Half Is the Market
Gil: I've been noodling on what are the specific signs of truly outsized successful outcomes in terms of the types of founders. I think a lot of it is just — do you end up in the right product market? Is the market big enough? Is it growing? Is it dynamic in the right way?
Half of it is you find the right market. Some of that is luck. But within that, tons and tons of people enter these markets and do horribly. So what's different?
Type 1: The Polymathic Hyper-Intellectual
Gil: The first one is the polymathic, hyper-intellectual, yet very competitive person. That's probably Patrick and John from Stripe. That was Larry and Sergey when I worked at Google. They were very polymathic, very deep on everything. They'd go down into the weeds on the data.
So one super founder archetype is that.
Patrick and John from Stripe. Larry and Sergey at Google. Very polymathic. Very deep on everything.
Type 2: The Super Hardcore Focused Founder
Gil: The second one is the super hardcore, extremely focused, really driven, overdrive founder. That may be Travis from Uber.
A lot of people in our ecosystem now are doing angel investing or involved with lots of other companies while running their company. This second class of founders don't do any of that. They say no to everything. They're all in on one thing.
Parker at Rippling is incredibly judicious with his time. He's just really focused.
This second class of founders say no to everything. They're just all in on one thing.
Type 3: The Network Effect Business
Gil: The third type is the network effect business. If you have something with network effects, you're going to do well even if you're a clown car.
You could be Zuck and then take it to the next level — start doing things like LLaMA. Maybe he's an overlapping archetype. One of those types plus you now have a network effect business, so it's default defensible.
If you have network effects, you're going to do well even if you're a clown car.