Continuations

At startups events I am often asked about important qualities in the character of founders. Persistence strikes me as crucial. Startups have many setbacks along the way and possibly even near death experiences. Only someone with persistence will be able to come back from those and keep plugging away. A great story in our portfolio in this regard is the team at Soundcloud. Yesterday, Soundcloud launched their premium service Soundcloud Go, which combines an offline ad-free experience, the cata...

Earlier this year someone suggested that I read “How Children Succeed” by the aptly named Paul Tough. It is an excellent book that deals with the question of how to help influence the character of children and how in turn that character contributes to their success as students and in life. This had already been on our mind and one of the things we were struggling with was how to measure character so as to give our children some kind of baseline and see how that changes over the year. So we we...

Fred wrote about tenacity this morning prompted by a post from Mark Suster about tenacity being a key trait for an entrepreneur. As per usual there is a long comment thread on Fred’s post and also quite a few comments on Mark’s. There is, however, only a limited discussion of the potential conflict between tenacity and the ability to “fail early and often” (before and after this comment). With the low cost of operating many startups these days, it should probably be called “iterate early (and...