information, or make it easier for people to hook up with each other - and they’ve known it since they were six years old.
And his point was that this is not me; I look like a mercenary. My life’s been a series of obsessions. I was obsessed with Warhammer figures, then cricket practice, then World of Warcraft, then playing 1st XV rugby, then studying maths, then AI ethics, then scholastic political thought, then University Challenge, then quitting drinking, then mobile advertising, and now insurance broking. I haven’t yet had that single-minded purpose.
I believe that some people have this purpose because I have met them. They’re obsessed with football, or the energy grid. They’re some of the best people I know. Even if they swing away into a side-quest, like political thought, they come back eventually to their actual obsession.
Because I am completely tone-deaf, I am a huge country music fan. I am a massive Luke Combs fan, although I do insist on pronouncing his name as if it’s the suffix to a small village in Somerset. He’s got a song about exactly this, called Doin’ This - an answer to the question “what would you do if you weren't doin' this?”. What if you weren’t one of the biggest pop stars in the world? And his answer is - exactly what I’m doing now, except with none of the recognition.
I'd have a Friday night crowd in the palm of my hand
Cup of brown liquor, couple buddies in a band
Singin' them same damn songs like I am now
I'd be feelin' on fire on a hardwood stage
Bright lights like lightning runnin' through my veins
At the Grand Ole Opry or a show in some no-name town
I'd still be doin' this if I wasn't doin' this
I'd still be the same guy they knew back in the day
Who was burnin' CDs just to give away
Payin' his dues if I wasn't doin' this
Five deep in a van, head full of steam
Hot on the heels of my neon dreams maybe comin' true
Livin' this life just like I was born to do
And the venture capitalists go crazy. Mission-driven! Obsessed!
But surely, surely, most of the valuable startups in the world (even if not most of the value in startups) isn’t created by these people. What kind of person knows from the age of six that they want to build a HR platform for modern teams? Or a tool to enable data migrations between legacy providers? These things make loads of money, and their founders must surely be mercenaries. It reminds me a bit of the opening scene in Come Fly With Me, the now-cancelled cult-status 2010 sitcom:
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. You could frame this as an optionality problem - something like, “the only thing worse than not committing to something is committing to the wrong thing.” I don’t think that’s it, though. When I think about all the things I’ve been obsessed with in the past, I think what I’ve really loved are the instrumental, incidental parts. That sounds wishy-washy - I’ll get specific:
I loved cricket practice because it was a tangible thing I could work on and get better at, with instant feedback. Every time I showed up first to practice, put my pads on and got in the nets, I did a good job. Every time I caught the ball, I did a good job. The value was entirely independent of actually being good at cricket (and I really, really wasn’t).
I loved University Challenge because I loved pressure and winning and being right. I enjoyed the intellectual challenge and I loved being able to show that I was faster than people. I was incredibly upset when we didn’t get on TV, even though I thought we actually would have been quite competitive, mostly because I didn’t get to do more of those things.
I love going into a new space and learning the gossip and the personalities and the dynamics. At one point, I could name pretty much every mobile game company in the world, their head of monetisation, their mediation stack, and their approximate monthly ad revenue. That’s a very narrowly useful piece of information, but I really enjoyed acquiring it.
Same goes for public speaking, or telling jokes. I enjoy the process, the form divorced from the actual content - which is more or less irrelevant.
I know I like those things, and I’m good at them, because I’ve been obsessed with things that I didn’t enjoy and wasn’t good at. Strange to admit it, but I just didn’t love playing rugby. I didn’t feel powerful or in control, I didn’t enjoy the pressure, because it was a physical challenge, not a mental one, and I just didn’t have the physical talent to win.
And when you put it like that, I think I’ve got more in common with Luke Combs than I originally suspected. He talks about singing, playing the guitar, his relationship with the crowd. He doesn’t say “My mission is to reinvent pop country for a new generation of fans” - it’s entirely about the instrumental actions that he does along the way.
If Luke Combs (well, at least the version of him presented in that one song) were building a company, he wouldn’t be someone on a mission to organise the world’s information, or bring low-cost air travel to flights within Europe and some selected routes across the Atlantic. If he were building a company, he might say something like “I’d be figuring out new markets, building relationships, writing code, selling my vision”. So maybe you don’t need to be obsessed from the age of six with some distant goal, as long as when you’re doing the basic work, you feel that you’d still be doin’ this, if you weren’t doin’ this.