The pigeonhole
I think we often get stuck as entpreneurs and investors in pigeonholing ideas or people.
Many times we are misled by this and start believing:
-only young folks understand how to start Web2.0 companies
-cto’s can’t be ceos
-founders can’t scale
-only seasoned execs are backable
-all ideas in a given a category are losers just because no one to date has figured it out
-that the world hasn’t changed and what didn’t work before will never work now or in the future
-that what has always worked for us in the past is always going to work in the future
-about people that we worked with many years ago as the same junior person that we managed in the past as the same person without giving them credit to all of their new experiences, lessons, successs and failures since those days.
Just recently I met an extremely talented entreprenuer that worked for a particular CEO for many years. The two of them had extraordinary success together. That CEO is now a VC and this entpreneur doesn’t want to work with that VC because he’s concerned that he’s still pigeonholed as direct report in that persons eyes. Maybe it’s true.
Pigeonholing is bad for business and for life.
