I’ve been thinking about Dave Winer’s recent post – Tech developers and users.
One thing I’ve noticed is that many of the founders of our portfolio companies are extremely self critical themselves. They tend to be intellectually honest about the challenges, shortcomings and areas of their respective products that require attention.
Startups are hard. They are really hard. I think most folks that have never been in a startup don’t realize how unbelievably hard people work in a startup company. And you gotta be an optimist at heart because the odds are against you. So that combination of being self critical and being an optimist is quite a combination.
In the midst of startup life – excitement, stress, anxiety, thrill, success and disappointment – I always value when founders are the first one to point out what needs to be fixed or improved.
Here’s a recent example. On the day we closed the Boxee investment, I sent Avner an email saying congrats and how excited I was to be an investor in his company. His response was basically that they were excited as well but there was a lot of work to do.
Those are often the most successful entrepreneurs in the long run.
They are never satisfied.